Video Game / Pax Britannica

No one can be certain what the future holds, only that the Pax Britannica is about to come to a screeching halt.

"With this principle, you may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension."

— Nikola Tesla

Pax Britannica is a Hearts of Iron IV Game Mod, set in a dystopian Tesla Tech Timeline where The American Revolution failed. Along with this change in geopolitical history Automechs, pseudo-sentient barbed wire, bio-engineered living weapons, and military cybernetics have all been invented by the early 1930s and Nikola Tesla's inventions form the backbone of modern industry via the Tesla Towers and other electric implements.

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This Game Mod provides examples of:

• Alternate History: In this timeline, the American Revolution fails, Tesla and Edison’s crazy ideas come to fruition, and the French Revolution never happens.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • The British colonial authorities are fighting a left-wing Jacobin army in North Indochina/Vietnam. Similar to real life, the event that brings a superpower that was initially just supporting the South into direct conflict involves Tonkin... except instead of an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, it's caused by the colonial garrison's Tonkin Campaign falling into a stalemate. Imperial Britain can either choose to become directly involved, or cut their losses and sign a treaty with the Vietnamese giving them control of the north.
  • The Space Race happens between the premier western superpower and Russia, except it happens in the Thirties between Imperial Britain and the Russian Empire.
  • The treatment of France following the Great War is extremely similar to the treatment of Germany following the First World War, with an extremely harsh treaty aimed at punishing them and removing their ability to wage war. Just like Germany in real life, this didn't really work and has lead to the rise of far right extremist political movements and a desire for revenge against the British and Germans.
  • IOTL the Nicaragua Canal was an unbuilt rival project to the Panama Canal. ITTL the Nicaragua Canal is chosen instead and built by the Americans.
  • The Maginot Line is still constructed in Alsace-Lorraine, except it’s the Germans who made it rather than the French.
  • The American SoCreds can create the Virgin Lands campaign - and, sure enough, it's roughly the same thing as the OTL Policies promoted by Nikita Khrushchev.
  • The various exclusion zones Spain set up around areas left infested by live wire and contaminated by chemical weapons following the Iberian Campaign are most likely a reference to the French red zones, areas declared off-limits following the First World War due to large amounts of unexploded ordenance, heavy soil pollution from chemical weapons, and large amounts of human and animal remains, some of which remain off-limits to this day.
  • Operation Overlord is the name of the joint Anglo-American amphibious invasion of Spain rather than France like it is in our timeline and it happens around this timeline's version of World War I instead of World War II.
  • One German anti-war slogan is "Why die for Wallonia?", alluding to the OTL French anti-war slogan "Why die for Danzig?"
• Amazon Brigade: The Razormaidens, cybernetically and biologically modified women who act as everything from supersoldiers to spies.
• America Is Still a Colony: The Point of Divergence.
• Anachronism Stew: Justified, as this is a world of unrestrained technological progress.
• Banana Republic: Nicaragua starts off as one as their autonomy status under the United Commonwealth.
• Balkanize Me:
  • Unlike in real life, where India, outside of Goa and Pondicherry, was either ruled directly by the British or by one of many princes who all answered to the British and had varying degrees of actual power in their territories, India is divided between a number of different native empires and colonial powers, with the British having both an area directly ruled by them (currently run by none other than Winston Churchill), and a condominium that owes fealty to them ruled by various Tamil princes.
  • Mexico has had various states split off into various independent nations following a civil war, including all of California and Tejas (Texas).
  • While most of the land is controlled by the British, Canada never unified, being split between areas directly ruled by London, the Commonwealth of Quebec (which controls most of what in real life are the provinces of Ontario and Quebec), and a colonial authority that runs what used to be Prince Rupert's Land.
  • The United Commonwealth doesn't control much beyond the original Thirteen Colonies and much of Louisiana and Florida. Even parts of what was French and Spanish Louisiana is a separate British colony. The West is still a wild territory divided between proto-states and warlords.
  • Brazil is divided into several states, one still claiming all of Brazil.
  • Prussia is independent from the United Kingdoms of Germany and Schleswig-Holstein is under Danish rule. This being said, Germany still starts out the mod larger than it was in 1914 — most of the Kingdom of Prussia is in Germany (independent Prussia only includes areas that didn't use to be part of the HRE), and Austria, Czechia and Slovenia are all part of the United Kingdoms.
  • The Ottomans have lost parts of Anatolia to the Kingdom of Greece, and Constantinople is controlled by the Russians.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The Panzer Hounds are noted to be an in-universe one. The original German name was Panzerhund, which most accurately would translate to "tank dog" or "armoured dog", not hound^note While hound can be translated as hund, jagdhund is a more accurate translation of hound. It is also mentioned that some people take it further and call them Panther Hounds.
• Bio Punk: A few bits of tech in Pax Britannica has some roots in Bio Punk, most notably the Combatagates.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: If things start going badly for France during the Second Great War, one of their national focuses has them loot their museums for every gun they can get their hands on.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • Tanks are called landships.
  • If Northern Canada is unified, it will be called Borealia instead of Canada.
  • British controlled Australia is called Victoria instead. Downplayed since the people living there are still called Australians.
• Chicken Walker: The Duopod variant of the Automat is literally this by name alone. Interestingly, the custom 3D model of the Automats have them all being Duopods.
• Civil War: A few, though most happen in North America
  • A civil war is already ongoing by the beginning of the game in Italy between the Kingdom and D'Annunzio's Social Revolutionaries.
  • Tensions between both the United Commonwealth of America and Imperial Britain could rise to a point where they don't see eye to eye anymore, starting the Imperial Civil War. This can become a three-way civil war if the Second Continental Army spawned in-game.
  • Old North vs South tensions heat up again if the Liberal Party under John Curtin gets in charge, with "The Free States" rising up against the North if he attempts to end segregation.
  • Early in the game, Qing China suffers a curb-stomped Civil War against the Wuchang Rebellion, a parallel to our timeline, albeit, happening much later. Planned updates involve the management of the newly-formed Republic and the inevitable eruption of a Second Chinese Civil War with the amount of warlords depending on how well you managed the fledgling republic.
  • In the Chinese rework, the Taiping Rebellion ended in a stalemate dividing China between the Taiping Empire in the south and the Qing Empire in the north. By the start of the game only the Taipings are left standing while the Qing succumbed to an Anarchist Revolution.
  • If Russia were to lose to the League of Nations, the Russian Civil War fires up for the first time in this timeline, with the Russian Anti-Treaty Insurrection going up against the All-Russian Provisional Republican Army.
• Crapsack World: Arguably, with the amount of terrifying technology about, the brutal wars said technology is used in, and all the horrifying ways you can meet your end in this world, it's hard to see Pax Britannica's timeline as one of whimsy and merriment. Of course, it does vary: Native Americans arguably have it far better in this timeline, controlling large amounts of land in the Midwest due to the British refusing to let the American colonies expand, and even in the United Commonwealth they have it better, with the area that in real life is the state of Florida being primarily populated and politically dominated by the native Seminole and the descendants of escaped slaves they took in. Most of India and the Middle East escaped colonization, a Maori king rules New Zealand on behalf of the British, and Hawaii is still ruled by the native Hawaiians.
• Cyborg: A handful of people are augmented.
  • Queen Victoria in this timeline, was the first ever cyborg made by the Edison Electric Company in an attempt to save her life. Because of such, she is the longest reigning monarch in human history, living long enough to outlive Prince George V at the start of the game.
  • Some Generals have the custom trait 'Augmented,' such as Lesley J. McNair whose portrait has some extra bits and pieces sticking out to him.
• Diesel Punk: The Automechs of Pax Britannica's timeline, along with the Hardsuits, are absolutely dripping with Dieselpunk, and quite a bit of the technology in this timeline has overtones of Dieselpunk design-wise.
• Double-Blind What-If: Pax Americana is an alternate history novel written by Elion Mimiovich. It takes place in a timeline where The American Revolution succeeded, causing Imperial Britain to fall to a Jacobin revolution. Russia and Germany fell also to a wave of Jacobin revolutions. Revolutionary Britain, Russia, and Germany formed an alliance while America, France, and Spain formed their own alliance called "The Atlantic Coalition". Critics of the novel note the improbable elements like the inventions and genius of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison never coming into fruition, resulting in a timeline where technology progressed slower and shown no dieselpunk aesthethics.
• Dystopia: Heavily Enforced, despite all the glamour and awe of the wondrous tech of Pax Britannica, this is a world where humanity has truthfully not properly learned the horrors of war, nor when science should be limited.
• Expy:
  • The Edison Imperial Electric Company is a MegaCorp, considered the largest in the world that started out as a electric company but has grow vastly and has grown more influence by diversifying their industry by manufacturing and controlling other industrial branches such as medicine, automation, vehicles, munitions, and resources. A MegaCorp that started out as a electric power company and has grown its influence further by manufacturing military hardware and equpiment, resources, and other industrial products, and became the largest megacorp in the world. Does that sound familiar?
• Genetic Abomination: The Combatagates are pure genetic abominations, being created on accident when experiments with gene splicing on cattle go horribly wrong.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Inessa Armand and the puppet leaders she can install across Europe are all OTL leftists turned into Commie Nazis.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Hitler in this timeline never became the dictator he did in our timeline, nor did he become disillusioned with communism, ending up as a painter in a Venice commune. There's an event where an implied time-traveller kills Hitler, and is quickly detained, however upon being detained he quickly becomes hysterical, trying to explain that he miscalculated, and went to the wrong timeline, having ended up in Pax Britannica's timeline, instead of his own.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Possible to do this to yourself if you engage in biological warfare, as, depending on what disease you develop for use, it can potentially spread to other provinces... including your own.
• Jet Pack: Used by Jet Troopers, a special type of elite infantry.
• Job-Stealing Robot: The increased use of automation in the workplace has led to an increase in unemployment, with the final straw being the introduction of mining robots that render human miners obsolete in Britain, causing the unemployed to riot, starting the Automation Crisis to which Imperial Britain has to solve.
• MegaCorp: The Megacorps of Pax Britannica include the Edison Imperial Electric Company, Tesla Electriworks, the Anglo-American Fruit Company, the Union Standard Oil Company, the Carnegie Steel Company, the exiled zaibatsu in Korea, the Big Three in India, the Belt Diamond Mining and Extraction Corporation, and the International Association for the Civilization of Africa.
• Off with His Head!: A woman is discovered with her head detached from her body near a church, courtesy of the Melbourne Torso Killer as retribution for massacring an entire church filled with civilians. The woman herself was part of the 85th Shocktrooper Corps as a Razormaiden.
• Powered Armor: Although much more mech-like in appearance, the Hardsuits of Pax Britannica are power armor through and through, being controlled by highly trained, partially genetically augmented, soldiers.
• Prison Colony: The Russian Empire uses the Aleutian Islands as this, mostly for political dissidents and radicals.
• Rash Equilibrium: France and Russia form together the Pacte Revanchiste but after their victory over the League of Nations their alliance can fall apart and lead to a Franco-Russian War for supremacy over Europe.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Quite a few examples. In fact, PTSD is already a properly recognized illness.
  • A number of officers who served in the Great War have this as a trait, including Bernard Montgomery.
  • T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, was extremely traumatized by his experiences in the Great War, including seeing the indiscriminate bombardment of a city by his own side. He has fled to the desert, vowing to never fight for the British Empire again and spending his time studying Arabic literature. The British have a series of events involving tracking him down and dealing with him, with results ranging from him rejoining the Empire, the intelligence agents deciding to leave him alone, or them killing him after he drew his pistol on them.
  • Should the Melbourne torso killer be caught, he is revealed to be a veteran of the Iberian Campaign, who was killing other veterans as retribution for the war crimes committed in Iberia.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the Infantry tab of the research tree, there is a sub-branch where soldiers can consume substances to improve their skills and their combat abilities. Some of these substances can be used to control a revolting populace such as Thalasin^note Which is a reference to a BLUE_CHANNEL video by Gooseworx and Soma.
  • The name for the Strategic Blimp for Imperial Britain is named the Rockerfeller. This also act as a Creator In-Joke since one of the composers of the Pax Britannica soundtrack and the composer of the main menu theme, AJCW has also made the soundtrack for the Monument Mythos.
  • The remark for "The Autométro" event for France is "I like trains."
  • The music used for the "The Second Great War" super event is a cover of Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears for Fears used in BioShock Infinite.
    • Furthermore, the Support Companies "Shock Jockeys" have been described as tesla coils that zap their enemies with electricity. Something like that could be done with a similarly named Vigor in-game.
  • Livewire is could be said to be inspired by Biowire from Rogue Trooper or the living barbed wire from Deathwatch.
  • At one point, the United Kingdoms of Germany has to investigate about a play known for anomalous activities named "Der König in Gelb".
  • Edmund Blackadder is a close friend and advisor to Prime Minister Haig.
  • Several of the names of Britain's colonial garrisons in Africa are references:
    • The 1st North African "Dry Boys" Brigade
    • The 3rd African "Rasczak's Roughnecks" Brigade
    • The 4th African "Outer Heaven" Brigade
    • The 5th African "Melchett's Marauders" Brigade
    • The 6th African "Bad Company" Brigade
  • The remark for the "British Surrealist Group" event is "Are we cool yet?".
  • The remark for "The Rise of the Swing Scene" event is "Ya like jazz?".
  • One of the options for what the British should do with Taiwan is "Direct control from London"
  • Amphibious landships are called "barrels".
  • The in-game newspaper is called The Happening World.
  • The response for when a Spinosaurus fossil is discovered in Algiers? "Life uh... finds a way".
  • One of the National Focuses to end the Bonus Brigade peacefully is titled "The Art of The Deal".
  • The whole Great Martian War sequence is a direct reference to H.G. Wells' War of The Worlds, with the initial Martian invasion beginning in a small rural town which attracts the attention of a couple of civilians, who are later massacred when the Martian visitors start waking up.
• Space-Filling Empire: Deconstructed. Pretty much all the major colonial empires are shown to need numerous semi-autonomous colonial governments simply to keep their empires running, even the Russians who directly border almost all of their possessions. And, despite this, there are major issues that need to be resolved.
  • The United Commonwealth has several completely distinct cultures from Britain, and has developed so much that it is nearly equal to the United Kingdom proper in terms of power, to the point that even many in the United Commonwealth who are loyal to Britain still wish for them to be officially equal to the Home Isles.
  • The British African Authority controls much of West Africa, and is shown as being very dysfunctional. No matter what path is taken, it doesn't survive as a single entity, either collapsing into independent nations, or being split up into smaller, more manageable colonies (for the British Conservative path) or commonwealths (for the British Reformist path), with the Reformists even creating some native-ruled subject states.
• Tesla Tech Timeline: A major component of Pax Britannica's alternate history timeline is a widespread acceptance of Nikola Tesla's ideas, no matter how mad they may be.
• The Theocracy:
  • Unlike in our timeline, here the Vatican still controls all of Rome as well as some of the surrounding countryside in 1933.
  • Andorra has gone from a Co-Principality ruled by a Spanish Bishop and the French President to being an independent Bishopric, mainly due to the demands of the British and Germans following the Great War, who really wanted to punish France in every possible way. They are currently dealing with a refugee crisis of moderate Iberian Catholics following the Fatimist movements taking control of Spain and Portugal. However, outside of removing one of the co-princes, the government mostly functions the same as it did before, making it closer to a constitutional monarchy whose ruler happens to be a bishop than a full-on theocracy.
  • Two currently rule the Iberian Peninsula, following the religious Fatimist uprising that occurred after the Great War due to the sheer devastation of the Iberian Campaign. The mainstream Catholic Church considers them to be extremists, with the Holy Kingdom of Portugal being so bad that most countries refuse to recognize it, with even the Vatican only providing some very reluctant support. Downplayed with the Holy Orders of Spain, who are closer to a traditional junta hiding behind a veneer of being knightly orders.
• War Is Hell: Oh where to start, even if the Geneva Conventions are signed in this timeline, it is considered largely irrelevant, meaning that non-combatants can be harmed in war's way without repercussions. The Hague Conventions is also seems to be never signed, meaning that pretty much any weapon can be used in warfare no matter how inhumane and unethical they are. The Geneva Protocol is also never signed, meaning that any chemical and biological weapons can be used. The Weapons of Mass Destruction used in a war can range from conventional chemical and bioweapons to weaponized psychedelics and hallucinogens, and macrobiological weapons such as Combatagates.
• Weird West: Due to the failure of the American Revolution, the United Commonwealth has not expanded very far outside of the East Coast. This has left the midwest and parts of the West Coast in a fairly chaotic state, with most of the nations there being somewhat backwards technologically, and made up of a patchwork of free Native American tribes, Mexican splinter states, bandit gangs, former slaves, people Still Fighting the Civil War, the remnants of a failed Jacobin revolution, several Mormon Theocracies, a Japanese remnant, and the descendents of Emperor Norton, giving the whole area an old west feel in a 1930's Diesel Punk setting.