How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

Which gap? Are you talking Europe vs the rest of the world? Or are you talking Europe vs Asia? 'Cause the thing is, the magnitudal gap that exists between say, Europe and the Americas isn't present between Europe and Asia. India, China, Japan, etc, aren't all that far removed from Europe technologically, and in Japan's case, easily play catch up once they decide to.

In the case of China specifically the problem isn't technological or even cultural—it's political. The Qing Dynasty quite deliberately crippled its own military in an effort to prevent a military revolt against the ruling dynasty, institutionalizing distaste for military service and strangling efforts at reform for fear of the nation disintegrating into warlordism, or Han Chinese revolt against the ruling Manchus.

And see that's just dead wrong. Plenty of Native American and African nations provided the Europeans with serious challenges, and held out against colonial efforts for years, decades, or even centuries at a time. The Iroquois checked the French, survived the British, and gave the Americans a thoroughly bad time of it in the nation's founding years. Comancheria defeated Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the CSA before the USA conquered it. The Asante sent the British packing in the 1820s, recovered rapidly from defeat in the 1870s. and were only conquered in the 1900s.

But I guess a game in which native peoples have a chance of resisting European imperialism for any length of time would be boring. Much better to set it up so that the only important competition comes from your fellow white men.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you're essentially buying into a colonialist narrative here—namely that the European conquest of the New World and Africa should be all about Europeans competing with each other.

edited 14th Aug '17 11:21:55 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

But there is a gap, even if it's not an order of magnitude. Industry and mass-production of firearms wouldn't have arisen in one small place if there was no difference.

Okay, you're being stubborn here over the most ridiculous reason possible. It is necessary to have a competitive Nazi Germany in a World War II game, because otherwise the game is either a cakewalk or more impossible than normal to learn (because the only challenge is so extreme). It isn't necessary for Native American or African nations to be stronger in EUIV or Victoria II, because there are other nations that can fill the role without tweaking.

In EUIV, at the start, most nations in the Old World and out of (sub-Saharan) Africa are about as competitive with each other. In Victoria II, all the Great Powers have a shot at things, and the various Secondary Powers can also have massive achievements.

Without a buffed Nazi Germany, you don't have a strategy game in WWII. It's quite a simple problem: there aren't enough major powers on each side otherwise.

The Islam-in-CKII thing? Early-game DLC symptoms.The default representation of Islam isn't good but it was also meant to be an alternative to the identical playstyles of most Christian nations. If you recall, it was more or less the same for every newly-playable nation—either they played like Christianity with maybe one or two unique traits, or an entire group went one way. At least the government types helped a bit, but it's rather too late to go back and redo it rather than just do the next game better.

This is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.

Because the games can't do that? Because they don't allow turning history completely upside down? But they do—and don't include the plagues that accompanied European explorers to make things far easier.

If you want to claim that the game is espousing some predetermined narrative because it's too easy, you should start complaining about the fact it's too easy to ship entire armies over, not that the new world is incompetent. That's a weird thing.

edited 14th Aug '17 11:24:40 AM by RainehDaze

Once again, Qing China strangled firearms production, and military production in general, out of fear of an army revolt. Japan had deliberately cut itself off from the rest of the world, which is its problem. India wasn't all that behind technologically—the British were simply able to play local states against one another.

There is no universal answer to "why was Asia behind Europe" because Asia, as a monolith, isn't behind Europe. Each Asian country has different reasons for why it wound up victimized by the colonial powers.

This is making excuses. An "alternative playstyle" does not require the incorporation of Islamaphobic tropes into the game mechanics. Nor does it require giving the Christian nations access to a vast variety of options for customizing their playstyle, while giving Islamic players none.

That's uh, not helping your argument. All you've done now is establish they were racist towards everyone who isn't Christian Europe. That doesn't make things better, it makes things worse (it also doesn't invalidate my argument that the game is especially Islamaphobic, because while it treats most non-Christian religions badly, it specifically deploys Islamaphobic stereotypes in its characterization of that faith).

And what, pray tell, is my conspiracy theory? That maker of video games isn't particularly enlightened and that they've passed some of that ignorance onto their players?

Because I can't complain about those things I guess? Also, you've just put down successful native resistance as being a product of European inability, another troubling narrative in and of itself.

edited 14th Aug '17 11:34:29 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

It's why there's only one option. One that ends up combining something that only existed for a small period of history and a mechanic that represents a scholarly concept that turns out to not really match reality that well. The second one was from Islamic writing, the first one is overly broad; inaccurate but not historically sourceless.

"Islamic players don't get to customise their playstyles" is a flawed complaint when Islam was introduced as a different playstyle. It wasn't part of the base game! You're asking "why doesn't this DLC have as many succession options as the original game?"

Are you really trying to argue in good faith now? Every new gameplay option they ever introduced before reworking a large portion of the game mechanics went like this—even merchant republics were just a very specific offshoot—because government and religion were tied; it was either a slight variant on one or something completely different. Charlemagne and the Horse Lords improved it by finally splitting government and religion.

That this is deliberate and malevolent?

... are you really trying to suggest that if the entire military strength of France or the Holy Roman Empire showed up at once it wouldn't have made a significant difference? Because that is, by and large, how anything in EUIV will go due to an ease of co-ordination that gets a bit absurd.

edited 14th Aug '17 11:42:00 AM by RainehDaze

I've lost track of the point of both your arguments at this point. >.>

Ambar is arguing that the lopsided nature of the various game mechanics (either in favor of the Nazis or against the natives/non-Europeans) is evidence of bigotry amongst the Paradox devs. While Raineh Daze is disagreeing.

edited 14th Aug '17 12:35:28 PM by Fourthspartan56

Technically I'm arguing that it makes the games bigoted, period. Whether the devs are intentionally pushing a white supremacist narrative or are just stunningly ignorant is sort of irrelevant. The final product is bigoted.

I never said it was historically sourceless, I said it was ragingly Islamaphobic, which it is. As is the "four wives gives a bonus" thing. As is the inability of Islamic players to give women greater rights (while the Christians can), or even to control who mentors their daughters (because you're playing as a filthy, woman-hating Muslim and therefore could not possibly care). As is the "muh brother" negative to cooperation between family members. As is the Decadence mechanic.

And we're not even getting into how this Islamaphobia sabotages the gameplay which it very much does. Since the game assumes all Muslims are misogynists it assumes those playing as them don't care about who raises their daughters. So the game automates the process, and shuffles the girls around from advisor to advisor ratcheting up massive "lost a ward" negative penalties and driving all your advisors into revolting against you. And that's just one problem—we're not getting into how Decadence and "muh brother" and women not being able to inherit under any circumstances screw you.

If you think that reducing one of the world's largest religions to a single "different playstyle" isn't a problem, I'm not sure there's anything else for us to talk about here. Christianity is treated as a default and given a wide amount of variation in its portrayal. Islam is treated as an alien other and portrayed as a monolith. That's bad.

This is the problem. Paradox treated entire religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, with their billions of adherents, as afterthoughts to be made on the cheap, modeled almost entirely on stereotypes, and downloaded into the game for contrast with the Christians that the game is really about.

Deliberate and malevolent or ignorant and stupid, the final result is the same—Eurocentric and Christian supremacist.

I am not disputing that Europe is grossly overpowered in EU. However, that doesn't mean that the Native Americans aren't also grossly underpowered, because they are. And that's not getting into the rest of the bigotry inherent in their portrayal (the conflation of the Aztec and Mayan religions would be an obvious and blatant case in point, as would the need for them to "reform" their cultures to have a chance at surviving).

Sadly, still better than Victoria which just pretends there are no Native Americans (unless you release the Cherokee as the USA) despite starting in the early 1800s. Great Sioux War? What Great Sioux War?

edited 14th Aug '17 1:17:34 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

All of this crap is why I tend to avoid "historical" games in the first place. With the exception of The Oregon Trail.

I remember hearing that when it comes to the technology used by the Axis in WWII, while it was usually more powerful and advanced than what the Allies were using, it tended to either have massive flaws or be way too expensive because it was usually rushed out way too quickly. Or it was used in an incredibly wasteful way (coughkamikazecough).

Like, the Yamato and the Musashi are considered to have been really powerful for battleships. But they were so powerful that they were functionally useless. Like, when firing exploding shells at an enemy ship, you don't want your cannons to fire the shells straight through the enemy ship, thus rending exploding shells worthless.

There was also the random useless projects the Nazis did because they were dumb enough to give a group of occultists way too much money.

I'm sorry, I have to take a stand here.

Take for example, the Ancient Egyptians. For years, they're building technology advanced by medical knowledge stagnated. The development of civilizations doesn't occur evenly, in most cases. If a war game represents this - giving them high "Engineering" skill, perhaps, but low ability to recover wounded troops - then it's being historically accurate, not bigoted.

Am I saying that there weren't inaccuracies, possibly horrible ones? No. But that doesn't mean imbalances automatically indicate bigotry.

If it was a one-off thing, maybe. But if it's part of a trend from a developer...

Whether or not it's deliberate or due to ignorance doesn't really matter in the end. It still has Unfortunate Implications.

edited 14th Aug '17 1:55:00 PM by M84

Going back to this for a moment, the problem is the things mentioned here REALLY are the best options for doctrines, to the point that modern warfare is defined around them, rapidly acting mechanized units supported by CAS....

The country that developed them is evil, but they really were probably the best thing said country had going for it to the point that Nazi generals are taught about in US tank schools, and there tactics still used to this day.

If you want to be accurate, and still portray the failings of the country, you have to bring back logistics simulation, because the tactics used in combat were sound, the suporting of them, the complexity of the machines used, and the logistics involved weren't.

Not really, you just use impact fuse shells, which caused comparable damage to kamikaze strikes.... and there was the fact that the Yamato got a ship to retreat just by shooting near by it, the spray flooded the ship and the forced a retreat.

The problem was the battleship was a dead concept by then, none of them ever contributed in any meaningful way because a carrier and its swarm of angry bees did every thing a battleship could do, but better and at a long range.

The Yamato and Musashi are best described as.

"It was like forging the perfect sword, only to find out the rest of the world had moved onto guns"

edited 14th Aug '17 2:11:55 PM by Imca

That's smart, but I don't think it solves the problems they're worried about.

The major problem I see with that is that it turns strategy games into full on Dwarf Fortress clones on a global scale. Logistics are even more complicated than moment-to-moment battle tactics. But if they could do it, that would add a decent layer of verisimilitude to the whole thing.

Yeah, I gotta say that Ho I 4 pretty much tends to lead to the expected historical outcome: Hitler fights on two fronts, Hitler gets rolled.

Um. No. What's being taught in American tanker schools are an evolution of the tanker strategies the Americans, British and the Soviet Union used to thrash the Wehrmacht. Remember, the whole 'them losing the war' thing? Why is the Russian Deep Battle doctrine programmed to be doctrinally inferior to the German doctrine it soundly defeated? If close air support is so essential, why are modern air arms built to be capable of both tactical keypoint bombing and close air support?

The Nazis pioneered a school of mobile warfare that they failed to truly understand. Their enemies took these principles and surpassed them. The Russians did it through intelligence ops, mobile reserves and artillery breakthroughs. Oh, and lest we forget, through an understanding of the operational level of war the Germans never mastered during the war. The Americans did it through masterful merging of armored forced with supporting arms in the form of artillery, airpower and a fully motorised army. The British did it through superior logistics, meticulously planned offensives and general mechanisation.

And yet all of them play second fiddle to a doctrine that failed.

edited 14th Aug '17 3:35:52 PM by math792d

I thought Superior Firepower was still considered the best doctrine tree because of how it makes your entire army just plain better and augments already highly important artillery.

But it is absolute bullshit that the Deep Battle tree, and especially the Deep Battle side is so weak, even if stacking that with level 4 logistics companies lets you achieve some hilarious unit densities.

But yes, modern doctrines are more evolved from what we did back in WWII than copied from the Nazis.

And to restate something important, even with HOI making things easier for the Axis and overbuffing them (especially Italy), in AI vs AI, the Axis almost always loses, and usually before the USA can even get involved. Despite the set up, the Allies are still much more powerful than the Axis to such a degree that playing as most Allied nations isn't fun due to how easy it is.

From my experience, three doctrines actually see use: Mobile Warfare, Superior Firepower and Mass Assault.

Mobile Warfare is fairly flexible - you either take it if you want to build a lot of tanks or if you a minor with low manpower - because Mobile Warfare actually offers manpower bonuses in one branch. Superior Firepower is basically the standard tree for most non-major countries.

And Mass Assault, while not being as good, is often used by countries that have a lot of manpower to spare anyway and can afford Zerg Rush tactics if you really want to.

Nobody uses Grand Battleplan, though.

edited 14th Aug '17 4:11:29 PM by DrunkenNordmann

Lemme guess, Mass Assault is Russia's default? (That's how that front was taught to me anyway, that and "do not wage a land war in Russia in the winter, idiots".)

Russia's actually pretty flexible. I think they start with the first point in Mass Assault, but most players go either Superior Firepower or Mobile Warfare - as the Soviet Union has both the industrial capacity and the commanders to pull off a tank offensive.

The only country I actually tended to use Mass Assault for - because of lack of industrial capacities at the start - was China.

@Ambar, not sure which version you looked at, but it is possible for Muslims to raise their Status of Women laws, and doing so actually can get them (and Nomads) off Agnatic only succession (though the AI, regardless of religion or culture or government, almost never does so). And the inability to assign daughters educators was a bug that was patched out ages ago.

This is why I stopped replying. Ambar keeps citing Victoria II (not updated since early 2013) or how the games used to be whilst ignoring any indication that they might have changed or that Paradox realised how badly they were handling those things (i.e., no comment on the EUIV tech changes).

I think you handled it quite well.

For whatever it's worth, I do agree with you, at least on the matter of playability. The playability and fun of a game should be paramount in its construction.

"We released a patch that removes some of the racism" does not change the fact that the original product was racist, and was racist for years. Nor does it suddenly mean that the company has a clean track record, or that I'm inclined to give them any more of my money.

This conversation started (in another thread) when I mentioned Paradox as being one of many companies that handle subjects like Nazism (and racism in general) poorly in their games, and said that as a result, I won't buy their products anymore.

Patches will not fix that—because after all their previous screw ups I no longer trust Paradox. I spent a couple of years playing their stuff and swimming in the toxic sewer that was the games' incorporation of racism into game mechanics. I'm not giving them another shot.

edited 14th Aug '17 7:02:05 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

... which is why I elected to not continue the conversation. You've so fervently taken the outcome of game mechanics and flaws in a DLC-based expansion model to be systemic racism that you've ignored anything to address that, since Paradox is aware of the older biases, and how some of those gameplay assumptions are flawed. It isn't an argument about the same topic.

Though by all means, keep insisting that a game with the Nazis already in a losing position should make them weaker for moral reasons, despite that destroying the game entirely. I don't agree that people are going to come to think that Nazis are good people as a result.

edited 14th Aug '17 7:16:20 PM by RainehDaze

To explain really quickly: Hearts of Iron 4 has four doctrines, each of which branch off at some point.

Mass Assault is the default doctrine for the Soviet Union and China. It branches off fairly early into a tree focused on Deep Battle, which emphasises industry and armored formations, and a tree focused on the 'Peoples' Army' which is mostly about making your infantry resilient enough to resist a technologically superior foe and overwhelming them with numbers.

Superior Firepower, which only America starts out with, puts an emphasis on artillery. There are two branches, mostly for helping you decide if you want to improve line artillery or support units in the case of the first. In the case of the second, it asks whether you want to improve at pure artillery warfare or you want some combined arms in there with the Air Land Battle doctrine.

Grand Battleplan is standard to Britain, France, Italy and Japan. It's an evolution of WW 1 doctrine, basically. Dig in until you have a logistical and planning advantage, then counterattack. The choice here is mostly between whether you have the industry to make mechanization worth it or you'd like to stick to infantry heavy armies.

Mobile Warfare, like Superior Firepower, branches off twice. The first branch focuses on mobile infantry over tank warfare, whereas the latter is basically labeled 'Blitzkrieg.' The second is based around the state of your nation. If you're doing fine you can pick the Modern Blitzkrieg side of the tree, focusing on perfecting armored maneuver tactics. If you aren't doing so hot (like if it's 1945 and the Russians are closing in on Berlin) you pick the Volkssturm side of the tree for all the manpower in the world.

Also the whole 'don't fight a war in the Russian winter' was inevitable. The offensive started in July and didn't deliver a knockout blow. It was bound to drag on into both winter and the rasputitsa afterwards.

edited 15th Aug '17 12:11:21 AM by math792d