Waging War In HOI4's Insanely Popular Fallout Mod
[Modern Review] Reforming Mexico in Old World Blues.
If you’ve seen an Amazon van recently, use their streaming service or are clued-up on the latest in film and TV then you’ll know that right now, Fallout is having a big moment. Interplay’s cult-classic RPG intellectual property, which was later acquired by Bethesda, has gone from being a PC staple strongly associated with Eastern European modders, to the series that was mostly considered to be “Oblivion with guns.” And has now arrived, miraculously, at massive pop-culture appeal.
I’ve always been more of an Elder Scrolls man: Morrowind is my favourite RPG of all time alongside KOTOR 1 and 2 but ever since my late teens I’ve grown to appreciate Fallout a lot more and to enjoy the delicious cynicism of its world.
Hearts Of Iron 4 is a game I know very well.
After so many hours of play, the frustrations from a decade of technical debt and the fatigue of the same setting for over 2 thousand hours certainly begin to set in, so I’ve been looking into the world of total conversion mods. Kaiserreich and The New Order had too much reading for me and Millennium Dawn is too boring; let’s see if Old World Blues can win me over.
Just a quick reminder before we begin: I have already reviewed Hearts Of Iron 4 in agonising detail, so this will be more of a narrative article looking specifically at the mechanics of the mod and following the general path of what I got up to. I hope you enjoy.
HOI… HOI Never Changes
Let me set the scene first and give you a run-down of what Old World Blues is all about.
The Old World Blues mod begins in 2275: 2 years before Fallout 3, 9 years before Fallout: New Vegas and just under 200 years since a nuclear war between a resource starved Communist China and a hyper-capitalistic USA plunged the world into ruin.
The world of Fallout primarily centres around California and the rest of the American West; up until Bethesda’s ham-fisted implementation of the East Coast and the contrived methods with which they planted classic Fallout factions there, the series was as much a Western as it was a post-apocalyptic Science Fiction. Classic Fallout was relentlessly bleak: the retro-futurist art-style and pre-war propaganda clashed brilliantly with tales of Canada and Mexico’s aggressive subjugation by the US Army and the remnants of the old establishment: The Enclave, are so twisted and violent that the denizens of the wasteland seldom refer to themselves as Americans or pine for the past; the pre-war America is ancient history to those who inhabit the world of Fallout, it would be like a modern Brit longing for the days of Queen Victoria.
This largely tribal setting, stretching from the Canadian Prairies in the North to Honduras in the South has been reimagined through the lens of Hearts Of Iron 4. War never changes, as ever you will find yourself completing focus trees, altering unit templates, training armies and producing equipment in order to fuel a war machine powerful enough to rebuild civilisation, 1 energy cell, 9mm bullet and frag grenade at a time.
Fledgling republics, religious fundamentalists, primitive tribals, technology cults or cartel kingpins, out in the wastes every kind of polity you can imagine is there to command. Many of them are original creations and it’s a testament to the mod-makers that I can hardly tell what is pulled from existing Fallout lore and what has been cooked up to fill in the barren wastes.
Taking Office
I’ve played brief sessions of OWB before: once as Arroyo and another as Mr House’s New Vegas but this time, I decided to head south of the border. The political landscape in Fallout’s Mexico is somehow both better and worse than that of its more vast neighbour to the north.
The former states of northwest Mexico: Baja California, Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua are littered with a mixture of bandits, ranchers and the pre-war Cartels immortalised as ghouls; on the coast also live the Free Fighters: a society of honest to goodness luchadores. Caesar’s Legion looks upon these weak polities with hungry eyes.
Northern Mexico is dominated by the Republic of the Rio Grande: a former US puppet state that boasts a surviving political system from before the war and maintains the Texan Arms Association as its unruly vassal state just beyond the river. To the east, the Ejercito Mexicano: the Mexican Army and its historically inspired AI General Santa Anna, styles itself as the true successor to pre-war Mexico, a Mexico free from US domination and their Rio Grandese underlings. Just south, Tlaloc: an unstable supercomputer named after the Nahua rain God preserves the interests of Petro Chico and delegates regions out to the control of its ‘sons’ which are other AI, like Santa Anna, who are inspired by figures from Mexican history. Further south, Petro Chico: the remnants of a US oil subsidiary, the Costa Cafeinada Cartel (what a fun name: the Caffeinated Coast) and a series of Nahua and Mayan states compete for dominance.
So, which did I decide to play? I’ll be damned if I’m going to fight for an AI controlled future and the idea of Mexico being run by a bunch of immortal Cartel bosses or Mesoamerican LARPer states wasn’t all that appealing to me so I picked the Republic of the Rio Grande. After 200 years and the USA having completely disintegrated, I should think any accusations of being quislings ring hollow by now.
‘One of the only pre-war countries to remain after the apocalypse, the Republic of the Rio Grande is a hollow shell of its former self. Surviving the collapse in no small part thanks to the American soldiers within its borders deserting to save civilian lives, the Republic redefined itself in order to survive.
With the rise of democracy came many challenges, and a long line of presidents have faithfully served the Republic in order to keep its people safe and happy. Despite this, tensions are running high as the Texan Arms Association continues to grow more and more discontent.’ - The Republic of the Rio Grande’s in-game description.
Broken Steel
Before we get into my campaign I want to call attention to just how perfectly the minds behind Old World Blues have captured the atmosphere of classic Fallout and New Vegas. This isn’t the same map you know from the standard game: the waterways are polluted sickly green and have all overflown, only to be crossed via strategic chokepoints or thrown together sea vessels, each and every city is a blackened corpse of twisted steel and large swathes of the land are scarred by nuclear fire and the landscape is dotted with caravans peddling their wares along the dilapidated road networks of the old world.
The presentation is elevated further by the UI and soundtrack, the former being modelled off Interplay’s original Fallout games and the latter taken from across the series, a few hours deep and you start to forget that you aren’t playing a real Fallout game. Fantastic.
I write all my reviews and articles under the assumption that (however unlikely) a developer might someday end up reading it, we can’t hold modders to the same standards as properly financed and organised development teams but I do have 2 minor complaints that I’d like to see ironed out: the stylised Fallout 1 and 2 font is extremely difficult to read sometimes and I’d love to hear some new voice lines recorded for the mod since it is a bit jarring listening to Mexican soldiers speaking Castellano Spanish and I have to imagine the ghoul troops sound normal too, though I haven’t played as a ghoul nation yet. I’d volunteer to do VA if I wasn’t so clearly a British man with a British accent.
Like in most mods, coloured buttons have been incorporated into the UI, I don’t generally use these types of mods myself but I found the splash of colour to be welcome when the environments are so drab and barren. Another burst of colour comes from the animated leader portraits, some of them have effects like arcing lightning or a holographic green tint with flicker and it goes a long way in making these seem like living, breathing people; I imagine this was inspired by Stellaris. I’ve never seen this done in any of the other total conversions I’ve played, bravo Old World Blues.
El Presidente
I took office in Rio Grande on the 1st of January 2275 and what I found was an absolute shambles.
Old World Blues has a fully fleshed-out and expansive Fallout-themed tech tree which covers everything from robotics and power armour to taming wasteland beasts and agriculture.
With the Legion an existential threat to the North, Cartels to the West and the Brotherhood of Steel well-established over the river in Texas, I found the nation without even the most basic robotics researched and much of the army being made up of small, undertrained, underequipped bands of infantry wielding pipe weapons, worse, even basic agriculture was not known to the Republic and we were working with the most rudimentary of tools; these were the technologies I focused on first: better industry and agriculture with a higher standard of infantry doctrine and training methods also set to research, better equipment would have to wait. Manpower is hard to generate in the post-apocalypse and better food means a wider manpower pool, thankfully, foreign auxiliaries were enshrined into the nation’s military laws, so for now, we had the means to fight and to grow.
And not a moment too soon, trouble soon found Rio Grande.
Not 3 days into my presidency and the ghouls of the Sinaloa Cartel came knocking: threatening for caps.
The Old World Blues mod implants the EU4 trade node system into Hearts Of Iron 4, this means that the rail network is set in stone and cannot be altered and it also enables various decisions around dispatching convoys and spending caps. To be honest, in all 3 of my OWB games so far I largely ignored these mechanics and didn’t notice a difference, I also could have paid off the Cartel easily and lived in peace… but a la mierda with that. I told the Cartel, in no uncertain terms, to do one and set up a defence on the border; we didn’t have expertise or firepower but we did have men: more men than the enemy.
While I prepared for the criminal onslaught: no doubt to be joined by a second cartel to the southwest who soon threatened me too, I took a good look at Rio Grande’s focus tree.
From playing Arroyo and as Mr House a while ago I’ve begun to pick up on the structure of these trees. Generally, the first few focuses are short lore primers that provide a few choices to gain extra factories or national spirits early on, from there you get to choose between a few different political paths with other, sub-branches for industrial and military development. I’m used to mod developers deploying walls of text after every focus and forcing the player down a very tightly controlled narrative so the level of freedom and the lack of overbearing storytelling in OWB was a relief for me.
The best part of Hearts Of Iron 4 is its combat system, everything around that should be there to facilitate more combat.
Most of the political branch of the Rio Grande tree was locked behind the dubiously named ‘desperate times’ so I went with the right branch first to improve the army. While I worked down these focuses, I was made aware of a top secret bunker, supposedly full of pre-war weapons and technology that could only be opened by seizing the key from Ejercito Mexicano and Tlaloc, I added this to my mental checklist of goals; eventual war with the Legion and NCR was inevitable and I would need some nasty firepower to take those superpowers on.
Speaking of the Legion, the lore primer informed me that not only did the Republic defeat a previous Legion invasion… but that the responsible Legate: Paullus still resides somewhere within our borders. I’m sure that won’t be important later.
In a move that I’m sure had my approval ratings subterranean and Rommel spinning fast enough in his grave to power Mexico City, I had accidentally left my defending armies on the border doing training exercises because well-trained troops are imbued with a slight edge in combat, so the men were completely disorganised by the time the cartels attacked. As the first waves of Cartel troops advanced my disorganised army was getting cut down quite easily; in base-game Hearts Of Iron 4, losing a border skirmish like this generally results in you ceding territory… so I was beginning to panic.
Fortunately, our superior numbers were affording us a greater level of staying power. In Hearts Of Iron 4’s combat system, division HP strongly correlates with manpower; more men means a higher HP pool. The Cartels had smaller divisions than us and less of them, so while the odds were not in our favour at first, those divisions who made contact with the enemy before the rest were able to tank the assault through good, old-fashioned attritional warfare while the rest regained organisation and joined the fight later.
Well-trained and reorganised forces joining the battle, special forces divisions relocated from the north and the sacrifice of the common soldier drove off both assaults. We had beaten the Cartels.
The victory saved the Republic piles of bottlecaps and secured the city of Rio’s Steel Heart from possible seizure but mostly importantly, it gave the army experience of real combat; like most RTS games, HOI4 has a veterancy system for units which meant I now had a cohort of battle-hardened troops. Since military experience is a tangible currency to be spent in HOI4 too, I got to work cashing in my nobly gotten gains.
I’m going to break the narrative flow temporarily to say that my long spoken of HOI4 tutorial article never saw the light of day because a new DLC completely invalidated huge swathes of it; it might eventually surface but in the meantime I’m going to give a few division design pointers here.
The division stats screen is incredibly intimidating but for your infantry divisions (which should ideally be used only for defence, offensives on terrain where armour is not viable and special operations like naval landings) the main group you need to be looking at is these:
Factoring in Rio Grande’s mediocre industry and technology along with the unlikelihood of us picking a fight with the Brotherhood, whose power armour wearing Paladins I would assume are hard targets, I decided to maximise Soft Attack, Organisation and Defence; I’m not all that well-versed in the new robotic and power armour wearing battalions OWB adds so I decided to stick with what I know. In Hearts Of Iron 4, Hard Attack is the attack state used against units with high hardness like tanks and presumably power armour while Soft Attack is for unarmoured targets like cars and infantry; the 8/2 infantry-HMG fireteam template here provided just enough hard attack for the odd armoured car here and there while allowing me to hopefully shred through raider and cartel factions. Organisation determines how long a unit can withstand combat and Defence governs how well a unit can hold its ground, I focused on these stats as well with the goal of wearing down enemy morale and equipment against my lines before advancing against their depleted divisions.
Really outing myself as a USSR, China and Poland player here. To cut a long story short? The divisions were quite manpower and equipment intensive for the wastes so this template was introduced only in limited numbers at first.
Desperate Times
After those initial raids, peace reigned for months and I started to bring real change to Rio Grande. Agriculture and industry improved allowing us to have a better equipped army with a higher standard of weaponry while more manpower steadily became available; a couple of new divisions were even trained. On top of all this, I invested 2 research slots into both robotics and a power armour program, these would take a while to come to fruition but in the event of an invasion by Caesar’s Legion or another big player, I wanted to have more than just pipe rifles and knives on hand.
One day, with bangs in the capital: Gloria and the sounds of gunfire out in the provinces, that brief, sweet peace was broken.
Relations with the puppeted Texan Arms Association had been deteriorating ever since I began my presidency but the souring relations finally came to ahead when they announced their independence, setting off explosive charges in Rio Grandese territory in the process. The disgraced Legate Paullus too was beginning to cause trouble, launching raids from an unknown location in the desert and destabilising the provinces.
Low stability but higher war support… central authority was weak but at the very least, the people had an appetite for vengeance and so I got to work on picking up the pieces.
The status quo would not do and the idea of cosying up to the Brotherhood and the other Texan factions north of the Rio Grande River didn’t appeal, so I decided to go with the The Hero’s Oath path: with the militaristic, charismatic and ruthless Presidente Leonardo Mora. Under Mora, I quickly got to work stabilising the nation’s economy and deciding what would be done with our two enemies: Paullus and the wayward Texans who had taken most of our military industry with them.
There were 3 options in dealing with Paullus but to be completely honest? I only cared about one of them: seeing him dead.
From what I understand about Mora, the character is violently anti-Legion so for role-playing reasons I went with the violent route and on a personal level I wanted a bit of revenge, so hiring the failed Legion expeditionary was not a thought I seriously entertained. Following this branch of the focus tree, a system of Minutemen, like those found in Fallout 4’s Commonwealth: Los Minutos was established, bolstering our army and the Legate was hunted down and shot… we even shipped his body back to Caesar.
The issue of the T.A.A is one I gave more thought than the raider with delusions of grandeur that was Paullus.
Crossing the Rio Grande and facing an enemy that was virtually built on its ability to manufacture large numbers of small arms would be a daunting endeavour. With only 3 major points of crossing and the T.A.A undoubtably having better equipment and a larger industrial base, it would certainly become a brutal, attritional war if I chose to attack; also on the table were the options to reach out to the T.A.A and compromise, or to sidestep them altogether and build bridges with the other factions of Texas. After much deliberation: at least 5 seconds! I chose war; this is Hearts Of Iron, not Pens Of Iron, I ain’t playing this game to hammer out peace treaties and sing kumbaya, I’m in it for the krieg.
After a wave of destabilising efforts and threats, I declared war on the T.A.A in September 2276. The opening week or so of the conflict went well. After sustained assault, a number of divisions were able to cross the Rio Grande and seize the settlement of Eagle Pass from the enemy, casualties were about equal on both sides which is a good sign when you’re on the offensive and the settlement of Rio River, while still holding on, was a shooting gallery… but then a series of amateurish and embarrassing mistakes were made.
I forgot to reassign my divisions from a fallback line so they were constantly trying to return to their positions on our side of the river, my plan to sneak a few divisions into the Texan heartland to seize a few cities and force an early capitulation led to hundreds of stranded troops; a fourth crossing point over the Rio at Nuevo Laredo, one which I had somehow missed, was used by the enemy to strike deep into the Republic.
With defeat almost certain and hopes of victory looking remote, I prepared to surrender and made plans for my next attempt at Old World Blues.
Only joking, I won. What, did you think I was going to lose? My stranded troops were able to seize all of the T.A.A’s major cities while the river crossing caused the dumb AI to overextend itself, giving up vital positions elsewhere to my army.
The conquest of the T.A.A gave the Republic the satisfaction of a revenge served hot, courtesy of our desert campaign but even better, it allowed us to secure the largest industrial base in the region and to harness a larger population living in less arid territory; the division template I prepared earlier was expanded to encompass the entire army transforming Rio Grande’s Army into a formidable fighting force.
With the two major national crises resolved, stability and prosperity began to return… but we had unfinished business with the Cartels and the Free Fighter luchadores to the West.
La Guerra Larga
The Focus Tree had brought stability back and hefty industrial improvements so I decided now was as good a time as any to go on the offensive and began manually justifying war against the Beltran-Levya Cartel next door. While we had been waging our great struggle against the Arms Association, those parasites from the Cartels had returned and with all of the Republic’s forces committed to the war, I had no choice but to pay them a large sum off money to piss off.
The area of northern Sinaloa where Beltran-Levya govern is harsh: rough, defensible hills and mountains that reach high temperatures but I decided to attack them first in the hopes of securing a viable port from which to construct a navy. I knew from my knowledge of Fallout lore that the New California Republic: the strongest nation in post-war America, would seize the long, slim state of Baja California from its bandit occupant sometime soon; a port and naval forces would enable us to launch a naval landing in the territory later if need be.
I had also hoped our recent advancement in air technology and production of gliders armed with bombs would prove decisive… if you speak Spanish and read the title of this section, you already know the answer.
The opening offensive of the war: the operation to capture the city of Nuevo Ideal went smoothly, not only were Beltran-Levya outnumbered but by now, more than 2 years into my game, I had managed to equip and train the army to a higher quality and quantity than that of my neighbours. There was a worrying lack of supply but I assumed that once the city fell and was incorporated into our logistics network, we could have a strategic pause, rearm and then push on.
You know the part earlier where I mentioned that you can’t built supply lines in Old World Blues? That they are natural, set-in-stone connections between nodes? Well, this is when I found out. My entire frontline was stuck in the rough Mexican wastes with no supply, waging a war that I had already spent 1000 lives in fighting. No turning back now.
My campaign into northern Sinaloa ended up being an unmitigated disaster. We were eventually able to secure supplies but the damage was done: of the original 7800 men sent into Beltran-Levya, about 4000 never came back. A devastating loss of life. The war was eventually won but at the cost of all those lives… and Rio Grandese democracy: Mora was made dictator for life in an effort to stabilise the state after a horrendous campaign.
In the time I had spent at war, I hadn’t noticed the world changing around me.
The Ejercito Mexicano, while I’d been floundering in Sinaloa, had launched a highly successful offensive against the Brotherhood’s Alamo Chapter in Texas and wiped them out. Just north of the Republic, Las Granjas: The Farms, a nation of peaceful cattle herders and crop growers, had been swallowed whole by the Legion giving us a direct border. Fearing that I was next, with an empty manpower pool and a fearsome army on my border I decided that just one more war: an annexation of Sinaloa Cartel, to establish a river border with the Legion and improve my defences was our only hope at long term survival.
Drunk on power, Mora declared the Republic of the Rio Grande to be the reborn United States of Mexico and marched into the territory of the Sinaloa Cartel; the Free Fighters in the south attacked too, looking to gain territory and prestige from putting down this bastion of crime.
In Hearts Of Iron 4, peace deals are largely conducted by acquiring War Contribution: a deeply flawed system that rewards you based on a few factors, the most important of which being victory points/territory captured… so despite my army seeing the heaviest combat, the Free Fighters managed to attain about 50% Contribution by seizing the Sinaloa Cartel’s capital. As a result? The peace deal I got was absolutely garbage.
It was at this moment, at the height of frustration, that I made the decision that would end my run. Depleted, overconfident and desperate to establish the Yaqui River as the (for now) permanent border between me and the Legion, I immediately invaded the Free Fighters: depleted, undersupplied and critically low on manpower, I actually chose to attack.
Within days, the remnants of my army were on the run and I did as many of history’s greatest generals have done before me… and hit Alt + F4. Mexico would be reunited… but not today and bot by me.
A Job Well Done
The worst thing I can say about Old World Blues is that it’s attached to a game that peaked about 5 years ago. The focus trees are well-designed, the aesthetic is immaculate and for the first time in a long while, I can look at my loss and not chalk it up to glitches or horrible RNG but instead pinpoint moments of poor judgement and sloppy warfare that led to my demise. That to me is what strategy games are all about: learning to maximise your success within a set of rules and parameters and playing your hand, no matter how horrible it is, to the best of your ability.
I turned a struggling, poor, technologically backwards republic in the deserts of Mexico into a military powerhouse with a wide industrial base and I had an absolute blast doing it.
If you’re a fan of Fallout then this mod is for you, if you’ve grown tired of Hearts Of Iron 4 then Old World Blues is worth trying for you too; I know there is an appetite among my readership for more Hearts Of Iron, so if you’d like to see me try more nations in Old World Blues than do let me know.
TL;DR: Hearts Of Iron 4 is far past its peak and Old World Blues’ developers stray from established lore in order to fill up the map with interesting factions but the aesthetic is spot on, the new units and tech add a wealth of combat options and wars in the wasteland are bloody, challenging tests of strategic skill.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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I don’t know why, but narrative play throughs like this are crack to me.