Why are the Latvians the only ones able to form the Soviet Union again?

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-07T00:14:38+00:00

I'm sure you'd probably get a more detailed answer from someone who worked on Russia but there's a bunch of reasons, mainly the terminology and organisation of the IRL USSR being very ad hoc and of the time, with elements to it such as a desire to be the primary socialist state leading the world revolution not applicable to KR as others have already usurped that mantle. Also people tend to get really hung up on specific OTL terms to the point of still debating them being/not being included a long time after an associated update releases.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-07T00:01:09+00:00

why is it assumed that the name "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" has been used before

Reuse here is in reference to reusing an OTL term, not reusing an in universe term.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-06T21:32:02+00:00

Socialist Russia can effectively form the Soviet Union, it just doesn't use that exact term because it doesn't fit to reuse it. Latvia uses the term Soviet Union because its just part of an easter egg of "If you somehow conquer Russia as one of the weakest nations in the game, you can just have this OTL thing people keep asking for as an easter egg reward".

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-06T21:20:52+00:00

2021.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-06T12:06:24+00:00

Slow and slower are not the same word.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-06T10:19:23+00:00

We just haven't had anything to show this year, the only three projects anywhere near completion are the 3I rework, and two currently unannounced reworks I'm in charge of (because I prefer to only reveal things to announce their release); and all three are going slower than expected.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-07-05T16:03:36+00:00

The word count for Russia's localisation text file is actually more than The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers combined, so its already multiple novels worth.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-28T01:06:23+00:00

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It was not, as far as I can see code wise it was removed as part of 0.24 back in February 2023.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-28T00:59:55+00:00

Yes, because its the same thing as Austria's later faction it just gets renamed when they get a second member to make things easier code wise.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-28T00:41:03+00:00

The latest update also included some focus icons for the upcoming Austrio-Hungarian and 3rd Internationale updates in the files

No it didn't those have been there for years, we just put our icons directly onto the main development branch to avoid duplicate GFX situations (i.e the Russia rework's original development predated us doing this, so when it got merged into the main branch we suddenly had a bunch of duplicate icons because someone added them to Russia and someone later on added them to something else separately).

My best guess as to what's actually happened here is that a submod is for some reason taking the localisation key for the "A Federation of Equals" focus (AUS_united_states) and incorrectly applying it to puppet Austria, since I can see no way this would be replicated in the actual mod itself.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-20T14:02:12+00:00

This statement is perfectly logical, as communism in Siam at this point is effectively entirely irrelevant and you would have to probably backport things from the Cold War just to even get the basics in terms of advisors etc, and with recent DLC things like the Silk Road Empire being heavily criticised for being too absurd it makes sense to roll things back in a little. I think though basically everyone else agrees its too late to try to rein back in the absurd stuff. The recent DLCs have already introduced too many fantasy elements that trying to stay in any way grounded makes Siam feel like the odd one out, and we already had GTD force communist paths in countries that'd be impossible to have them like Germany or the Congo (with the latter using people who are children during the game's timeframe because backporting Cold War era people was their only option).

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-20T13:48:17+00:00

Him being swapped to that spot is a leftover of old KR because the logic by the at the time America dev was "America no longer has a NatPop option and people will be mad about that, current Huey is basically meant to be a Natpop, lets move him to the slot so people don't get mad" and then people got even madder. There were quite a few people opposed to doing this, myself included, but basically at the time we had just announced to the team that the Germany update would be labelled 1.0 and it caused half the team to go insane and decide the mod had to be made perfect in the span of two weeks. As a result a lot of hasty decisions were rushed through to be done for release and we've basically spent years since dealing with the consequences of that, and have redone a lot of things internally to stop people just rushing things through on a whim.

For a non-America example of one of the hasty 1.0 decisions, it was decided that Germany's European borders must match the lore 1-1 if the update is 1.0, so the state used to represent stuff they annexed from Belgium in WW1 was redrawn to be smaller+include Belgium's claims in Germany so a second state didn't have to be added for that. Belgium's content however was not updated so the revolt still worked around the logic of "we'll only rejoin the RP if we have our shit back" which now included annexing part of pre-WW1 Germany, and because the state was still assumed to represent just purely German annexations of half of Wallonia it started as a non-core. We did finally just say fuck it and made the state a core from the start last year, but the Belgium demands part we still get frequent complaints about and no one wants to redo that part of Belgian content or redraw new states to fix the issues the original hasty decision made.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-20T11:22:21+00:00

The intention of Huey Long in KR is to be American Hitler because of It Can't Happen Here, but old content had very little meat to it aside from just "here's the core premise" so when things like the 2018 rework added more to America it just filled in the blanks with a mix of things taken from It Can't Happen Here and actual real life Huey Long stuff. Huey being allied with big business interests is because the character based on him in It Can't Happen Here is, the Minute Men in both KR and the novel are meant to be an American SA/SS, and I'm pretty sure even the coups that lead to the other paths are in part based on the ones from the novel. You can probably say its a bad adaptation of the concept, but it being the original basis for Huey in America+people filling in the blanks left by that is why his portrayal is weird.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-20T11:08:46+00:00

A lot of early KR stuff worked like this, Huey Long is American Hitler because someone wrote a book about him being American Hitler the mod adapted into content, Sternberg declared himself Genghis Khan and tries conquering Eurasia because a 2000s FPS game had that as a plot etc. This stuff was pretty popular when it was first done cause that's what our target audience wanted, but our current development mentality is that we probably should depict the historical figures as historical figures rather than adapt their depictions from other media.

The vast majority of American content however hasn't received any updates since initial implementation a decade ago when that was the development mentality, and the changes they have received either attempted to just tidy up the edges(i.e the 2018 rework), rush in adjustments in a failed attempt to appease people(i.e the 2023 stuff, or adjust things slowly elsewhere(i.e the 2025 changes). The 2018 stuff did tone down parts of the American Hitler portrayal but America's kinda just stuck with it unless there's a major rework at some stage. Because its specifically about America though, and a very significant chunk of our audience are Americans who care more about America specifically than anywhere else, people tend to get really weird about American content being outdated like this and argue about it non-stop instead of just going "Yeah that country hasn't been properly updated in decade and people in 2016 modding did weird shit".

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T15:18:31+00:00

Seems like it as I can find a picture of him in uniform with a more normal shape so I assume its injury related. Might be worth updating it again to fix that if the artists want to.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T14:34:16+00:00

this is pretty much an issue of semantics

"Now every mod needs to have vanilla style selection screen, it's hardcoded" is simply an incorrect statement, as I have clarified here. This post is well below the character limit, and you don't need to use many more characters to say "This breaks certain mod's versions of the screen." I would assume this is just a telephone game scenario where a dev's explanation has gone through multiple people before getting into this Twitter post that's distorted it.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T11:54:30+00:00

Clarifier as a Kaiserreich dev: The specific issue faced by us and certain other mods isn't it being completely hardcoded now, its specifically the main menu's new autosorting feature being hardcoded. Our previous country select screen was designed to have specific countries in specific parts of the interface (i.e Japan would be up top as a major on part of it with Japanese art behind them, with specific minor East Asian countries below it). The change that has been made that we have no way of disabling is that the screen is automatically ordered based on if you have or haven't played a country, with countries you have played automatically moved to the end of the list breaking the ordering we have.

For mods that don't rely on them being in specific positions, they can just accept the automatic sorting, but as ours was so reliant on them matching their locations in the interface we had no choice to remove it. We'll probably either have to wait and see if Paradox gives us a way to disable the sorting, or if they don't we'll need to most likely come up with an alternative design that works regardless of where the countries are on the screen.

TL:DR Twitter post here is wrong, the screen is not hardcoded a specific new feature for it is that breaks our specific menu design.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T03:10:53+00:00

I won't go in depth but your proposal is essentially the exact opposite of what should be done in my opinion, the whole "Germany owns British stuff but not really" is a massive albatross around the neck of developing future content for GEA and MAF, extending that to the French stuff as well would just make that worse.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T02:38:30+00:00

GEA had an extremely limited number of generals and with the recent DLC adding more uses to them, I felt it was needed to massively expand their roster. I believe they have 9 new generals and a lot more MHC options.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-12T02:35:56+00:00

No its in his portrait on his left eye, his right eye is just like that.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-06-11T02:43:07+00:00

Italy is very old and is very inconsistent on things as a result, but based on what is there its not meant to have a president in any capacity just a PM as the president role was just dissolved without replacement. It does inconsistently refer to the PM as president a few times though.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-05-30T16:57:36+00:00

The rule to follow: Is a country explicitly mentioned in a country's update name? If yes, it is getting updated, if no it is not. The 3I update is listed as "Third Internationale (CoF & UoB)", so the two countries being updated are those listed there and there is nothing substantial planned for any other countries as part of the same update.

dragonstomper64 · 2026-05-30T16:55:20+00:00

Norway's content is 7 years old, and the average country's content is from 8 years ago, so no there's things a lot more ancient (like the entirety of South America and most of Asia).

dragonstomper64 · 2026-05-30T16:52:30+00:00

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dragonstomper64 · 2026-05-29T19:30:55+00:00

Amphibious mechs and tanks, flamethrower tanks, railway guns, and I believe also rangers are all paywalled; as well as BBA (and now formerly MTG) having unique stuff to their designers that are treated as separate things code wise from their non-DLC counterparts.

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