Hearts of Iron 4's 'End of a New Beginning' Mod is the Victoria 3 we need, but not the one we deserve

The year was 1870 and things were very much not going well for France. Getting into character as Napoleon III, I had previously embarked on a series of foreign adventures that quickly turned into calamitous humiliations: an uprising in Savoy, a pig headed Mexican adventure, an ill-advised conflict with Belgium over railroads or some such nonsense.

And now the Prussians were pushing into Alsace-Lorraine! Fearing a military coup against my flailing regime, I tacitly accepted Blanquist support for an assassination attempt against General MacMahon, one of my top field commanders. When the assassination failed, the General and his allies fled to Bordeaux to raise a rebellion in the southwest. It was only a matter of time before a flood of Prussians pushed through the fortified border, captured my unlucky emperor, and marched on Paris mere days after a government of national defense could be organized.

That was the high-water mark of my first campaign of End of a New Beginning (or, EoaNB), a mod for Paradox Interactive's WWII simulator Hearts of Iron IV. It's a project with an impressively ambitious mandate: extend the timeline in HoI4 to cover the period from 1857 to 2050. Although the mod is still very early in its development, it scratches a very particular itch. It offers the promise of a modern grand strategy experience set (if only partially) in the Victorian era, that age of industrialization and imperialism.

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