I think I’m just looking for some hope or catharsis lately. What’s a good game where I can see some success as a communist group, country, etc?
Would playing as the USSR for Hearts of Iron IV work? It sounds super satisfying to defeat the Nazis in a war, but the game also sounds extremely complicated - well, the one time I tried it (and found a 6 hour tutorial or something like that on YouTube, then gave up).
What do people think of that game? Are there other alternatives to scratch that itch?
There’s the recent game where you play as the Mensheviks or Bolsheviks post USSR Revolution in 1917, but I’m still figuring out the German SDP version of the game. My brain isn’t ready to learn all the nuance of a new version of that yet, I don’t think lol.
HoI4 and Victoria 3 are nice games for escapism to make timelines that aren’t miserably bleak, but there’s definitely a steep learning curve for sure. And with mods, there’s a lot of neat scenarios and start dates you can pick from to start your global communism run, such as mods that cover the Cold War, the 2000s, the 2020s, etc. I recently played a nifty one called Red Dusk that started in 2000 with the premise that the August Coup was successful in removing Grobachev.
There’s a small indie studio call
Kremlin GamesNostalGames that makes kinda janky political simulators about socialist states, like Crisis in the Kremlin which is about late 80’s USSR, China: Mao’s Legacy which covers 1970s+ China, and Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall which covers the other Warsaw Pact states in the late 80’s. I think the latter also has DLC for Cuba, Yugoslavia, and the DPRK.Just wanted to add they’re called NostalGames now and they just released Crisis in the Kremlin 2 about a month ago. Def worth checking out all their games if you can get past their clunky UIs