I’ve been working on Spanish for a couple of years now, but what was once 30+ minutes a day has become <5 minutes a day just to keep my streak up on Duolingo. I need to get back into it, I interact with multiple native Spanish speakers in my everyday life, but I’m not quite at the point of being able to have even a simple conversation

I haven’t really been able to fully figure the loyalty system either. I know standard of living is a main component of it, but I haven’t found a good way to reliable keep loyalists around. This is what it says on the wiki, but it doesn’t really help with figuring out what to do:

Radicals and loyalists, just like with interest group membership, are not whole pops but rather individuals within pops. Loyalists can be considered happy or content, while Radicals are unhappy.


There is a large variety of ways that pops can become radicals or loyalists, here's a few of the more common reasons listed below: 

   Pops that experience an increase in SoL will become more loyal.

   Pops from political movements that have their demands fulfilled become more loyal.

   Pops that experience a decrease in SoL will become more radical.

   Pops from political movements whose demands are ignored may radicalize over time.

   Pops whose SoL is below the minimum they expect to have will radicalize over time, particularly if it's so low that they're actually starving.

   Pops that are discriminated against (ethnicity/religion) radicalize over time (but only if they are literate!)

...

Pops will remain radical or loyalist until they either die or have a status change as a result of becoming more radical/loyal (for example, a loyalist pop might stop being loyalist if their material standard of living suddenly takes a nosedive), but they do, in fact, die.
As generations die off and are replaced by new ones, less and less people will remember all the great things done for the country 30 years ago and will start wondering instead what has been done for them lately. 

I haven’t played a lot of Millennium Dawn, but Kaiserreich is probably at least three quarters of my HOI4 playtime. Keeping in mind that it’s all alt-history, and as such doesn’t have a lot of overlap with events in the real world, I enjoy playing the leftist nations in the mod. China is one of the more developed areas of the mod, but with an entirely different setup vs. IRL China. There’s a ton more content than vanilla HOI4, with almost every country having a unique focus tree, and there are events as far out as the 1950s for most major nations, as far as I’m aware.

I’ve also had fun with the USSR successor states in TNO, but I haven’t played much else in the mod. It was fun to rebuild the USSR from the remnants of the red army led by Zhukov.

There’s Red World Fan Fork, which is an alt-history mod where the USSR wins the cold war, but I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. And it’s not really communist specifically, but I’ve been messing around with North America Divided, which has communist paths for most nations (located entirely within North America, as the name implies lol).

It’s unfortunate, there was originally a whole “dark energy” storyline that was supposed to provide an actual justification for the reapers and become the main story after they were gone. If I remember right, the gist was that the mass relay-based tech that keeps being re-developed in every cycle effects space-time in a way that would threaten life across the universe if it was used at too big of a scale, so the reapers regularly purge advanced civilizations to keep it from getting developed too much, to preserve life in the rest of the universe. But we would only find this out after stopping the reapers, so then the story becomes finding a way to stop it from happening without having to resort to cyclical genocide. They started hinting at it in ME2 so they could do the big plot twist in ME3, but then there was a change in the writing staff after 2 came out, and between that and 3 being rushed so much, it was never picked back up. Except for the sort of half-assed reworking of it for the plot of Andromeda lol

I switched tabs and forgot the context of this post for a minute, so I just spent a little bit trying to parse your comment as some really weird political take lol

the Soviet government passed one of its first acts ever, with the decree of 3 May 1918 that expropriated about 2,500 cars from the bourgeois members of society.

To give an historical perspective, this predates the October Revolution by about six months

lol

It reminds me of that series of tweets where several people were asking Notch to just say that he’s not a Nazi, and he weaseled out of every single one just like that