Current must-have mods?

[KingCarrot]

What are the current mods that are more or less must have? I have been away from the game for some years, and I cannot recall which mods I used to have.
What are the current good and well maintained mods that are considere must-haves?

What are the larger add-ons that simply are really good? Maybe some of the larger overall ones. Overhauls? I cannot recall that they are called

 

[Bunnytob]

What are the current good and well maintained mods that are considere must-haves?

From my, er, less than stellar (and also highly limited) experience with mods, I've found that HFM and HPM are decent so long as you don't play the USA. There's also a Vanilla Rebalance Revival currently in development, and I've found that a slightly modified NNM isn't bad either.

 

[ThePoleCat]

If you’re looking for complete overhauls, DOD (Divergences of Darkness) is a great alt-history mod. It’s really fleshed out, and is definitely worth your time. (Just be sure to get the fan-fork version that’s still being updated) There’s also a very big multiplayer following for the mod if you’re into that sort of thing.
HtA (Heirs to Aquitaina), AoE (Age of Enlightenment), & Napoleon’s Legacy are also great mods that are worth a shot.
Alstadt is a good mod that is essentially vanilla but takes away to broken parts of the game and optimizes the economy in a better way than HPM & HFM (also a lot faster)

 

[the_hdk]

If you’re looking for complete overhauls, DOD (Divergences of Darkness) is a great alt-history mod. It’s really fleshed out, and is definitely worth your time. (Just be sure to get the fan-fork version that’s still being updated) There’s also a very big multiplayer following for the mod if you’re into that sort of thing.
HtA (Heirs to Aquitaina), AoE (Age of Enlightenment), & Napoleon’s Legacy are also great mods that are worth a shot.
Alstadt is a good mod that is essentially vanilla but takes away to broken parts of the game and optimizes the economy in a better way than HPM & HFM (also a lot faster)

Alstadt? where can I find it? googling doesnt bring up anything

 

[ThePoleCat]

Alstadt? where can I find it? googling doesnt bring up anything

Ah, it’s mainly used in the MP community and I thought it was uploaded online, but apparently not. If you’d like, I can send you the file over discord, because I can’t attach it in the forums.(ThePoleCat#4210)

 

[Delterius]

HPM, pretty much.

 

[the_hdk]

Ah, it’s mainly used in the MP community and I thought it was uploaded online, but apparently not. If you’d like, I can send you the file over discord, because I can’t attach it in the forums.(ThePoleCat#4210)

I seems not to be able to add you. sent you an PM

 

[maxirage]

The mods aren't any better than vanilla. A lot of Vicky 2 is hardcoded, so they can't solve any of the big problems and instead duct-tape over them using railroaded events which feel half-assed and artificial. I suggest to make your own simple QOL mods instead. For example, I disabled the election popup events so playing as democracies isn't a headache, and disabled subsidies to prevent the AI from spamming worthless factories and crashing the global economy.

 

[Guedes]

I'm with the poster above, Vanilla is totally playable as it is.

Total overhaul mods, although have some nice features, for me just feel streamlined to "work as intended". If you like you can do some smalls QoL mods by yourself (and its quite nice to learn how to mod and not difficult at all, the wiki has all info that you need).

I play Vanilla version with subsidies and SoI disabled and for me its golden.

 

[the_hdk]

I play Vanilla version with subsidies and SoI disabled and for me its golden.

Sol?

how you turn ff subsidies?

 

[Bunnytob]

SoI = Sphere of Influence.
And you'd probably turn off subsidies by modifying the three non-LF economic policies to be unable to subsidise.

 

[Guedes]

Sol?

how you turn ff subsidies?

Go to issues.txt and replace all the "can_subsidise = yes" to "can_subsidise = no".

I recommend creating a mod for this though, so you can easily switch to vanilla unmodded at the launcher screen.

 

[Bunnytob]

There might be a few other things you'll want to do as well - some cores (e.g. the mess that is Transcaucasia) and accepted cultures (e.g. Persia not getting Hazara, Egypt being Misri-only, Mexico getting Mayan for some reason) can be quite out-of-whack.

 

[rwds]

The overhaul mods such as HPM, HFM, Blood & Iron provide some cool features but the unfortunate side-effect of adding 50 african and asian tags is that the game becomes unplayable past a certain point because of how slowly it runs. I've been having a lot of fun with the Ultralite & Minimalist mods because of how they just fix some minor annoyances and the Minimalist mod provides for a possibility of achieving a somewhat historical outcome (such as Belgian Congo and German Kaiser Wilhelmsland) without railroading the game too much.
The heavily railroaded overhaul mods if I have too choose one would probably be HFM. It has some interesting flavor such as UK refusing to ally the other european great powers until 1 of them upsets the balance of power too much (preventing the usual UK + Germany hug-box), removes tea from british india until much later in the game giving China a near monopoly on tea as it should, makes british India being ruled by the British East India Company making it more realistic in that the UK can't draw hundreds of brigades from India but rather has to let a satellite control it and so on.

 

[PatrykCXXVIII]

I don't think that there're must-have mods. (Aside from Big Frame Flags [Or was it Square Shaded Flag Frame for vanilla? I'm sure there's a pastbin copypaste with mods like that somewhere.], if you like flags.) Though I don't remember when I last played vanilla as nowadays I mostly play HPM (HFM is too railroaded for me though I like micro-nations on map like Andorra, or Lichtenstein.) and Divergences of Darkness for alt-hist. I used to play Concert of Europe, but since dev team decided to give up on versioning and having a stable branch, I gave up on the mod as I don't like the possibility of random crashes depending on the day you download the mod. It's a shame that there are so little alt-history mods for Vic2, when HoI4 has couple of great ones like Kaiserreich, The New Order, Thousand Week Reich, Old World Blues (Though it's another universe, not alt-hist...), or Red Flood, and so on and so on... Though it's understandable since HoI4 is more popular and more "modable".

 

[TheCrimsonMajor]

Been playing a lot of HPM recently. I like that it doesn't change too much and is still being updated.