Historical accuracy can be tricky to define, but I would say that, disregarding the meme focus trees, Horst is even less historically accurate than vanilla.
Let's look at some aspects of Horst that are more realistic than vanilla:
Now, consider all the historical inaccuracies:
TL;DR anyone who claims that Horst is "historical" has either never played it, or knows almost nothing about WWII.
Let's look at some aspects of Horst that are more realistic than vanilla:
- Air base capacity is halved.
- Italy capitulates if you take all of north Africa and take a few cities in southern Italy
- Oil in the middle East belongs to UK
- War focuses for Germany and Japan have a time restriction, and take only 1 day to simulate surprise attack (although this is not very different from vanilla, where manual war justifications take only ten days)
- More tiles in north Africa leads to a more engaging campaign
- Trade embargoes are represented properly. I really don't think this should count though, due to highly unrealistic resource distribution making embargoes mostly irrelevant, and any major country can easily achieve Autarky.
Now, consider all the historical inaccuracies:
- Unrealistic resources
- Manchurian oil- Japan gets too much oil for free. This actually has an insanely unrealistic effect- in real life oil embargoes on Japan were one of the reasons why they felt they had to declare war on the Allies and seize the southern resource area. If Japan already has so much oil in Manchuria, they probably would not have gone to war with the Allies at all
- Chinese steel - Japan gets way too much steel when they annex China and develops Chinese resources
- German steel - Germany has far more steel than they ever produced in real life. Core territory of Germany already produces three times the steel as UK (when IRL they were roughly equal) and Austria, Czechoslovakia, plus Benelux all produce more steel than real life, steel which is almost guaranteed to end up in Germany. Part of it compensates for Italy's lack of steel but Horst really goes above and beyond.
- Greek aluminum - I'm no expert on 20th century Greece but I am fairly sure they were not producing as much aluminum as all of Asia and Europe combined.
- For some reason Germany has access to rubber in Siam which is of course completely unrealistic.
- Unrealistic factories and industrial capacity
- Everyone gets more building slots than they do in vanilla - everyone except USSR. Historically the industrial capacity of the USSR in 1943 was many times larger than Nazi Germany. In Horst USSR actually has slightly fewer slots than Germany, which is completely unrealistic. Not to mention, a lot of the USSR's building slots are concentrated in the western border, when IRL they managed to relocate many factories to the Urals (which have relatively few slots in Horst)
- USA should also have many times more building slots than Nazi Germany, but with Horst, they get roughly the same. Again, that is ridiculous. No mod can honestly claim to be "historical" while Germany and USA have about the same number of slots. In actual history Germany did not have a chance in hell of outproducing the USA.
- German refineries - in real life German coal liquidization consumed large amounts of coal, which is required for power generation and steel production. This is abstracted in Hoi4 with building slots, where you have to choose between building a refinery or building another factory. Horst completely avoids this dilemma by giving Germany 24 refineries FOR FREE . In real life, Germany did not produce anywhere near the amount of synthetic oil and rubber that Horst Germany can produce by 1941.
- Japan also gets far more building slots than they should have. In Horst, Japan would have roughly half as many slots as US. In real life, Japan's industrial capacity is a drop in the ocean compared to USA or USSR's industrial power.
- The Sino-Japanese War. In real life, the Japanese invasion of China killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, and occupied more than a million. In Horst, it is nothing more than an easy source of xp and a military academy for your generals. Japan can easily end the war pretty much whenever they want, but the optimal time is in spring 1941 - which is obviously unrealistic.
- Generally in Horst, if Germany pushes to the Volga, and the Allies still haven't made a solid beachhead somewhere on continental Europe, USSR is already dead. There's no chance for a comeback. In real life, obviously Germany did push to the Volga, and USSR still decisively defeated the Nazis. There are numerous reasons for this, but the main reason is that in real life, Germany did not have the oil to launch large scale offensives, whereas in Horst, Germany does not have to worry about running out of fuel as long as they build plenty of refineries. You could say that vanilla Hoi4 also suffers from the same issue, but in Horst you could actually build even more refineries than vanilla.
TL;DR anyone who claims that Horst is "historical" has either never played it, or knows almost nothing about WWII.
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