CK2 Dev Diary#26: Considerable Converter Capabilities

[Darkrenown]

Hello all, and welcome back to another CK2 Development Diary. If you didn’t notice last week, we now do CK DDs on Mondays to match up with the Medieval Monday stream. Anyway, getting on to the point of this DD: We’ve been updating the Converter!

Development in EU4 will now be based on the state of the world in CK2. Holdings, Buildings, Hospitals and Prosperity all count when determining if your capital should be the new Paris or not. The development of the default 1444 EU4 provinces (within the converted area) will be redistributed in a way that makes sense for your world.

Dynamic fort placement. No longer will forts be placed exactly as they were in the default 1444 setup, instead forts will be placed in strategically appropriate areas for each nation.

Revamped Tech Groups. Now, as Tech Group no longer actually affect your technology cost (that’s handled by institutions), your group will be based on the geographical area of your capital. This is then used to improve your experience in many ways, i.e. through custom idea generation!

Dynamic ideas. No longer will your nation simply have the ‘National Ideas’ set, instead a unique one will be generated for you based on your situation in EU4. These idea sets will give you appropriate ideas, so no naval ideas if you are landlocked or just have one port.

Institutions have been revamped to account for the vastly different world that is a converted game. The institutions will spread in a much more dynamic way, and no longer discriminates in favor of Europe (especially not if India or the Middle East manage to get a high Development converted over!). Institutions such as the Printing Press do not necessarily have to spawn in Germany, either.

Converter-centric idea picking for the AI. With most converted games missing a Portugal, and in some cases even a Castille or England, the AI has been readjusted to dynamically assume these positions. One nation will try to assume the role of Portugal - be it Iceland, Scotland, Korea or Majapahit you won’t know until you play!

Traits now convert over from CK2. Did you have a midas touched genius ruler or a possessed imbecile lunatic ruler? No matter what, you will recognize them by their traits in EU4.

Improved Sunset Invasion setup. For all of you who wanted the New world empires to be even mightier we’ve improved the High Americans with new missions and unique units. High American units tend to have many Fire pips, so beware their power!

The Converter will be updated alongside the release of Rights of Man on the 11th. That’s all for now, but I have even more Converter stuff to talk about next week.

 

[Trin Tragula]

This is all very well and good, but will the underlying problems with the converter- such as provinces being given to completely the wrong nation- be fixed?

This is something that can be fixed through the province mapping and weights already in the converter. Please report specific such issues as you run into them and we'll fix them

 

[Darkrenown]

Immortal carries over, yes. Now no more immortal talk until next week

 

[Trin Tragula]

Very well; I shall do so .

Be sure to tag me too just to be sure.

 

[blackninja9939]

These issue have been one of the key things making me not enjoy my converted game to eu4 from ck2 as much as the base eu4 starts, these fixes are great and I can't wait to finally have the eu4 game with my inbred lunatic immortal ruler

 

[Darkrenown]

Are you using 2.6.1 or the 2.6.2 beta? Either should be fine in themselves, but if you are using modded traits on 2.6.1 it'll break a bit when you move up to 2.6.2.

 

[Moah]

What would happen if i had in kiev 5 maxed out towns a maxed out castle and church, with prosperity 3? what's the development floor?

I think it is all relative. The best provinces in CKII will become the level of the best provinces in EUIV, and the worst become the worst.

This is exactly it. We sort all EU4 provinces by their development, then sort all CK2 provinces by their pseudo-development (the mentioned value), and we give each CK2 province the develoment of the province of the same rank in EU4.
So if say Kernev was a megalopolis with all 7 settlements filled to brink, plus an hospital also filled to the brink, a trade post and prosperity 3, Kernev in EU4 would receive the development of Constantinople (or Paris).
This way the map stays balanced, but the most developed area of CK2 are also the most developed areas of the converted game.

How much can the converter be modded? And can we mod EU4 to fit new personality traits?

(I've never been a modder... ...but... ...way of life dlc... ...reaper dlc... even short of immortals, evil thoughts abound...)

A lot of the converter can be modded, it is one of the way we encourage people to improve the conversion to fit more with their vision of what it should be.
To answer the specific question, the personality trait conversion can be modded to add more or remove those you don't like.

Speaking of 2.6.2 have you then solved the speed problem? And if not will you then allow people to stay on 2.6.1 if they prefer having speed?

We have found the issue, and a branch should be available.

 

[Moah]

@Moah So, if you don't have Reaper's Due, (or any future DLC that adds extra province stuff), what happens? will your provinces be poorer on average or will you have different values for that?

if you don't have RIP, the "ck2 dev" is lower than if you had rip, but it doesn't matter because the most "developed" province from ck2 will still get the development values from the most developed province from eu4 (ie your highest ck2 province has a value of 17 instead of 21 let's say, it still gets constantinople's development).
The "ck2 dev" only matters in relation to other ck2 provinces, and only for sorting provinces from richest to poorest.

 

[rageair]

I don't understand, so if Portugal doesn't exist another nation will try to become the 'early game colonizer', but Korea isn't even affected by the conversion, and not at all suited for colonizing northwest Africa or Brazil, so how does this work?

It's highly dependent on where the renaissance spawns - if it spawns in Asia then an Asian country till assume the role of Portugal (unless you as the player does it first), European nations suitable for colonization will colonize too, of course. In my test game Korea reached America by going Taiwan -> Micronesian islands -> Hawaii -> California, an alternate and fairly exciting route. I also had a game where a converted India went Ceylon -> Andamans -> Philippines -> Micronesian Islands -> Hawaii -> California and a game where the united Japan went directly for Alaska -> California!

Great stuff, time to finnish my current CK2 game in time for the Rights of Man release, just two things:

• No naval ideas for nations with one port excludes one province minors, right? Else it wouldn't make sense for a Socotra or Gotland that is independent at the time of conversion.
• Will the Sunset Invasion setup work with a EU4 Random New World, I don't recall if it currently does but I think I remember it doesn't.

Merchant republics and OPM's with a port will probably be weighted up for naval ideas, it's all fully scriptable and moddable too.
The Sunset Invasion setup doesn't support RNW.

Can we count on improvements for converted heresy? Eg. Karma system for the Cathars or Fervor system for Iconoclasm in EU4?

All religions should have something exciting, most of them make use of Fervor or Aspects though.

This kind of worries me, actually. Usually, I find in my CKII games that most provinces everywhere get developed about the same amount. Perhaps the player's area is more developed, perhaps certain AI areas are underdeveloped due to frequent changing of hands. But I worry that all converted games are going to look the same, and, unlike the current system that uses vanilla EUIV development, the converted developmen will just be evenly spread everywhere, with no especially rich or poor areas.

The only consistently different area compared with the default 1444 setup is Arabia. It's generally more developed, as it's much more unlikely for them to get absolutely stomped by Mongols in CK2 than happened historically. In general Scandinavia and Russia are very poor, without player involvement. The setup varies a lot between game to game though, I just finished a game where I got Kola to get Paris's development and Finnmark to get London's! Getting high EU4 development is a really fun sub-goal to aim for in your CK2 games.

How much can the converter be modded? And can we mod EU4 to fit new personality traits?

(I've never been a modder... ...but... ...way of life dlc... ...reaper dlc... even short of immortals, evil thoughts abound...)

You can mod a lot of it! I would even dare say most of it.

 

[rageair]

Ok, that's rather cool. However would it be possible to force the 'Portugal' to appear in Europe for when one doesn't want a too funky game, apart from portugaling yourself.
And if Portugal does exist (be it in the form of a Muslim Sultanate), are they certain to take the Portugal role?

We want converted games to be more open and 'fair', so there's no way to force it. You can easily mod it though.
They will pick early Exploration ideas, so unless they're crushed by war they should explore & colonize early on.

 

[Moah]

The Constantinople reference has me a little nervous as it doesn't start with fantastic development like Paris, London, Beijing (if I recall correctly), Milan, or Rome unless the Ottomans or Byzantium take their special decisions.

That's what I get for having been a CK2 exclusive for so long: i keep thinking in those terms. Thankfully the code doesn't look at the values I think province have, but what they actually have, so it should be all right.
Just a note: Beijing should not be in the running, since we're only redistributing the provinces that have a CK2 equivalent.

 

[Darkrenown]

@Moah, this might be last minute to implement immediately, but can you please add an element of change to East Asia depending on the state of Western Society?

Ming formed as a result of the fall of the Yuan dynasty, which was itself a Mongol Dynasty that only existed after the fall of the Tang, the rise of the Song, the decline of the Song and the rise of the Jin, and the fall of the Song and the Jin to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty.

All this happened during the CKII era.

If the Mongols don't spawn, or are driven back from the west in defeat, the Yuan would never overrun the Song.

Can we please have a more varied China, Korea, and Jurchen in conversion?

Butterfly theory, @Moah, butterfly theory. @rageair, what do you think?

@Trin Tragula, @Darkrenown, @Doomdark???

It's a cool idea, but it's outside the scope of this converter update. It's really outside of the scope of the converter itself since it doesn't really touch Asia.

If it isn't a bother can you say what was the issue? Curious about what was making such a huge difference.

Turned out to be a code thing, some MP things were being checked in SP and wasting a lot of time.

How bout a nice 0/0/0 instead?

I don't remember if it's 1.18 or RoM adding it, but you could always abdicate

 

[Darkrenown]

@Darkrenown
Would the truncated county names be fixed (there is a certain limitation of symbols in county names)?

I get that this is important to you, but you should not post about it in every thread. However, yes, it is.

 

[Darkrenown]

I’m working on modding the Converter for the HIP mod project. I have some questions which don’t seem to be answered anywhere and I’m hoping since this is being updated, I could get an answer to any of them. I recently reported a Converter crash, with fix, for y'all so can I parley that into some aid here?

1. How nation_table.csv works – it doesn't seem to always convert CK2 realms to their mapped EU4 tags. Does order matter – will it prefer to match k_castilla rather than d_castilla just because the former mapping comes first in the file?
   1. What do the entries do at the bottom of the file, with blank CK2-title entries? They say “exists in EU4, not in CK2,” but that’s true of lots of tags not listed.
2. Generally how province_table.csv works – how does it handle many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships between CK2 and EU4?
   1. E.g.… if 3 CK2 counties are mapped to one EU4 province, and A controls two of them while B controls the third, does A always get the province in the conversion? Does that depend on the order the mappings are listed in? If the third mapping were tripled, would that mean B now gets the province?
   2. Whether the third column "Filename" of province_table.csv matters at all—given that about 15% of the entries in that column don't point to actual province history files?
      
   3. What is the sense in having duchy titles in that table (as it has in at least some places)? Why would they matter for province mapping?
   4. There are some lines duplicated, with a comment saying it’s to increase the weight of a certain option. How does this work? To what extent is it deterministic vs random?
3. What’s the point of border_provinces.csv? Especially since the map has expanded to the east since that file was changed?

I managed to question Groogy quickly and this is what he had to say:

1. It will only convert one of them to that tag, it will pick the first one in the list. The ones at the end are probably just from the scripters at the time when they copy pasted the list from eu4 and started working.
2. It's a point system, the more "hits" you get in the province list the more likely you are to get the province in eu4. So if a county is listed twice it is like "two points" Which is also why duchies are in the list to give more weight to the one who owns the duchy
3. Is used by hordes for how it should generate ASIA, i.e if spawned horde owns these provinces it will make a huge mongol horde in asia

 

[Darkrenown]

Those are all great ideas.

@Darkrenown, master of all things dark and renowned, please consider the possibilities here!

I agree with you, it's certainly cool. The problem isn't convincing me it'd be a neat thing to do though, the problem is convincing our project planners to expand the Converter over working on other things for both the CK and EU teams which is a trickier thing. Thankyou for the info though!