Automated Dynamic Tag Conversion

[Fintilgin]

The more I think about it, the more I dislike the idea of tag merging. If my EU2 game still has a strong and independent Brittany and Provence in 1819, I don't want to see them merged into some deterministic super-France. For me that almost kills the idea of the converter altogether. I mean why should France get free minors if France is weak or wiped out?

Assuming the kind and merciful gods at Paradox won't put extra tags into the next Vicky patch, why not come up with an automatic tag conversion scheme, which will allow every extant 1819 EU2 nation to wind up still extant in Vicky? Now, EU2 has more tags, but due to the expansionistic nature of the game the chance of actually having 214 tags still independent in 1819 is very small.

What I'd do is have the converter convert all the easy/major nations that already have equivalents in Vicky. Then with all the other's I'd assign them a random tag from the grab bag of leftovers. So, for example, Byzantium might wind up with the Afghani tag or the USA tag if neither one of those was going to exist. Only then, if all the tag slots were full would I consider tag merging.

Now, you might think it's lame to have the Kingdom of Jerusalem or Brittany randomly converted into Brazil, and yes, it would be (but less lame then it disappearing altogether). This brings me to the next part of my idea. The converter should generate two more files.

The first of these would be something like newtext.csv which you could rename and stick in the appropriate folder. It would basically just tweak the text based off what conversions it had made. The line BRA;Brazil would just get rewritten to BRA;Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The next file would be a very simple .bat file, which as long as all appropriate flags were included would put in the correct flags. It would rename the Brazil flag to bra.old (or something) and the new KoJ flag to the old name of the Brazil flag and bingo!

The converter is already taking care of culture and tech and stuff, so now you have the correctly named nation in the correct place with the correct flag! Another .bat file could restore the old flags from a backup directory when you were finished. The only real problem is the historical events would be messed up for some countries, but as the world situation is going to be so different after 400 years of EU2, I don't think it's a bad idea to disable most of those anyway. Some tags like USA have hardcoded features, but you could put these at the the bottom of the random draw so they wouldn't be very likely to be picked.

I think a system like this would add an enormous amount of strength and flexibility to the project without being an overwhelming amount more work (compared to what other challenges you're already facing.)

The closer things are to the end state of the EU2 game the happier I’ll be. Mother countries and tag absorbing seems like a bit of a let down.
Thoughts?

 

[Chaingun]

We did consider something similar to this; eg. that changes in the text files/database files to make a more efficient use of the available tags in Victoria. The reason to why we did not choose this route is partly that it would of course create incompabilities with other games, and each converted scenario would essentially require its own mod dir. The problems don't stop here however; programming wise it would require me to create some sort of large pool of the Victoria tags, only to write exception code for those uncertain situations where certain countries would have to be merged due to the more numerous EU2 tags.

For now, this idea is discarded, but if the mother country concept proves to be especially flawed we might consider a change. Also, remember that Countries.txt is modable. That is if in your game you want to preserve a super Britanny you can make a specific version of Countries.txt for that situation and assign Britanny to a different tag. I believe this is the way it will be done if for example games that are deemed extra important, both in MP and SP. Of course you can also then mod the country names for the tags and such for your specific likes.