CHAPTER 3
Revisiting the provinces.bmp, advanced map filler tooling
We started out with a single province somewhere in Ireland, rest wasteland. Billy the Conqueror must've taken some wrong turn to end up all alone in Ireland and not on a hill in Hastings. This is obviously not even close to good enough.
First some statistics
- there are 1210 land provinces in vanilla
- there are 346 duchies in vanilla (3.5 counties per duchy)
- there are 79 kingdoms in vanilla (4.4 duchies per kingdom)
- there are 18 empires in vanilla (4.4 kingdoms per empire)
- there are 3485 holdings built out of 5064 (theoretically) possible holding slots (on average 2.88 of 4.18)
Using similar ratios between the de jure tiers is a good rule of thumb. After all those are the ratios that the devs were using. It all depends on the map that is being made, though. Try to make best use of given information when it comes to de jure structure.
I. Drawing a better provinces.bmp
In the case of Ireland it would be hard to get to a number that is near vanilla. In my opinion anything from 400 to 800 provinces should do.
One choice for Ireland is to adapt it similar as the Indian sub continent in RoI. Several large empires that can be merged into one "High kingdom of Ireland" once enough land is held.
The borders of this map are from after CK2's timeline but they are quite fitting for our de jure structure. Traditional kingdoms (Ulster, Leinster, Connacht, Munster, maybe Meath) are the empires while the 32 counties are the de jure kingdoms:
But what about the duchies and kingdoms? As per the above information we want something like ~4.4 duchies per kingdom and ~3.5 counties per duchy. That would bring as to ~500 counties which is a good enough number. My usual approach is to split the kingdom's area along historical borders as much as possible. And only then invent county borders.
If you are mapping out a setting for which no reference material is existing you should just settle upon a county size and use it everywhere. It isn't as easy as it sounds to just double the number of provinces on a finished map. If you split every single county the counties might end up looking awkward.
For invented province borders: Personally I LOVE weird looking provinces. I don't like provinces that look like the
counties of Kansas. If you are like me zoom far in and have your hand shake a little. Don't draw straight lines but add some random bumps to it.
Coming back to Ireland:
riadach posted a nice map of Ireland of old in this thread:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?623180-mod-resources-Ireland-Map
And there is also the historical baronies (same thread), which were created only after the Norman invasion of Ireland, that may be of use.
If you compare these maps (and all the others you might've found on the net) you'll see that they can't be overlaid right out of the box. What we can do is insert the maps into the PSD file (as new layers) and set the visibility to 50%.
Then resize and skew it until it fits the shoreline best. For that align one edge of the map with the coastline. Then resize and rotate it (if necessary). Lastly you can use the distort feature of free transform. Skew all the edges until it fits the coastline best.
After all reference maps are in place start from the top down: First draw the empires, then the kingdoms and so on. For drawing provinces of any size I like to use the lasso tool. Draw a selection with the lasso, then fill it with the paint bucket tool ("contiguous" off!). Also note that you can add to and remove from a selection by pressing ALT or CTRL. When using the lasso tool it is important to set feather to 0 and disable anti-aliasing:
The color you can freely choose from the color selector. Pick some color that you like and that is distinguishable from the one next to it. If you first paint the empires try to use very distinct colors for every empire (e.g. make one yellow, another one blue, ...). Even in Ireland you shouldn't exclusively use green
As of today (2014-10-3) I am not done with the provinces.bmp and am still gradually adding provinces. This is a gradual process that does not have to be finished right away. The approach is to make use of any kind of border on Riadach's map (black line, background color / different background color). Next do the same for the barony map: Split counties along borders given by that map. All the color should be randomly chosen based on the color of the de jure tier above. If you always pick a color that is similar to the one of the tier above empires and kingdoms remain distinguishable on the provinces.bmp.
504 provinces (and counting). As you see, there are still some fairly large provinces that should be split and some tiny ones that should be merged:
II. Extracting the colors
Picking the colors at random was convenient. But how get those colors into the mod files without too much tedium?
If you extract all the color RGBs at once you have hundreds of colors and figuring out which one is which will take some time.
My approach to this is to do it in small batches of a kingdom (or a duchy at a time).
For this I copy a portion of the provinces over to another file (I like to call it colors.bmp). For most maps a file with a size of 500x500 pixels is big enough but you can use any size you want (that is big enough for the selection to be copied in).
Then I select all counties I want to copy over with the magic wand tool and then copy the selection to the other file. If you hide the background layer and flatten the two layers you get something like this:
[Donegal]
Last time you downloaded the
map filler tool. Since v12 it contains a second .bat file that allows you to extract the rgb colors.
Save your colors.bmp in the map filler tool folder. Then run
colors.bat. The program will then print the colors to the console and
also to a file located right next to the image file (with the same content).
III. Advanced map filler tooling
Now we want to quickly construct a provinceDef.xls that will generate us a map with all the provinces we drew before. We do this in small batches: a kingdom at a time
For this we first extract the colors for a kingdom. In the case of Ireland a single county e.g. Donegal (image in previous chapter).
We start with an empty provinceDef.xls and copy in the
RGB colors we extracted in the columns C - E. Then we give each line an
index (does not have to be in order, numbers can be missing from the sequence, NO DUPLICATE NUMBERS).
Next we assign province
religions and cultures (Irish Catholic for all of them). For empire and kingdom we choose Ulster and Donegal for all provinces.
Next thing to do is to define the province names and the duchies. Keep in mind that this does not have to be final: You can re-run the map filler tool as often as you want and change this over and over.
I haven't finalized my version of Donegal so it still contains some placeholder information:
Columns L and M are for terrain and climate.
The terrain column can be used to tell the engine that a province is of a specific terrain type. The engine determines the terrain type based on the data in terrain.bmp; Setting it here overrides that.
The climate column can be used to define the severity of winter in the regions of the map. Vanilla offers 4 types: severe winter, normal winter, mild winter and no winter at all.
The following values can be put in those columns even if it doesn't make much sense in the case of Ireland:
Columns N+: numh and Baronies
numh can be used in two ways: 1) Adding a single number; this defines the maximum number of holdings, nothing else (e.g. "3") and 2) Adding number_othernumber; This defines both the maximum number of holdings in a province and the number of currently built holdings (e.g. "3_5")
If the maximum number of holdings (e.g. 6) is greater than the number of names specified in columns O+ the province name is used for each of them. Which is good enough in many case: Barony of Derpington, City of Derpington, Temple of Derpington
If the number of built holdings (e.g. 4) is greater than the number of baronies with a type specified types are chosen in the order B, C, T, ... (described in more detail in the
map filler tool thread.
To finish this off you'd have to do this for all the provinces on your provinces.bmp;
The capital of any title is always the first province declared for it. To change a capital move lines around. The ids do not have to be in order so this is not a big deal.
Additional things to do:
- Define holy sites: Can be done by adding { holy_site = catholic | holy_site = cathar } to a barony. The pipe sign ('|') serves as the delimiter.
- Add an overrides file. If you want to make minor amendments of the landed_titles that can not be done in the xls you can add a second file to common/landed_titles. It has to be parsed AFTER the generated file. The parse order is determined by ascii order. If you prefix that file with "z_" you can make sure to have it parse last.
In this file you can just re-define any title you want and add / change things. Here is the file we are using for the WitcherKings mod:
https://www.assembla.com/code/witcher-mod/subversion/nodes/548/trunk/MOD/Witcher/common/landed_titles/manual changes to 01_landed_titles.txt
You can add cultural renamings of titles, new title colors, special titles, ... this way. And you do not have to search all over the landed_titles file to add them.
