New war and Diplomacy improvement mod

[NoodleNaught]

Well the objective of this mod will be to improve both the military and diplomatic asspects of the game for starters.

Current ideas for Diplomacy:
-More features dealing with barbarians allowing you to speak barbarians who are living on your borders, and offer them things such as places to settle, or to join your empire as a new province witha degree of autonomy, or to supply recruits for your army.
-The allowance to send some of your troops to ally as expeditionary forces to use as they see fit.
-A revamped peace screen allowing alliance leader to dictate which provinces go to which country.(For example: Macadonia, Crete, and Rhodes, are allied together in a war with Egypt. In this war Crete captures Cyprus, and Rhodes captres Cyrenica. Crete has a core on Cyrenica, so when it comes time to make peace Macedonia as the alliance leader awards Cyrenica to Crete despite Rhodes controling it. But as compansation awards Rhodes Cyprus which Crete controled.)
-2way peace deals, allowing you to sweaten up peace deals, by say offering money for the enemies land.(For example:Rome is winning in a war with Carthage, however the war was very close. By the time Rome offers peace they have captured all of Carthages island holding whcih amount to 70 peace value, however they only have a war score of 50%, so to sweaten the deal they offer to pay Carthage 300 gold lowering the peace value to 40.)

Current Ideas for Military:
-Attachments for regiments like in HOI2. (For example: Catapults could be attached to a regiment to reduce siege time by 3%.)
Only one attachment would be allowed per regiment.
Attachments would also be avaiable for ships.
- More types of ships, for instance you would have galleys as transports, heavy galleys as light escorts, triemes as your "cruisers" of the ancient world, and finally some sort of heavy trieme as your "battleship" of the ancient world.
-Low reinforce rate for armies, that is raised by having a king with high martial skill, and a high martial skill magistrate in charge of the military. Also improving your land technology would raise the amount of men that could be sent to your armies as reinforcements per month. Something similar would also effect the repair rate of ships.

These are my current ideas, i'd like some feed back from the community, before i get to heavily in to moding the game.

 

[Cheexsta]

Very ambitious, but sadly most of those are hardcoded

Diplomacy with barbarians could certainly be simulated by events and decisions, so that's fine - you might also like what I have in mind for the next version of Total Conquest. But diplomacy itself is very much hardcoded, unless you intend on editing the .exe which I'm sure Paradox would have a problem with Some things can be done with events and decisions, but even simple things like forcing peace or vassalisation can't be done by event (which is irritating, as you can do it in EU3).

Military ideas:
- Attachments could possibly be done with the addition of a Catapult unit, but I can't see a way of it affecting siege time.
- Sadly, ships just aren't that moddable. All ships are set to be able to work as transports in EUR and we can't change that. Moreover, triremes are galleys.
- The reinforcement idea is very much possible, though. It'd just be a few lines in static_modifiers.txt and land_technology_table.txt. Ship repair can't be affected in this way, though.

I hope this isn't too discouraging. We need a more vibrant modding community.

 

[NoodleNaught]

Thanks for the feedback.

So basically if i'm understanding this right Engine change=new game? If this is the case then i would see the problem, I wouldn't want anyone stealing my engine ethier.

 

[Cheexsta]

Something like that, yeah. That said, I did a tutorial a while back on how to modify the .exe to change the end date of the game and no one from Paradox told me off about it - but I'm very sure that actually distributing a modded .exe file is out of the question.

 

[NoodleNaught]

Hmm well so if i make all the changes and don't distribute it then there shouldn't be problem. Which kinda sucks, as one of the things i most enjoyed about modding other games was of course knowing that others were getting as much enjoyment out of my work as i had.

Oh yeah and thanks again one of the reasons i posted about this in the first place is i was hoping someone more experinced with modding would come along and tell what could and what couldn't be done.

Also which tool did you use to modify your .exe?

 

[NoodleNaught]

Oh i also see that many of the things i was hoping to change have been proposed for the expansion.

 

[Cheexsta]

Hmm well so if i make all the changes and don't distribute it then there shouldn't be problem. Which kinda sucks, as one of the things i most enjoyed about modding other games was of course knowing that others were getting as much enjoyment out of my work as i had.

Modding itself is fine, and Paradox games are great in that they are actually very moddable (and Paradox has even been known to even incorporate parts of mods into later versions of the product). I just know that modding a company's game engine and then redistributing it is generally frowned upon.

Also which tool did you use to modify your .exe?

I used HexEdit and the normal Windows calculator (for figuring out hex values). It was easy enough to change the end date - it's only a single hex value. What you'd be looking at for your proposed changes is sifting through thousands of lines of code to make your changes.

Of course, someone more knowledgeable than I may be able to correct me on Paradox's stance towards editing the .exe and the feasibility of the programming side of things.

 

[NoodleNaught]

Is there a moding guide, that i could refresh my knowlage of modding with?

 

[jshuad]

Is it still outhere somewhere? I'm having a great time with Rome, but I'm afraid that a hundred years is not going to be enough time to subdue the east.

Edit: This is a reply to Cheexsta