[Victoria 3] Suggestions for Improved Moddability

[Chief of Staff]

Inspired by an official thread for suggesting improved moddability for Europa Universalis IV by @jrgen3 (many thanks to him for that thread, by the way), I have decided to take an initiative and create this thread with a similar purpose for Victoria 3 modding. You are welcome!

P.S. If Paradox would like to take over this thread, then, by all means, please do. Replace me as the OP for this thread, edit this thread, or whatever you want. Whatever it will take to help with the development and improvements of this game, especially for modding.

P.P.S Sharing is caring.

 

[Chief of Staff]

So, I will go ahead and make the first suggestion for this thread. I would like to see a way to check for character's last name. For example, I wanted to make a decision and an event for Habsburg Restoration in Austria after the said dynasty had been deposed but it turned out to be technically impossible right now to check whether a Habsburg are ruler or not. So I was forced to shelve that project now for the time being.

 

[Marco Dandolo]

Please make Production methods more moddable. At the moment it seems like only unlocking_technology is a trigger to decide what is needed to unlock a certain production method. At least my attempt to influcene it via variables wasn't fruitful.

It would give us a wide range of possibilities, if production methods were more moddable - think of an event or a certain amount of variables to give the player or AI a new production method. This would make things more flexible.

 

[BPZ1941]

I'd like for the way the game validates scripted values and scripted effects on startup to be changed. I have a lot of them, and they work fine when tested and don't generate more errors once in the game - but they still give me hundreds of lines of "wrong scope" errors during game boot despite every single use of them setting the event targets and variables needed.

 

[Chief of Staff]

This may or may not be feasible but I would like a way to modify the election interval for a particular country. I just discovered call_election effect which I could use for on_character_death, limited by ruler, under on_actions to trigger Demise of the Crown for Great Britain. Before the Reform Act of 1867, the rule was still in effect in which the parliament are automatically dissolved and an election held on death of the monarch. I have not yet tested this effect out so no telling if this effect still works or have been removed, as it does not appear to be currently used at all in any files.

However, there seem to be no way, as either an effect or a modifier, to set election interval for a country. At least not that I can find so far. The only way to do this is through ELECTION_INTERVAL_YEARS via defines but, unfortunately, that would apply to every country. For the historical context, Septennial Act of 1715, which set the maximum life of a parliament at seven years, was still in effect at the time of game start and this length was not changed to five years until Parliament Act of 1911.

 

[FloorIsGround]

For country rankings, I wish the documentation was more clear. It shows that you should be able to use triggers in a possible = {} block but unfortunately the game will not read or recognize such a thing, like the vanilla files suggest.

 

[Hertog Jan]

This may or may not be feasible but I would like a way to modify the election interval for a particular country. I just discovered call_election effect which I could use for on_character_death, limited by ruler, under on_actions to trigger Demise of the Crown for Great Britain. Before the Reform Act of 1867, the rule was still in effect in which the parliament are automatically dissolved and an election held on death of the monarch. I have not yet tested this effect out so no telling if this effect still works or have been removed, as it does not appear to be currently used at all in any files.

However, there seem to be no way, as either an effect or a modifier, to set election interval for a country. At least not that I can find so far. The only way to do this is through ELECTION_INTERVAL_YEARS via defines but, unfortunately, that would apply to every country. For the historical context, Septennial Act of 1715, which set the maximum life of a parliament at seven years, was still in effect at the time of game start and this length was not changed to five years until Parliament Act of 1911.

When looking at the effects page on this Victoria 3 Wiki you will find an effect called call_election, with the ability to set the number of months until the next elections. There are on actions for a new ruler, but also for the end of an election campaign. For the latter you could set the number of months till the next election dynamically per country, albeit on a hard-coded basis, for variables probably won't work in setting the number of months. For a Demise of the Crown, you could set it at 1 month or so.

 

[Glloyd]

Giving cultural traits more purpose beyond discrimination, like allowing us to give modifiers to specific cultures, would be much appreciated, especially for fantasy mods like Anbennar.

Also allowing more granular definition of starting pop literacy levels without having to modify pop wealth would be much appreciated.

 

[Marco Dandolo]

What applies to the production methods also applies to the technology. In Victoria 2, inventions could be tied to many different triggers - such as the number of ports or variables. In Victoria 3 there are only other technologies that can unlock technologies. As far as I know, technologies don't even accept an OR for unlocking technologies (which would give the possibility to modders that only one and not all technologies are needed for researching a new technology). This is an unfortunate step backwards. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Chief of Staff]

Hello, again! Reviving this thread for your inconvenience. ;P Jesting aside, I am not sure if something like this already existed under a different name or that there is a workaround for this, but I would like to request a new command/effect add_state_trait that adds a state trait to a state.