Event Modding Tips

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I was going to send somebody some event modding tips privately but then I realized that other people can use the information so here it goes (they are not in any specific order yet):

1. missing { or } can cause events to not work or the buttons or text may be messed up for all the events in the file. I think missing # (comments) and " " could also do this.
2. Make sure that no events share a event ID. all events should have a different ID number. start with at least a number higher than 10000 but no bigger than 999999 or possibly 9999999 (not sure about this big of a ID). Vanilla events use nubers from 1 to 9999 for event IDs.
3. when you are new to event coding, after finishing your edits on a event file, save your work and test the mod. This will let you know if there was any errors in your changes. I used to never do this and more than once I had to root through all of my events in order to find the ones that crashed the game. Yes, events can crash a game. If your mod runs fine after editing a event fill, it is probably ok but it is not a sure thing. at least you know the game will not crash while loading due to that edit.
4. the event coding guide does not explain very well about scopes. scopes are very important. there are two kinds of scopes, province and country. country events start in the country scope and province events start in the province scope. some triggers can change the scope but this is only for that trigger. an example is the change from country scope to province scope with random_owned = {} (owned province) which will change to a province scope where you will need to use province coding. owner = {} changes the scope from a province scope to a country scope (owner of the province). It is very important to keep the scopes correct, meaning that you should not use a tag = INC in a province event trigger because it is a country scope and will crash the game when the event fires. Effects (in the option = {}) also need to be correct for scopes. province event options will start in province scope so if you need the country scope use owner = {}.
5. vanilla and some mods use the localisation\*.csv files in order to store event titles, descriptions, and options. I do not like to do this. If you do not use the *.csv files then do not make your event title,description,option text very long. if there is too much text in the title,description,option while not using a *.csv file, it will crash the game.
6. mean_time_to_happen = {} tells the event how often to fire depending on the adjustments made with the modifier = {}. You can have many modfiers. you can use a MTTH of days,months or years. the calculated result after the modifiers will increase or decrease the chances of the event to happen. If the modified result is 12 months, it does not mean that this event will happen every 12 months, it just means that on average, it should happen once every 12 months.
7. when a game loads, the EU3\logs\setup.log file will tell you how many events are in each file that was loaded. you can add these numbers up to determin how many events you have in the mod and also see if the right number of events is being reported.
8. usefull links:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...d.php?t=319112
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...d.php?t=307325
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...d.php?t=282542

if anyone wants to add to this post it here.