Useless ocean?

[Uglyr]

In a geat thoughts of "what perversion should I do now" my attention focused on the sea provinces.

At first, I've replaced history file "1274 - Coast of Britanny.txt" by "183 - ile-de-france.txt":
1. At game start in nation selection map this province assigned to France. Nice! Started a game as France
2. In the game the province seems to be OK - included in the Ledger, have floating taxes.
3. Holding mouse over it shows that it is mine.
4. By right click I was able to build army. But I could not select this unit. Neither the province. But unit could be selected by the butoon in right upper button though. And moved to neighbour province. But not back.
5. All building graphics was in the center of the province. Clicking there caused CTD.

"Nice!" I thought. And removed strings about city and population.
6. All works fine! City is still drawn in the center but no more CTD on clicking. Maybe I wasn't that precise? Or it was a COT that caused CTD?
7. Buildings still shown in the Ledger in this province (so in the savegame).

"Nice!" I thought. And removed everything, but the owner, controller, add_core and gave it to nonexistant (but defined) nation.
8. I've started the game as this nation. Everything seems working - I've got monarch, capital and can do any diplomacy with others.
9. Diplomacy you say? How about some war? And declared war to Brittany. And immidiatly was considered as loser -100% warscore. But they could not annex me as could nothing capture. So do rebels, which appeared shorty and started to stay next to my army doing nothing.

Conclusion: so, sea provinces are quite useless except for maybe one thing. Thay can store information like cores and probably flags and modifiers, that can be read in triggers in events using province id. And I guess, using ID - is the only method.
They can also be used as a global variables/counters operating with "native_hostileness" and "native_size".

[gigau]

If one can really store information there, it's neat

[fuzzbug]

(apologies - this post is about what I thought this thread was about rather than what it is about)

I think there are far to many see provinces especially in the extreme south of the map. After all the projection is distorting areas enourmously. I am pretty sure that the area of the globe represented by two or three of those southern sea provinces is smaller than one of the sea provinces on the equator.

Hint: Gigau, keep this in mind the next time someone begs you to include their neighbourhood as a province!

[gigau]

Hint: Gigau, keep this in mind the next time someone begs you to include their neighbourhood as a province!

Indeed, thanks

[dharper]

This looks fascinating if hard to understand. I'm sure Alvya will have a field day with it, though.

Also, Gigau: can you please make Toronto into its own province for your map...?

[The Impaler]

It would be interesting to see if making a sea zone into a nation's core would affect the chance of the AI sending navies there. In EU2 seas could be cores and a nation's AI file altered (if only we could do that in EU3...!) to give higher priority to defending cores. I used this in my AI Project mod to try and make Denmark and the Ottomans more likely to block their straits.

[Uglyr]

Can someone check if "random_empty_neighbor_province" works with sea provinces?

[Uglyr]

One more good stuff: it can be used to run handsoff game to observate how things doing without you. Just give some far off sea province ownership to "unexisting" country, choose it, start a new game and relax - noone can do anything to you.

[Darken]

I suppose you could call the new nation Atlantas LOL.....

there used to be a hands-off mod but the link got broken i think. This is a better way to do hands-off tests anyway though as there is no way that you can get annexed.

one idea, In the board game 'axis and allies', you could blockade straights if you owned all the land around them so that no ships could get through. would this sea-zone owning thing work in order to keep ships out? if so, can cores and ownership be added removed by event for sea zones?

[Uglyr]

No - ships can pass through sea-owned provinces without any diifficultes.
Edit: Just saw the creaion time of this comment: 12-12-2007, 01:01

[Uglyr]

Sea provinces can also be used as a global counters. Here's example (draft) that counts and checks number of catholic provinces in a country:

country_event = { 
	id = 28305121
	trigger = {
		NOT = { ai = yes }
	}

	mean_time_to_happen = {
		days = 1
	}
	
	title = "Count"
	desc = "Province counted"

	option = {						
		name = "Great!"
		random_owned = {		
			limit = { 
				religion = catholic 
				NOT = { has_province_flag = counted1 }
			}
			set_province_flag = counted1
			1700 = { native_hostileness = +100 }
			1700 = { native_size = +100 }
			capital_scope = { native_hostileness = +100 }
		}
	}
}


country_event = { 
	id = 28305122
	trigger = {
		NOT = { ai = yes }
		1700 = { native_hostileness = 300 }
	}

	mean_time_to_happen = {
		days = 1
	}
	
	title = "Catholics >= 3"
	desc = "by ocean"

	option = {						
		name = "Great!"
	}
}


country_event = { 
	id = 28305123
	trigger = {
		NOT = { ai = yes }
		capital_scope = {  native_hostileness = 300 }
	}

	mean_time_to_happen = {
		days = 1
	}
	
	title = "Catholics >= 3"
	desc = "by capital"

	option = {						
		name = "Great!"
	}
}

[Darken]

As Ubik once told me, I will tell you

Congratulations! An excellent example of lateral thinking...

[Uglyr]

Thanks!

[Helius]

Have you tried using variables in these provinces? I am finding that it is a pain to use non-existing countries to store variables - basically, the only way to check for those is from the owner scope of an existing country, using a specific tag.

[Uglyr]

Hm... I haven't done anything with variables or anything under IN. Basicly I don't know how to use them...

[Uglyr]

Do anyone has any short tips on how variables are used?

[Antimatter]

My work with variables was on EU:R, but assuming they work the same...

Variables are country scope, as far as I could tell. To do global, you could easily create a variable country and assign all globals to that country. They're pretty simple to work with. There are three commands, all of which of the form:

X_variable = { which = var value = n }

where X is one of:

- set - sets var to the given value
- change - adds the given value to the current value of var
- check - check the value in a trigger

The only thing to note is that check_variable seems to work differently than any other check trigger I've seen. If you do check_variable = { which = var value = n }, it is checking for whether the value is strictly greater than n, where most triggers check for greater than or equal to. Similarly, NOT all that checks for less than or equal to. So, for example, check_variable = { which = var value = 3 } checks if a variable is 4 or more, while not that checks for 3 or less.

There's a file here where I made heavy use of variables. AFAIK, that code is fully functional and should be more or less the same for IN.

[Helius]

In IN, variables are either country or province scope.

[Uglyr]

Looks like it works fine. Here is what my code was:

country_event = { 
	id = 28305121
	trigger = {
		NOT = { ai = yes }
	}

	mean_time_to_happen = {
		days = 1
	}
	
	title = "Count"
	desc = "Province counted"

	option = {						
		name = "Great!"
		random_owned = {		
			limit = { 
				religion = catholic 
				NOT = { has_province_flag = counted1 }
			}
			set_province_flag = counted1
			1700 = { native_hostileness = +100 }
			1700 = { native_size = +100 }
			1700 = { change_variable = { which = counted value = 1 } }
 
			capital_scope = { native_hostileness = +100 }
		}
	}
}


country_event = { 
	id = 28305124
	trigger = {
		NOT = { ai = yes }
		1700 = { check_variable = { which = counted value = 3 } }
	}

	mean_time_to_happen = {
		days = 1
	}
	
	title = "Catholics >= 3"
	desc = "variable"

	option = {						
		name = "Great!"
	}
}