A little idea regarding maps

I hadn't actually looked into it... but jesus christ... It's not worth it unless there's someone who already knows exactly what they're doing. Map editing for HOI2 is an utter nightmare... jesus christ I didn't know it was that bad.

You could effectively crowdsource a lot of the work for converting to E3 though.

I mean to get a working version going what would need to be done?
-determine which province in vanilla maps to what in E3, in terms of ownership, resources, industry, ect. May be more than one, could be less than one for some parts of the world. May need fractional division of resources/industry/ect.
-go through events with a fine toothed comb changing province references. If you really are going to review events, it should be after or while doing any map modding.
-AI triggers/events/ect. I guess that's probably the biggest pain in the ass.
-revolters
Pretty much all the actual map work for E3 is done from what I understand. IC/resources would be inherited from CORE so they're irrelevant.

A lot of that stuff, going through events replacing references to provinces is gruntwork that anyone can do if they're given a big list of what province maps to what, in a copy-pasteable format.

Then tons of spotting things that are missed, balancing, fixing bugs, ect of course.



At this point AoD with CORE is actually better than Darkest Hour apart from the map - it's finally stable and works, DH is running round in circles, and they've spent basically a year on a patch that doesn't solve rather serious balance issues and doesn't put in a proper supply system. Naval combat in AOD is about 1000 times better too. A lot of the combat and supply mechanics in AOD were very well thought out, it's such a shame the map wasn't fixed and that there were so many stability an AI issues.

Actually there were a couple of mentions from Amallric on the E3 thread - is the provinces.csv stuff actually partially done already? I can't be bothered reading through every page of the thread, but when I was searching for something else there CORE came up a couple of times.

Tegetthoff said:

I tend to think that we would have the culmination of the HOI2 series if we give CORE an upgraded map, and there a graphics retouche would be enough.

Click to expand...

Completely agreed. Played a game as Italy (but allied with Germany from the beginning), and the initial fighting with Britain and France in Africa was great - the way units start to really suffer when flung out at the end of a long logistics trail and how you actually seriously aim to capture ports is just brilliant. If only there was a better map.


CAV with LARM served me fairly well for a while, (plus reserves and infantry from the starting army) though once British armor started showing up in early 41 and half pushed me out of Ethiopia a second time it became seriously touch and go.
~39-40 I smashed the Egytpian 'front' but suffered some brutal fighting in Turnisia and barely managed to get my forces back to Tobruk. The naval situation was impossible, I could disrupt them a bit with bombers but I simply couldn't operate in the Med myself and was losing convoys badly. Couldn't ship additional forces to Africa, failed to knock out malta and lost most of my cruisers in the process.

Just after France had been knocked out I had forces caught up in Palestine and was just getting reinforcements overland to East Africa, having lost half of my colony. They pushed the British out completely, and I started heading into Kenya.
I'd successfully pushed the British out of Palestine with only a corps, when they landed a full corps of their own at Suez. Once my forces freed from Tunisia arrived in Egypt I was able to break my own guys out of Gaza, but they nearly had me. From there I was able to utterly destroy the British on in the near east - at which point they started landing in Somalia and followed through with armor, pushing my all the way back to the Ethiopian Capital. The only thing that saved me was that I'd improved the airport in Addis Ababa and was able to shift 4 wings of bombers down, which let me ravage the org of the Brits and totally stop their offensive until I was able to get my forces from the middle east down.

It's partly Vanilla AOD, but the AI is devious and really knows how to use naval invasions effectively, even when opposed. Now that it actually escorts transports there's a more or less functional Naval AI. Dunno how well it does in the Pacific but the British do just fine elsewhere.

One thing though - something that must be fixed with the map that can actually be done: make the province that controls the Suez Cannal Port Said. Please! It's insane that ships in the suez canal can block movement, and what's worse is that AI does it on purpose.

Oh, and Egypt should probably hand provinces over to UK prior to Danzig or War, just in case. (it'd probably make initial Italian incursions into Egypt a bit more realistic too). I had to DOW them manually.

Tegetthoff said:

Yes, but the main problem remains a personal one. There are two or three people out there with the capability to redo the map. All of them have done a major map mod that they consider their baby - although none of them has been integrated even into vanilla to make a playable game. So if one of those guys would consent to work on the CORE team and do something a lot less ambitious than what he did up to now, we might get a workable modified map. But again, this would not be as fascintaing as doing your own, 5000 province map.

Click to expand...

I see the issue with province.csv actually - so basically the only thing you could maybe get much help with is going over events. Damn.So is E3 completely off the table then? I'm just kinda curious as I've gotten a bit excited about CORE again since the last release.