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Taylor

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Feb 17, 2006
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  • War of the Roses
  • March of the Eagles
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Europa Universalis IV: Res Publica
  • Victoria: Revolutions
  • Europa Universalis: Rome
  • Sword of the Stars
  • Sword of the Stars II
  • Victoria 2
  • Victoria 2: A House Divided
  • Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness
  • Rome: Vae Victis
  • Warlock: Master of the Arcane
  • Magicka
  • 200k Club
  • 500k Club
  • Cities: Skylines
  • Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado
  • Magicka: Wizard Wars Founder Wizard
  • Crusader Kings II: Way of Life
  • Pillars of Eternity
  • Magicka 2
  • Europa Universalis IV: Common Sense
  • Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords
  • Europa Universalis IV: Cossacks
  • Stellaris: Nemesis
  • Europa Universalis III
  • Cities in Motion 2
  • Crusader Kings II
  • Crusader Kings II: Charlemagne
  • Crusader Kings II: Legacy of Rome
  • Crusader Kings II: The Old Gods
  • Crusader Kings II: Rajas of India
  • Crusader Kings II: The Republic
  • Crusader Kings II: Sons of Abraham
  • Crusader Kings II: Sunset Invasion
  • Crusader Kings II: Sword of Islam
  • Darkest Hour
  • Deus Vult
  • Cities in Motion
  • Europa Universalis III: Chronicles
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Divine Wind
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • Europa Universalis IV: Art of War
  • Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise
  • Europa Universalis IV: Wealth of Nations
  • Europa Universalis IV: Call to arms event
  • For The Glory
  • Heir to the Throne
Welcome to RickRand, the random scenario generator for Victoria: Revolutions!

(download link to the current version, 0.9a (mirror here). Please read the instructions below!)

Introduction
Whether you want a two-nation armageddon or two hundred nations fighting for a place under the sun, or whether you want all pops to be of the same culture or a cultural mix of 200 cultures, or whether you want a peaceful or warlike AI, RickRand can give it all!

RickRand randomizes nation territory and claims, population density and culture, national economies, technologies, reforms and political parties, armies and navies, all in a sensible, plausible way, so that no game will ever be the same.

RickRand has a Graphical User Interface, allowing the user to easily set his preferred settings.

This version is in principle compatible with any mod you may have applied, as long as you set the correct game version in the "game version" field. However, the economic system is balanced for vanilla V:R with OHGamer's hotfixes. In a later version, I will make VIP:R 0.3 a selectable game version, with a balanced economy.

Instructions
Installation:
- Just extract the files in the archive to your Victoria folder.
- If you do not have the .NET framework installed already, do so now, since RickRand GUI uses it. You can download it here.

How to generate a scenario:
1. Run JSGME.exe, and make sure that there are no random scenarios in the right column (the activated mods list)
2. Exit JSGME, and run RickRand GUI.exe. Adjust the settings to whatever you want. Then click Generate!
3. A dialog will pop up asking whether you want to save your settings first.
4. After you've saved (or not), RickRand will run, and generate your scenario. Hit any key when it's finished. It shouldn't take more than a minute or so.
5. Exit the GUI, and run JSGME again. The scenario you just generated will be listed in the left column (the available mods list). Select your scenario and click the right arrow to activate it.
6. (Optional) If you want, you can view some statistics about the nations in a generated Excel-file, located in your Victoria directory and called "[scenario name]_statistics.csv", where [scenario name] is the name of the generated scenario.
7. When it's activated, exit JSGME, run Victoria, and start playing your scenario!

Note: Anytime you want to generate a new scenario, remember step 1! Otherwise RickRand will use the (random) data from the previous random scenario (this is not always a problem, but may still give unexpected results).

Note 2: If you want to go back to playing a "vanilla" save, you should first deactivate any activated random scenario's using JSGME. And when playing a "random" save game you should make sure that the correct random scenario is activated (and other random scenarios deactivated) in JSGME.

Bug reporting
If you want to report a bug, please include the settings you used, by posting the contents of the saved settings file. If you haven't saved the settings, you can find the settings of the last generated scenario in the file "rickrand.rrc".

Requests for new features are of course also welcome!

Old versions
Old versions are available, too:

- version 0.8f.
- version 0.7c.

Source
The RickRand scenario generator was written in FreeBasic, while the GUI was written in VisualBasic.NET. The source for both can be found (version 0.9a) here (mirror here).

Acknowledgments
* This program was inspired by AlenlorDRot's Randroad project for HOI, (see here).
* The JoneSoft Generic Mod Enabler (JSGME.exe), which is included in the download, was not written by me but by Jaesen Jones.
* Although all the code for RickRand and the RickRand GUI was written by me, I got some very valuable programming ideas from correspondence with Scottland.
* Sarganto's Random Scenario AAR has been very inspiring for me to continue working on this. And so have all the enthusiastic responses in this thread!
 
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I updated the program. In the first version I completely forgot to give civilized countries some technologies. This meant that they could not build divisions and could not trade certain goods on the world market. So it was not really playable. This bug is corrected now.
 
I updated the program again:
- I added the option to have different country sizes.
- You can now set the desired parameters in a file 'rickrand.cfg'.

Even though these are the only new features, the program is actually much better now: it uses less space and is much quicker, especially when making a Risk-scenario. Also, the rickrand.cfg file will easily allow me to make a graphical interface for it in the future.

EDIT: Oh, and I also gave it a name! How's that for a new feature :cool:?
 
I haven't tried this mod yet, but I just wanted to show you some support. :) I think it is a great idea and when I finish with a personal mod of my own I am going to try this.

~~Jerzul
 
Cant you make the program assign provinces per state? That way the maps would be a bit more reasonable often I guess... ;)
 
Do the unclaimed areas have pops in them?

EDIT: I have found that many of them do, but some do not have any pops in them. Is this something that can be fixed?
 
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Thanks for your replies, all!

Strategist said:
Cant you make the program assign provinces per state? That way the maps would be a bit more reasonable often I guess... ;)
That's a good idea. I think I can do that.

Taybaxter said:
Do the unclaimed areas have pops in them?

EDIT: I have found that many of them do, but some do not have any pops in them. Is this something that can be fixed?
Also a good point. I had noticed that, but it slipped my mind again. It's easily fixable.

The next version will also assign everyone some Clipper Convoy, so that countries with overseas territories can get income from them.
 
Version 0.2 is finished! Here's what's changed:
- Every country now has some iron at start
- Every country now has some clipper convoy at start
- Fixed a bug which resulted in some regions always being unoccupied: for example in inland Africa and arctic America
- All provinces (also the ones not controlled by anybody) now have pops in them
- Added the option to assign whole states to the countries
 
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Latest version is not working with me. Whenever I choose the option "no" in the random country size the program crashes when alocating provinces. If I choose "yes" and it starts to create the scenario it always stops when creating the first factory. Previous version worked fine. I'm using Windows XP.

Does it affect if I've edited my game files?
 
Which game files have you edited? The program uses province.csv, country.csv, all the party files and world_names.csv (in the config dir).

Still, strange that it doesn't work now while it worked earlier. I'll look into it.
 
OK, I fixed this bug. It turned out that if the program couldn't find wether to assign whole states or not in rickrand.cfg, it would crash since the procedure that asked wether to do this was broken.

By the way, rickrand should be fairly compatible with edited files, as long as you don't add or remove provinces, or add or remove cultures etc. But you can edit existing province and culture names.
 
Nice, I like.

Suggestion:

All nations should be civilised.

It's too much of a disadvantage. Eg. no matter what, the human player should be able to civilise. In most cases, the computer won't.

You should also be able to set a limit to the amount of states. Eg. min 2, max 10. Seeing nations spread from the Pacific to the Med was a little... Odd.

Only problem then, is, potentially these territories could be anywhere. Eg. capital in an island in the pacific, a large state in Siberia, and a large state in Africa. Would it be possible to locate states close to one another? Or is this unlikely? (as an option)
 
Hardstuff said:
You should also be able to set a limit to the amount of states. Eg. min 2, max 10. Seeing nations spread from the Pacific to the Med was a little... Odd.

Wow! Did you see a nation spread from the pacific to the med? How many countries did you choose?
Well I didn't want to cutoff the number of states/provinces because I wanted anything to be possible. But having very large nations was meant to be very unlikely. Anyway, I can make an option to set the upper and lower limits.

Hardstuff said:
Only problem then, is, potentially these territories could be anywhere. Eg. capital in an island in the pacific, a large state in Siberia, and a large state in Africa. Would it be possible to locate states close to one another? Or is this unlikely? (as an option)

Well it's very hard to figure out which provinces border each other. If you choose the connected mode, it will try to make connected countries (i.e. countries with provinces/states close to each other) by making use of the fact that provinces with neighbouring ID-numbers are usually close to each other. I don't know if it can be done any better. But since it's also possible to edit the map, I would say it should also be possible to let the program figure out which provinces border.

Hardstuff said:
All nations should be civilised.

It's too much of a disadvantage. Eg. no matter what, the human player should be able to civilise. In most cases, the computer won't.

Hmm. I wanted to make uncivilized nations which the civilized ones could conquer. But I can make an option to make everyone civilized. Or better, I can let the user choose the percentage of countries he wants to have civilized. By the way, the civilize event is not included in the scenario, it made victoria crash. I still have to figure out what's the problem.

Thanks for your reply!
 
Yes, I think making the user choose the percentage of civilised -vs- uncivilised countries would be the best solution indeed - especially seen as there is no civilise event. :eek:

Well, I've generated many scenarios. One scenario that was very memorable, was with 10 nations. Australia seemed to span 70% of the planet! Panama was 15% and the rest was distributed amongst the others - who were mostly concentraded in central Africa.

Other times, I suppose, I've played games of 50 nations to 70, 100, 150 and 170. (Also 195, but countries weren't as huge, although in some cases, still somewhat big). I just feel, that you should have the option to limit States - so you can choose to have it very random, or restricted (this way, it allows for land to be colonised)

Ah yes, I read what 'Connected Mode' was after I posted, I just didn't edit. I didn't mean to suggest something that you're already working on. :)



I enjoy this mod, it has potential. :)
 
I must admit that I never tested the generator with only 10 nations. Maybe the function which determines the amount of provinces a nation gets behaves weird for small amounts of nations. I will make some parameters in this function adjustable (these will then determine how evenly distributed the land is). Anyway, I like the hard limit idea, so I'll make that too.
 
I'm playing a game at current and its 1855.
There is nobody in the world producing precious metal.
Also.... I've just been informed that there are no events to trigger precious metal in this mod!!!
I think this needs to be fixed.... FAST. :(
 
Taylor said:
I must admit that I never tested the generator with only 10 nations. Maybe the function which determines the amount of provinces a nation gets behaves weird for small amounts of nations. I will make some parameters in this function adjustable (these will then determine how evenly distributed the land is). Anyway, I like the hard limit idea, so I'll make that too.

Or instead set a mean: (maybe 10) and a max range and a min range?
 
noddy102 said:
Or instead set a mean: (maybe 10) and a max range and a min range?


Give the user as much choice as possible.


But of course, minimum of two countries has to be there. Hehe. :p