Dev Diary #11 - National Ideas & Modding - 19 .November 2009

So its Thursday again and this means: time for a new Arsenal of Democracy Development Diary!

As we talked last week about the AI i will introduce you this week to our new concept
of national ideas as well as into the general improved modability itself.

Some of you may have noticed on a few leaked screens that we created 3 new fields
in the diplomatic tab under the ministers section. this is were our new ideas find place :

- National Ideology
which tries to model the ethics of the population itself


- Social Policy
which simulates in an abstract way the social fabric of a country and the degree of development towards
a human and tolerant society


- National Culture
which actually tries to represent the overall mindset and social conventions of a country


Those 3 are all dependent on a country’s base ideology e.g. autocratic or democratic,
left wing or right wing. Because it is very hard in real life for a nation to just switch between
different value-sets, a change takes first of all a lot of time and second gives a huge dissent to
your nation. Thus, you are still limited in new policies to the options in your near environment, e.g.
as a fascist Italy you wont be able that easy to go a liberal way in social politics but maybe one which tends into the Nazi region.

The effects policies have on the gameplay values itself are very broad. Changes range from
the field of diplomatic or intelligence costs, to build times or organisation and dissent modifactors.

We added for every major a unique ideology, policy and culture.

Of course this is all editable in a new file, the ideas.txt, which leads us to part #2 of this diary.
It uses the same commands as the minister.txt, a new file we also integrated and which makes it
now easy to create and change minister traits.

For map creating purposes, we have removed the province limit. you can now mod your own maps with up to 10.000 provinces.

You can create new brigades in all three branches. they are custom definable in the boostertext.csv .

We have removed the country limit, so you can include all the nations you have ever wanted.

And of course we exported hundreds of game variables to the misc.cfg. you can set and define
now every piece of the game in this file. From the cost of artillery bombardment through the relative
damage a bomber does on installations to gearing times, conversion rates, infrastructure bonuses and so on.

We re-arranged the technology tab in a way that you are now able to mod in more techs if you want. the room available on every tech-section has increased dramatically.

In the events section, we build in various new commands as triggers. E.g. a check command if complete areas are under control of an ally/enemy/neutral/etc., which opens up lots of new possibilities for modding.

I hope I could give you a good insight into this topic of AoD. stay tuned for next week when we show you a small AAR !

 

Sounds great! One suggestion: I have always dreamed about defining variables in event scripts and doing calculations instead of just setting and clearing flags. This would be the ultimate extension of modding...

Any possibility of putting this in?

 

Cool!!!

 

Good work

Is there still the 10 models limit in the unit file? Can we create new units now?

Thanks!

 

Good ideas in order to represent national flavour.

As a suggestion, I think I'd prefer few but bigger effects of 'national ideas' rather than a lot of 5/10%s... but, as moddable feature, we'll experiment.

Finally, looking forward that AAR next week and preordering it asap

 

Interesting

 

Really interesting, it will add some depth to the game.

 

New nations, with E3 map, cold war mod and and and... lots of possibilities

 

I wonder how many national Ideologies there will be ? 6 ? 10 ? More ?

For now it looks like every major country receives one. I wonder if there are true, vanilla ideologies useful for certain groups of countries ?

For example isolationist, recently liberated or those which are literally building their nations favouring certain nationalities/etnicities, but not pushing 'aliens' too much i.e. Latvia or Ireland.

 

Looks nice, though I´m not sure if this brings in completely new aspects. Up til now there have been limited choices already (e.g. national socialist could never have full free market). Still I doubt that anyone can appreciate every change without seeing the whole picture - I´m really waiting for that one

 

Nice, but I suggest making dissent REALLY hurt. Now that we can make multiple slider moves and national idea changes with a disssent hit, it should be very severe. Personally I find HoI2 concept of dissent so abstract it feels superficial. At over 75% dissent, it should be game over, and yet the only truly noticeable effect is lower IC + maybe a few revolts.

As it stands now, I'll probably won't mind taking large dissent hits for all those sweet slider/idea bonuses.

 

Question:Could we know all the national ideas which you will put in the game?

Many thanks if you will inform us about them

 

I...think...I love you.

You have absolutely no idea how happy you've made me. That will make continuing my AAR past 1964 so much easier.

How easy will it be to mod in said techs?

 

Firestorm, do you have the Cold War Tech Tree mod?

 

This has probably already been noted by you, but the National Ideology tab is named Nation Indentity in that screenshot...

 

Most pleasing, this should give the mod community a whole new boom of creativity.

 

Such a mod exists? That would be amazing, as I plan to continue my AAR past 1964 when AoD comes out.

 

Yeah of course.
Check this: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=376965
A really nice mod.

 

Will the AI be able to adjust their National Ideas if they have a sudden change of government, (coups, becoming a puppet...) or the situation requires it? (sudden invasion, preparing for a war...)

 

This sounds really, really cool.