Fintilgin’s Chaos Mod
Alpha 0.01
Okay, this is an extremely crude alpha of some ideas I’ve been kicking around. I’ve actually been trying to teach myself scripting from scratch to work on this. I haven’t worked on it in a while, partially because I think I bit off more than I can chew, but I’ve been thinking of digging back into it. I thought I’d post it up here and see if there was any interest or suggestions. It is intended to be a single-player mod, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about multiplayer support, in fact I suspect multiplayer would break some of my planned even chains.
Basically I wasn’t satisfied with the philosphy of most of the mods. They all wanted to push the game closer to emulating actuall history rather than a more dynamic and theoretically possible history.
The only thing I actually have half-way ‘done’ in this alpha is a draft of my ‘ChaosAI’. ChaosAI is an attempt to make the colonial AI more… lively. I got really sick of seeing the AI always follow the same historical path in New World in every game. Why didn’t AI Spain ever discover New England instead of Mexico? Why didn’t AI England ever make a grab for Brazil? History could have gone differently, and predictability is boring. This is my attempt to remedy that problem.
At the beginning of each game all major colonial AIs randomly pick a schema for where they will want to colonize.
Schema A = Vanilla England
Schema B = Vanilla France
Schema C = Vanilla Portugal
Schema D = Vanilla Spain
I’ve set it up so that if, say, England picks Schema D it deactivates the events which allow any other AI to choose it. Therefore the four major AIs will divy up the above areas with no overlap. For example, Portugal and France could not both get ‘Schema A’ I also am in the progress of tweeking it so that if a human chooses one of the four majors (thus making one of the schema unselected) a minor power like Sweden or Genoa may attempt to grab that area and become more powerful. I did try to weight the majors using offsets so that they tend to pick their historical areas, but aren’t guarenteed to do so. Please look at the Chaos_AI.txt file in the ChaosEvents directory to see how I worked this.
That brings me to the second part of my vision for this mod. The Chaos_Dice.txt file. In Vanilla EU2 many countries get extra-special events to boost them up. Like Austria. Awsome leaders, inheritance events, manufactories. Hard to beat that. Chaos_Dice is intended (eventually) to open up the possibility of many such countries getting similar AI ONLY events. Right now I’ve chosen the Navaho to be my ‘Dice Roller’. Ideally the mod would include a new map with a ‘Dice Roller’ fully isolated by PTI, say in the middle of Australia.
Anyway, at the start of the game the Navaho get a huge list of random events where choice_a is always ‘no effect’ but other choices lead to some random AI country getting some cool event boosts, new AI, and leaders and such. Or, strange an ahistorical things like a return of the black plague, the Kingdom of Jeruslem surviving, or other such weirdness. I’d like to see event chains that could push the AI toward uniting Germany or Italy (like the France ones) and then make them colonial players. The idea of this is that with a large enough list of possible events that every game will have 8-10 of them happen, but you’ll never know WHICH ones, as any given event would only have a five or ten percent chance of happening. It would make each game more unpredictable and exciting. The current event file contains a few of the events I thought would be cool, I’m sure other folks could think of similar good ones.
None of these have really been written yet, as it will take a lot of scripting, but I was playing around with (probably excessive) boosts for Genoa and Sweden. In my current alpha these always trigger because I was testing them in hands-off playthroughs. In a finished version they’d only happen mabye %8 of the time.
Some random thoughts:
This version contains the misc_colony file borrowed from Aberation.
Treaty of Torsedillias is, obviously, disabled.
Getting Spain and Portugal to play with new colonization schemas meant replacing them altogether. Currently I’m just using a crude hack event that flips their tags to SpainX and PortugalX a few days into the game. Later I intend to actually replace them from the get go. Don’t play Spain or Portugal in this version. (Spanish and Portugal events should trigger, as I did mod the event files.)
Because of the above, there’s a bug on scenario start where it tries to create leader 9600. If it looks like it locks up just press ‘i’ for ignore.
Don’t play the Navaho, either.
Other things I’d like to add:
Full random leaders may be too hard to add without an external program and detailing which country should tend to get better leaders. I would however like to make the current leader and monarch system more unpredictable. Each of the majors should have a bunch of dynasties, each of which rules for three or four monarchs. Some dynasties are great and historical, some are lousy, average, or mind-blowingly awsome and ahistorical. You have no control of what dynasty you get. They’re determined at the beginning of the game (to prevent reload cheating) by the ‘Dice Roll’ country. For example, the Navaho might have and event where choice ‘A’ triggers and event for Spain giving them historical monarchs from 1450-1500, choice ‘B’ gives them lousy ones, and choice ‘C’ gives them mind-blowing ones.
Similar treatment for explorers. The four big majors each should have a chace of getting some of the lucky early explorers like Columbus. Possibly divy them up like the colonization schema. The majors randomly can get Schema A (early explorers like Portugal), B (Spain style), C (later like England), or D (later and fewer at start like France). So perhaps it’s England that get’s the best and most early explorers and grabs large chunks of the New World.
I intend to make some the events like the fall of the Aztecs happen for any AI that happens to grab the capital, not just Spain. This fits the design much better.
Enhancing AI. Right now the AI just picks from fairly vanilla schemas, with normal semi-poor performance. I’d like eventually to tie something like a version of the Daywalker or EP style AI to the random selection to enhance performance. This would result in having probably 70 or 80 AI files for the four majors alone, but it would be mostly copying and pasting with kill-list tweeks and such, changing the target areas more then anything else.
Looking at the Alpha:
The best way to take a look at this is load the Butterfly scenario up as the Dakota, pause the game immedately type ‘Columbus’ and let it go. You should see the following in the first few months (adjust message settings to see other nations events if you don’t):
Lots of event spam from the Navaho. All of these are possible events from the Dice_Roll file. The vast majority of them will say ‘TEST: None’, that means nothing happened with this event and you can close them. Some will tell you something happened, like "TEST: The Maya are tough bastards" or "TEST: Venice goes Colonial". I like to leave these up for a while to see what happened.
Some boosting events for Sweden and Genoa (see above).
One event each for SpainX, PortugalX, England, and France. They will declare which colonization schema they have chosen for the game. If France says it picked "CHAOS_AI_EVENT D" for example, they will attempt to colonize traditionally Spanish areas. See above for which schema is which. They might all pick thier normal areas or they might all be different, changes every game.
Sit back and watch the Chaos.
HANDS OFF Screen shots from a couple Test games:
1758: Spanish North America. Louisiana has revolted from Portugal.
1640: Genoa takes New England. (Actually that was me boosting the Dakota there, `cause I was bored, but it didn't affect the game at all.)
Anyway, so there it is. I intend to keep plugging away on this a bit a time, even if it’s just for my own amusment. I really think it would make the game much more fun if, when you’re playing Spain you get stuck with some bad monarchs and late explorers. Then when you get to the New World it turns out England has already conquored the Aztecs so you have to grab and fight for other lands. Meanwhile, Austria flopped, but Brandenburg has conquered much of Germany and has a nice colonial foothold in Florida. You head south and east, fighting France for colonies in Brazil and South Africa. What will you find in the East Indies…?
I don’t want to play history as it happened, I want to play from the point of view of the monarch and people of the countries:
They had no CLUE what was coming next.
They didn’t know they were getting a great monarch or explorer in a couple years.
They had to fight for every advantage and take opertunities when they arose.
They couldn’t leave areas uncolonized while they did something else, because they knew nobody else had AI programed to grab it.
Does anyone else agree? I really think most of the funcionality I want can be done with the EU2 engine, it’s just a matter of scripting and tweeking it. The hardest part strikes me as getting ahistorical AI to perform well, but I’m very supportive of AI cheats and stuff, because I want a fun and challenging single player game, so I don’t think making this mod is an impossible challenged.
I know this mod won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m very open to suggestions, comments, and offers of help.
Download link:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=4195567#post4195567
Alpha 0.01
Okay, this is an extremely crude alpha of some ideas I’ve been kicking around. I’ve actually been trying to teach myself scripting from scratch to work on this. I haven’t worked on it in a while, partially because I think I bit off more than I can chew, but I’ve been thinking of digging back into it. I thought I’d post it up here and see if there was any interest or suggestions. It is intended to be a single-player mod, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about multiplayer support, in fact I suspect multiplayer would break some of my planned even chains.
Basically I wasn’t satisfied with the philosphy of most of the mods. They all wanted to push the game closer to emulating actuall history rather than a more dynamic and theoretically possible history.
The only thing I actually have half-way ‘done’ in this alpha is a draft of my ‘ChaosAI’. ChaosAI is an attempt to make the colonial AI more… lively. I got really sick of seeing the AI always follow the same historical path in New World in every game. Why didn’t AI Spain ever discover New England instead of Mexico? Why didn’t AI England ever make a grab for Brazil? History could have gone differently, and predictability is boring. This is my attempt to remedy that problem.
At the beginning of each game all major colonial AIs randomly pick a schema for where they will want to colonize.
Schema A = Vanilla England
Schema B = Vanilla France
Schema C = Vanilla Portugal
Schema D = Vanilla Spain
I’ve set it up so that if, say, England picks Schema D it deactivates the events which allow any other AI to choose it. Therefore the four major AIs will divy up the above areas with no overlap. For example, Portugal and France could not both get ‘Schema A’ I also am in the progress of tweeking it so that if a human chooses one of the four majors (thus making one of the schema unselected) a minor power like Sweden or Genoa may attempt to grab that area and become more powerful. I did try to weight the majors using offsets so that they tend to pick their historical areas, but aren’t guarenteed to do so. Please look at the Chaos_AI.txt file in the ChaosEvents directory to see how I worked this.
That brings me to the second part of my vision for this mod. The Chaos_Dice.txt file. In Vanilla EU2 many countries get extra-special events to boost them up. Like Austria. Awsome leaders, inheritance events, manufactories. Hard to beat that. Chaos_Dice is intended (eventually) to open up the possibility of many such countries getting similar AI ONLY events. Right now I’ve chosen the Navaho to be my ‘Dice Roller’. Ideally the mod would include a new map with a ‘Dice Roller’ fully isolated by PTI, say in the middle of Australia.
Anyway, at the start of the game the Navaho get a huge list of random events where choice_a is always ‘no effect’ but other choices lead to some random AI country getting some cool event boosts, new AI, and leaders and such. Or, strange an ahistorical things like a return of the black plague, the Kingdom of Jeruslem surviving, or other such weirdness. I’d like to see event chains that could push the AI toward uniting Germany or Italy (like the France ones) and then make them colonial players. The idea of this is that with a large enough list of possible events that every game will have 8-10 of them happen, but you’ll never know WHICH ones, as any given event would only have a five or ten percent chance of happening. It would make each game more unpredictable and exciting. The current event file contains a few of the events I thought would be cool, I’m sure other folks could think of similar good ones.
None of these have really been written yet, as it will take a lot of scripting, but I was playing around with (probably excessive) boosts for Genoa and Sweden. In my current alpha these always trigger because I was testing them in hands-off playthroughs. In a finished version they’d only happen mabye %8 of the time.
Some random thoughts:
This version contains the misc_colony file borrowed from Aberation.
Treaty of Torsedillias is, obviously, disabled.
Getting Spain and Portugal to play with new colonization schemas meant replacing them altogether. Currently I’m just using a crude hack event that flips their tags to SpainX and PortugalX a few days into the game. Later I intend to actually replace them from the get go. Don’t play Spain or Portugal in this version. (Spanish and Portugal events should trigger, as I did mod the event files.)
Because of the above, there’s a bug on scenario start where it tries to create leader 9600. If it looks like it locks up just press ‘i’ for ignore.
Don’t play the Navaho, either.
Other things I’d like to add:
Full random leaders may be too hard to add without an external program and detailing which country should tend to get better leaders. I would however like to make the current leader and monarch system more unpredictable. Each of the majors should have a bunch of dynasties, each of which rules for three or four monarchs. Some dynasties are great and historical, some are lousy, average, or mind-blowingly awsome and ahistorical. You have no control of what dynasty you get. They’re determined at the beginning of the game (to prevent reload cheating) by the ‘Dice Roll’ country. For example, the Navaho might have and event where choice ‘A’ triggers and event for Spain giving them historical monarchs from 1450-1500, choice ‘B’ gives them lousy ones, and choice ‘C’ gives them mind-blowing ones.
Similar treatment for explorers. The four big majors each should have a chace of getting some of the lucky early explorers like Columbus. Possibly divy them up like the colonization schema. The majors randomly can get Schema A (early explorers like Portugal), B (Spain style), C (later like England), or D (later and fewer at start like France). So perhaps it’s England that get’s the best and most early explorers and grabs large chunks of the New World.
I intend to make some the events like the fall of the Aztecs happen for any AI that happens to grab the capital, not just Spain. This fits the design much better.
Enhancing AI. Right now the AI just picks from fairly vanilla schemas, with normal semi-poor performance. I’d like eventually to tie something like a version of the Daywalker or EP style AI to the random selection to enhance performance. This would result in having probably 70 or 80 AI files for the four majors alone, but it would be mostly copying and pasting with kill-list tweeks and such, changing the target areas more then anything else.
Looking at the Alpha:
The best way to take a look at this is load the Butterfly scenario up as the Dakota, pause the game immedately type ‘Columbus’ and let it go. You should see the following in the first few months (adjust message settings to see other nations events if you don’t):
Lots of event spam from the Navaho. All of these are possible events from the Dice_Roll file. The vast majority of them will say ‘TEST: None’, that means nothing happened with this event and you can close them. Some will tell you something happened, like "TEST: The Maya are tough bastards" or "TEST: Venice goes Colonial". I like to leave these up for a while to see what happened.
Some boosting events for Sweden and Genoa (see above).
One event each for SpainX, PortugalX, England, and France. They will declare which colonization schema they have chosen for the game. If France says it picked "CHAOS_AI_EVENT D" for example, they will attempt to colonize traditionally Spanish areas. See above for which schema is which. They might all pick thier normal areas or they might all be different, changes every game.
Sit back and watch the Chaos.
HANDS OFF Screen shots from a couple Test games:
1758: Spanish North America. Louisiana has revolted from Portugal.
1640: Genoa takes New England. (Actually that was me boosting the Dakota there, `cause I was bored, but it didn't affect the game at all.)
Anyway, so there it is. I intend to keep plugging away on this a bit a time, even if it’s just for my own amusment. I really think it would make the game much more fun if, when you’re playing Spain you get stuck with some bad monarchs and late explorers. Then when you get to the New World it turns out England has already conquored the Aztecs so you have to grab and fight for other lands. Meanwhile, Austria flopped, but Brandenburg has conquered much of Germany and has a nice colonial foothold in Florida. You head south and east, fighting France for colonies in Brazil and South Africa. What will you find in the East Indies…?
I don’t want to play history as it happened, I want to play from the point of view of the monarch and people of the countries:
They had no CLUE what was coming next.
They didn’t know they were getting a great monarch or explorer in a couple years.
They had to fight for every advantage and take opertunities when they arose.
They couldn’t leave areas uncolonized while they did something else, because they knew nobody else had AI programed to grab it.
Does anyone else agree? I really think most of the funcionality I want can be done with the EU2 engine, it’s just a matter of scripting and tweeking it. The hardest part strikes me as getting ahistorical AI to perform well, but I’m very supportive of AI cheats and stuff, because I want a fun and challenging single player game, so I don’t think making this mod is an impossible challenged.
I know this mod won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m very open to suggestions, comments, and offers of help.
Download link:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=4195567#post4195567
Last edited:
