Editing province owners

[Paul Hanson]

How do I edit who owns a province? In my current game as the USA (started under 1.2, but now on 1.3, which may be the cause of my problem), I've managed to get myself into the Allies early on, and its now August 1940. I've managed to halt the German advance into France and its now time to begin the counter offensive to liberate Belgium. So far, I've managed to take Brussels, Antwerp and Namur back from those dastardly Nazis, but this is where the problems begin.

Despite being liberated from French soil, I own Namur and Antwerp. And although Brussels was retaken by an offensive launched from US-controlled Namur, it's French-controlled. This wouldn't be a huge problem, but I keep getting two messages each day telling me that France has swiped control of Antwerp and Namur from me, even though they're still controlled by me.

How do I edit the game files so that all three provinces revert back to (rightful) Belgian control?

 

[Paul Hanson]

No-one? Come on, this must be a pretty easy question for you expert modders out there. Think of the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get from helping out a novice!

 

[Keln]

Well, it's pretty easy to figure out. Savegame files and scenario files and just about everything else in this game are so easy to modify and especially to read and make sense of, you would be doing yourself a favor just going through them to see whats in there. Like when first played EU for the first time, I didn't know there was such a thing as "Badboy" value until I started looking through the savegame file. It explained while I was getting a war every 5 minutes heh.

But, I did this one lastnight for some fun (I changed ownership of key provinces in different countries and gave each an army sitting on it....what a rat's nest that stirred up!)...so I will tell you how to do it.

Look in the savegame file. You will need to locate the country who currently controls it (you in this case). You can do this by doing a find for tag= USA or whomever. You will also have to figure out which province it is that you want to hand over since in the game files, provinces are numbered not named (eg. Paris is 56 I think). An easy way to do this in the savegame file is just look for one of your units that is stationed in that province. It will say it's location= # , the # being the province you are seeking.

Now, you need to look in your country's list of controlled provinces. Find the number of the province and remove it. As with all mods, make sure you have a backup to this file you are messing with just in case you make an error. Ok, with the number removed, your country no longer controls the province. If the other country owns it and nobody else controls it, I think it would revert to the owner automatically, but since I do not know for sure, I would find the country I am giving it to (Belgium or netherlands, etc) and find their controlled provinces list and add that number to it. Make sure that number is also in their owned provinces. Remember, if Germany kicked everyone off the continent and had Vichy France event, France no longer owns the German controlled French provinces...Germany does. So take them for the USA! hehe.

A few other ways you could swith control to the proper owner, I have heard, is to move one of their armies onto the province(s) in question. If you can assume military control of the country, simply move one of hteir units onto it. If you don't, simply change the location of one of their armies to that province in the save game file.

There you go. As I said, you should play around with the files. It's really the best way to figure it all out, and it's all in english and not some whacky computer language so just about anyone can figure it out.