One of my favorite things to do with Hearts of Iron and with other games like Europa Universalis and Victoria was to start messing with the maps a bit to make my own scenarios once I'd played through the historical ones. Giving Germany back its pre-World War I colonies, for example, to see how that turns out. Put the Austro-Hungarian Empire back on the map. Have Portugal annexed into Spain while turning its colonies over into the hands of Brazil. Return the territory Mexico lost to the US in 1848. Put Poland-Lithuania back, give the Greeks a Byzantine Empire or the Turks their Ottoman one, etc. I just love to experiment.
Hearts of Iron III was my favorite to do this with, but the process was insanely time consuming due to the sheer number of tiny provinces that had to flipped over one at a time through the console commands. It frustrated me because the game included a 'map painting' tool that was used for drawing up your Theaters, and it seems this tool could easily have been used to turn some of these hour long projects into two-minute ones. Alas, it was never made available for that purpose.
Hearts of Iron 3 also had console commands for 'changeowner' and 'changecontroller', but it was never given one for 'changecore'. As a result, when I got through making all the changes I wanted to province ownership, I'd have to go into the savegame text file afterward and do more time-consuming CTRL-F replacement to change the cores so that the revised countries could actually use their new territory and resources to their fullest extent.
I also had a happy accident of sorts one time when I attempted to edit the AI's LUA files to tamper with the research and building priorities for some of the countries. I don't know why, but those edits ended up breaking the files. As a result, the game still played in all respects, except that the AI would not build anything or research any technologies for any country in the world. While that crippled the gameplay, I found it immensely useful for map editing, since I could set the date back to 1930 or whatever and roll the clock freely as I made my changes to see them take effect and decide whether I was happy with them or not.
A full Map Editor would be a major addition to the game and one that I understand would not be feasible for me to ask for if it wasn't already in the works. However, I'd be happy to see a few simple things added to help make it easier to play around with the maps:
1) I'd like a console command to add or remove cores from provinces. I think this feature made it into EU IV, but it was never updated into Hearts of Iron III.
2) I'd like another console command that can toggle the construction/research AI off and on for all the CPU-controlled countries.
3) I'd like some way to change ownership/cores on more than one province at a time in order to speed things up. I still want to be able to change one province at a time for making fine adjustments, but I'd also like for there to be an option to them en masse. Either
Hearts of Iron III was my favorite to do this with, but the process was insanely time consuming due to the sheer number of tiny provinces that had to flipped over one at a time through the console commands. It frustrated me because the game included a 'map painting' tool that was used for drawing up your Theaters, and it seems this tool could easily have been used to turn some of these hour long projects into two-minute ones. Alas, it was never made available for that purpose.
Hearts of Iron 3 also had console commands for 'changeowner' and 'changecontroller', but it was never given one for 'changecore'. As a result, when I got through making all the changes I wanted to province ownership, I'd have to go into the savegame text file afterward and do more time-consuming CTRL-F replacement to change the cores so that the revised countries could actually use their new territory and resources to their fullest extent.
I also had a happy accident of sorts one time when I attempted to edit the AI's LUA files to tamper with the research and building priorities for some of the countries. I don't know why, but those edits ended up breaking the files. As a result, the game still played in all respects, except that the AI would not build anything or research any technologies for any country in the world. While that crippled the gameplay, I found it immensely useful for map editing, since I could set the date back to 1930 or whatever and roll the clock freely as I made my changes to see them take effect and decide whether I was happy with them or not.
A full Map Editor would be a major addition to the game and one that I understand would not be feasible for me to ask for if it wasn't already in the works. However, I'd be happy to see a few simple things added to help make it easier to play around with the maps:
1) I'd like a console command to add or remove cores from provinces. I think this feature made it into EU IV, but it was never updated into Hearts of Iron III.
2) I'd like another console command that can toggle the construction/research AI off and on for all the CPU-controlled countries.
3) I'd like some way to change ownership/cores on more than one province at a time in order to speed things up. I still want to be able to change one province at a time for making fine adjustments, but I'd also like for there to be an option to them en masse. Either
- A) Having a click and drag tool like the Theater painter from HOI 3 to highlight a bunch of provinces at once, or
- B) Having another console command that could change ownership/cores of all provinces in a state or region at a time from one country to another.
- 2
