Map Modding Question

[Weijun]

While I am delighted to see Clio actually put to use, as OHGamer mentioned, it was designed with the limitations of Victoria I in mind.

I was wondering whether Victoria II would allow modders to use a much higher-resolution base map. Suppose one wanted to increase the number of provinces by an order of magnitude, would the Clauswitz engine allow it? I recall some modders having trouble with this in EU3.

 

[The Wookiee]

AFAIK Johan or King said something about the maximum number of provinces would be about the same as HoI3. You could in theory have 13000 provinces, but it'd probably slow down the game immensely.

 

[OHgamer]

While I am delighted to see Clio actually put to use, as OHGamer mentioned, it was designed with the limitations of Victoria I in mind.

I was wondering whether Victoria II would allow modders to use a much higher-resolution base map. Suppose one wanted to increase the number of provinces by an order of magnitude, would the Clauswitz engine allow it? I recall some modders having trouble with this in EU3.

AFAIK as The Wookiee said the engine should be able to hold quite a few more provinces, but with the caveat that Johan gave in the Magna Mundi forum when similar questions were asked

Adding tags and provinces in any game which has "country vs country" checks or "province vs province" or "country vs province" causes insane performance problems, and is one of the major things we have always tried to optimise for. There is a reason why HoI3 has so few country tags when the amount of provinces.

As an example.

If you have 100 countries, and your advanced diplomatic AI takes 0.1 second to perform every "day" or "hour".

Then using 150 countries makes it take 0.225 seconds instead, 200 countries, 0.4 seconds, and 300 countries almost a full second.
....

so yes you probably could make a map with as many provinces as HoI3, but as V2 will have more countries, the result would be a game that runs very slowly as the engine does all the additional calculations needed (though that of course also depends on the specs of the individual computer doing the calculations as well, if you have a top end system with a high power processor, it will likely handle more data more efficiently than someone using say a < 2.0 GHz processor). Since HoI3 only covers ~12 years, the number of countries needed is much smaller than for a Victoria 2 that will cover a century.

If you are only thinking of adding another 50-100 provinces though, that I would wager should not be much of a problem.

 

[Weijun]

AFAIK as The Wookiee said the engine should be able to hold quite a few more provinces, but with the caveat that Johan gave in the Magna Mundi forum when similar questions were asked



so yes you probably could make a map with as many provinces as HoI3, but as V2 will have more countries, the result would be a game that runs very slowly as the engine does all the additional calculations needed (though that of course also depends on the specs of the individual computer doing the calculations as well, if you have a top end system with a high power processor, it will likely handle more data more efficiently than someone using say a < 2.0 GHz processor). Since HoI3 only covers ~12 years, the number of countries needed is much smaller than for a Victoria 2 that will cover a century.

If you are only thinking of adding another 50-100 provinces though, that I would wager should not be much of a problem.

Perhaps the most important question is whether you and XieChengnuo were planning a map mod for Victoria II.

Looking over my old spreadsheet, in Clio, China only has 146/314 historical prefectures. I would certainly be interested in a mod to add the rest in. Of course, every region had provinces axed. Perhaps another 2000 globally?

I understand that performance would take a hit. However, good mods take years to develop, and do not have to match the same minimum specs as the vanilla game, no?

Still, I do wonder about the technical question of whether the game can handle a higher resolution base map. Was it Gigau who ran into problems in EU3?

 

[OHgamer]

Perhaps the most important question is whether you and XieChengnuo were planning a map mod for Victoria II.

Looking over my old spreadsheet, in Clio, China only has 146/314 historical prefectures. I would certainly be interested in a mod to add the rest in. Of course, every region had provinces axed. Perhaps another 2000 globally?

I understand that performance would take a hit. However, good mods take years to develop, and do not have to match the same minimum specs as the vanilla game, no?

Still, I do wonder about the technical question of whether the game can handle a higher resolution base map. Was it Gigau who ran into problems in EU3?

Re higher resolution map, I asked Johan about this one time for HoI3, and he said that while adding more provinces to the base 5160x2180 map in HoI3 should not cause problems, he did say that increase the size of the whole map would cause all sorts of problems, so at least for now 5160x2180 is the maximum size for HoI3 (and I will assume V2).

I am definitely thinking of doing more tweaking to the map post-commercial release, and since HoI3 has almost 15K provinces total (land and sea) while IIRC V2 is in the low 3000s range land and sea combined (IIIC what King said in a DD reply) so my guess is increasing the number of provinces to perhaps double would be feasible, depending on the number of nations are in the game as well and how many new nations would want to be added as well (and considering this game is a century long, that becomes another issue). Another big question is POPs, since that will be a huge amount of data crunching that EU3 and HoI3 don't have to the same degree (EU3 just has one data point for POP, HoI3 has manpower), and each new province is going to have I'd wager at least 4 or 5 POPs minimum (all same culture-religion, but farmers/labourers, artisans, soldiers, clergymen and aristocrats I think would be present for most pre-industrial human societies).

In the end it will probably just require testing - add a group, load and see how it works, if it works fine, add some more, until that point where it becomes too much for the game engine is finally reached (as gigau found for his MEIOU project, or Magna Mundi did at one point at least for the number of countries they added). But the base proposition that one can mod the map and add provinces is there, the question is the scale.