It's very interesting how age, free time and hobbies interact. A lot of the people in these fora discover the game(s) when they are young and have a lot of free time. Some mod, some write AARs, some just play the game (let's stay with EU2 just for the argument, but it's also true with with other titles like Victoria, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron). As they grow older and enter university, start a family and/or get a job, they either move on or just don't find the time for modding or playing the game anymore. MOD33 for Darkest Hour is a good example, where the lead developer is a young father and quite understandably does not have the time any more to work on the very complex and convoluted mod of his. But there are also cases where the persons in question are older (in their 40s or 50s) like yodamaster or navapaddy (who mods DH). They may also get bored or have other real life issues, but for them life usually goes its steady course and they usually do not do not go through quite as many changes as a younger person. Therefore I think, if it was just boredom or lack of free time, yodamaster would have told us so like Kasperus did or responded to the many attempts of his co-devolepers of the game or the mod. I really hope yodamaster is doing well in real life, but I think that sadly FtG and AGCEEP are sore subjects for him now that he just does not want to talk about.
In retrospect it would have been better for the game to have been published a little later but to have included a new map. After the Europa Engine was made available to fan developers For the Glory was the first game to be released for the christmas sale 2009 IIRC. The old EU2 fans would have also bought the game in spring or summer of 2010 and a new map could definately have helped to appeal to new fans. Just think of Darkest Hour with its new map being favoured over Arsenal of Democracy with its old HoI 2 map. Sadly a fan improved Victoria never came to pass and in my humble opinion both HoI 2 reworks should have pooled together. Whenever I play Darkest Hour I miss the better economic and supply system and the research will be finished at date X feature of Arsenal of Democracy. Whenever I play AoD I miss the improvements os Darkest Hour like being faster, the easier leader selection, the map, etc.
For the Glory is in my opinion a better game and a better basis to build mods upon than DH or AoD which have an economic system that kind of works during war time (getting the raw material supplies to the factories was a major effort during WW2 and the economies were geared towards the war effort) but is not really all that great during peace time. But WW2 is more popular than the Age of Discovery and the Age of Enlightenment, so I don't think it's a surprise that remakes of a more popular game (HoI2) are more popular than a remake of EU2.
Back then the plan was basically to release the new map and to then adopt AGCEEP to the new map and basically overhaul the AI and events on the new map. But that version 2.0 of the mod never came to pass.
To be honest I did not know the term Gestaltzerfall, but you're right in that some contributors for the mod definitely were not aware of the bigger picture at all times. I do not know if the same figure of speech exists in Japanese, but in German and English you often talk about not seeing the wood (forest) for the trees. You don't see the bigger picture, only the component parts.
Quite often it was person X doing nation Y or event chain Z and later another person coming and changing or improving something and you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. E.g. if Burgundy gains the crown of Lotharingia it loses French as a national culture but receives German instead. If Burgundy then goes on to form France, France is stuck with not having French as the national culture but German.
There are actually a few of these cases of gaining or losing accepted cultures through the backdoor, e.g. Teutonic Order->Brandenburg->Prussia retains the Baltic culture next to German while Brandenburg->Prussia only has German, Styria->Austria->Germany keeps Slavonic while in all other cases you're meant to be left with only German as Germany.
Then you have patriotic wish fullfillment fantasy events like the union of England and France, when you manage to defeat France as England during the Hundred Years War. Once you do so and survive the Wars of the Roses and the little and easily crushed side-action in France the events for an English victory in the HYW just run out and it's smooth (and incredibly boring) sailing till the end of the game. With the right sliders there won't even be an American insurrection and independance.
The Han Chinese never really accepted the Manchu/Qing Dynasty and I don't think the English Monarchs or various heads of state like Oliver Cromwell would have just been accepted by the French in all cases either. Even the French Monarchs faced various frondes and France was torn apart by wars over religion. Henry Quatre and all that. The whole sequence just is unconvincing. A personal union under Henry VI okay, but then the French should really choose their own monarch and go their seperate ways.
Very early on the basic mod was done by two people or so in a rather short time. They therefore had a good insight into the details as well as an outlook on the overall picture. Then a lot of people contributed and like you said did some amazing work on the detail level that at times can really suck you in and is a big part of the appeal of the mod. At one point the AGCEEP High Council was installed, cleaned up the event files (the event files of AGCEEP are much easier to read than those of other mods that do not have any meanigful way in which the events in a file are ordered) and imposed a certain minum standard on the events added, but did not really eleminate the inconsistant or dubious elements of what was there all too often. And who can blame them. Noone can know and do everything, some things were constrained by the EU2 engine that are not constrained by the FtG engine and it was always "we'll take a good look at things on the new map".
Another issue is that AGCEEP was never really adopted to version 1.3 of FtG. Rebels are much more powerful and colonies (under 1000) are more frequently wiped out by native uprisings.
I therefore propose two things:
-At least in the case of nations that are not big colonisers like Sweden, all provinces should have at least 1000 inhabitants so that colonial uprisings do not just make the provinces revert to empty land that then gets settled by colonisers like Portugal.
-We need to take a good look at event chains that involve rebels or revolt_risk in order to determine if they still work as intended. Case in point the whole Pacification of An Nam sequence that allows China to gain territory in Vietnam. In EU2 or FtG 1.2 you could suppress the revolts in Vietnam as China, because provinces occupied by rebels did not spawn new rebels like they do in FtG 1.3. You had to defeat a lot of rebels in the process and invest a lot of money in the troops needed for that task, but it was doable and a great example for how costly expansion often is in real life. Now it's impossible, you simply get overrun by the constantly spawned rebels.
I agree that your plan of action (improving the map step after step, more focus on the right territrorial development of the countries on the map, lateral linking of the event sequences) is sound and probably the best course of action.
I'll look into finding a more reasonable value for the province_revoltrisk in the above mentioned Chinese Pacification of An Nam sequence). I'm not sure quite how much time I'll have in the next couple of days and weeks, but I should be able to squeeze in a few test games in order to find the right number.
