USA tag & migration in the Vicky .exe

[Kaoru Nagisa]

To start off: This is NOT a question about its effects. This is not a question about how to get or prevent assimilation. This is not a question about assimilation at all. However, it IS a question about modifying the .exe, but, heck, there are windowed mode threads and no-time-limit threads, and this is really just for a personal modification.

With that out of the way, I'm wondering about the position and nature of the 'USA' tag's special assimilation bonuses within the Victoria .exe. I'm interesting in making a personal modification to it - with full awareness that Paradox will not offer me any tech support for my possibly-broken, modified game - whereby either the USA tag's effects can be extended to another country (Which I'm sure would be ludicrously complicated) or whether another tag can merely be switched in, in its place, to receive the bonuses - though I realize this could cause problems for poor America.

I have Victoria 1.04 and Revolutions 1.02, and am playing Rev 1.02 with the VIP: R mod, the latest version. My editor is Hex Workshop 6.1. Alternatively, if I can't do anything about the USA tag, is there somewhere in the .exe where I can bump up assimilation numbers for non-USA countries? Thanks!

That's the first half of the question. The second is a little more simple. Where, if anywhere, in the .exe does it control the size of POP migration? Or, even better, the times during a month when POPs actively migrate? Would there be some way, via hex-editing, to produce multiple migrations a month?

Anyhow, those're my questions. If it's not okay to ask them here, feel free to delete this thread, but, as I said, I just see so many 'windowed mode' and 'no-time-limit' threads, that I figure a personal modification to increase my enjoyment of the game falls under the same umbrella. Thanks for your time, and here's hopin' you can answer - even if the questions are, admittedly, pretty esoteric.
~Kaoru

 

[Kaoru Nagisa]

...Shoot. I just realized this should probably go in the 'User Modifications' subforum. I haven't posted here in waaay too long...mrrf. If a moderator sees this, could they, please, move it there? x.x; Sorry!

 

[unmerged(131989)]

Something from a while back was that search for "USA" and replace it with "U01", then where that "U01" is replace it with "USA", or something along those lines?? The idea is to just swap the USA tag with a user defined (Uxx) tag which isn't used??

Not sure on the precise details, though, I just read it a while back. I haven't ever tried altering the .exe myself.

 

[doublezero]

Negating USA immigration bonus

Here, this thread explains what to do. I tried it a while back and it worked. The exact lines might be different if you're using V:R rather than vanilla.

 

[Kaoru Nagisa]

E

The values were indeed different, but it's hard to miss a giant block of country tags, so I found it, even so. Excellent! ...By which I mean, I tried that and I didn't crash my game. So that's a victory, at least. I'm unsure if it's working, mostly because there's another little problem I've encountered, which I'm sure I'll have to mess around with textfiles to solve: Namely, after the tags have been switched, the EXE reads the USA with the data of the country-tag it replaced, and vice-versa - which means a USA with (in my case) Grecian provinces, and a Greece with the entire US at their disposal. That's not good... Still, thanks much for the good pointers!

But, yeah. I've just gone through about half a million lines of hex code at a clip - reading from the bottom of the EXE up, trying to find anything that looks useful, and I've also taken to searching for individual values. And I've found some, I just feel a little too nervous to do much with them unless I understand what I'm looking for. So, does anyone know the location for migration values or timescales, or even for the stats for assimilation itself?

And, just a question for anyone who DOES regularly work with .exes or even hex and game code - how the heck do you tell which line of code affects which location? Is it really just trial and error, boot the game up, see what, if anything, is broken, and what's working, rinse, lather, repeat?

 

[doublezero]

Switching USA tag

In regards to your question about switching the USA tag with the GRE tag, I think that's how it's supposed to work. If you've used the HEX editor to switch GRE with USA, then GRE will get the USA hard-coded immigration bonus and the USA will receive only the levels of immigration normally received by Greece, which is next to nothing, even with good reforms, democratic government with a limited or full citizenship party in power, and high plurality. USA will be considered on the European continent and Greece will be considered to be in the Americas.
Since you have switched the tags, the Greece in your game will get high assimilation of minorities and massive immigration no matter how the country is being managed. It will be an American continental nation with the USA bonus. Greece will not actually be the USA - it doesn't get the USA events or anything, and the POPs aren't Yankees, but it will get the immigration.

You'll know it's working if you see any immigration at all going to Greece and none going to the USA in the first year of the game.

 

[Kaoru Nagisa]

In regards to your question about switching the USA tag with the GRE tag, I think that's how it's supposed to work. If you've used the HEX editor to switch GRE with USA, then GRE will get the USA hard-coded immigration bonus and the USA will receive only the levels of immigration normally received by Greece, which is next to nothing, even with good reforms, democratic government with a limited or full citizenship party in power, and high plurality. USA will be considered on the European continent and Greece will be considered to be in the Americas.
Since you have switched the tags, the Greece in your game will get high assimilation of minorities and massive immigration no matter how the country is being managed. It will be an American continental nation with the USA bonus. Greece will not actually be the USA - it doesn't get the USA events or anything, and the POPs aren't Yankees, but it will get the immigration.

You'll know it's working if you see any immigration at all going to Greece and none going to the USA in the first year of the game.

Yeah, it's working - thanks again for the good advice! It turns out that funny graphical display - the USA, in blue, occupying Greece, while Greece, in its own lighter-blue, controlled the continental US - was just due to wrongly-cached data in the database. As soon as I started the game, it became apparent that the map wasn't really like that, and the weird display no longer happens.

Funnily enough, two years into the game, I'm getting no immigration whatsoever - though plenty of assimilation, which is good, because it's what I was going for. I'm actually experiencing Emigration in large numbers for the first time, ever - I'd only ever lost about 100 citizens a month to it, but now I'm regularly losing 1,200. Which is fine, as they're mostly starving drifters, and my goal is basically to re-spread Hellenism to as much of the world as possible, so invading America nice and stealthy-like is preferable to fighting her.

However, I do know WHY this is happening. I bumped America's plurality up - pursuant to the results of another person's plurality vs. hard-coded bonus testing - to 500%. Yeah, 500%. As a result, the US is getting just as many immigrants - or possibly more! - than they did with their bonus. They've lost their fast assimilation speed, however, but they seem to be assimilating all right, regardless.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that Greece doesn't really seem as if it's considered to be on the American continent, and the US, likewise, does not show signs of being considered to be in Europe. Namely, because if it was, I'd not have small numbers of my POPs emigrating to places as diverse as Alaska, Arizona, Ohio, California, New York, etcetera. After all, as it says in Vicky Wicki, once a POP leaves 'Europe', they never return, and nobody immigrates to Europe. Yet I have a thousand people a month heading for America. But most of the USA's immigration bonuses have transferred to me, so, yay!
~Kaoru