As Pike revealed yesterday I’ve been working on a mod for Victoria II lately. It came to me while I was playing the rather good Fallout mod for Darkest Hour, because one of the challenges the modder faced there was dealing with the need to have a lot of land empty as ‘wasteland’, for the powers to colonize and claim. If you’re familiar with HoI2 and derived games you’ll know that this isn’t an easy feat, because HoI does not work like that, there are no empty provinces as in EU3 or V2 to colonize.
But hang on, there are empty provinces in those games and mechanics for claiming and settling them. So I thought, why not make a mod for one of them revolving around a similar idea? And now here we are, working on a post-apocalyptic setting for Victoria II, starting shortly after said apocalypse and covering the reclamation of the ruined Earth, the development of new technologies, and ultimately the emergence of new political ideas.
It’s a lot of work, even the fairly simple stuff like putting in new countries and editing provinces. But what’s really struck me on this project is how tough it is to keep things balanced. Now partly this is because I’m in no position to mod the AI, so I’m working with the thing as it stands, but it’s really difficult to ensure that people don’t just dominate. In the regular game the UK is the dominant power and unless you’re a decent player or the USA they’re staying that way. With so much more land available to colonize however, the ability of countries to simply run away with the game by claiming more and more land is acute here, and my biggest challenge has, as I say, been working with that.
As I work on the mod the problem decreases but it’s still something I’ve been struck by; balancing is something of a totemic idea that holds less real value than might be assumed at first blush. To take vanilla V2 again, playing as Cambodia should not be as easy as playing as France and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, there needs to be a semblance of the ability to compete even if you can’t expect to conquer the world, and it’s both interesting and daunting to experience first-hand what developers must struggle with every day.
Hi M.A. (if M.A. is simply unacceptable, my apologies =),
Is it possible to make it so that colonized provinces, unless empty to begin with, suffer a colonization penalty such that they don’t produce as much as they would if they were “national” provinces, for want of a better term? For example, let’s say Newcastle and Dehli are provinces with identical stats. Among them, both produce 100 widgets per turn/year/whatever, among other things. But, if you’re England and you hold Dehli as a colonial province and Newcastle as a national province, Dehli only gives you 90 widgets per turn, or something along these lines.
I’m sure you’re considering any number of ways to balance these things, but I thought I’d mention this one just in case for the following reason: it would introduce into affairs the difficulties colonial powers had in successfully managing colonies, and the more your national power in totum is dependent on your colonies, the harder the eventual fall.
Anywho, just a thought, and best of luck. Sounds like a daunting project, but one that will ultimately prove very rewarding.
I think there are ways to do things like that (although I have a suspicion it’s something of a kludge to do, having to use events and such), but that particular problem is not really present in my mod because everywhere has such a low population that production is incredibly low in colonial provinces anyway to start with. But it is definitely something to keep an eye on, so thank you for pointing it out!
(and MA is fine :D)