DIY Invasion of Neutral Nations, Declare War, Raise Tensions

[dizzy]

This is a role-play How-To that walks your through the process making a few easy Notepad++ text edits to your game. Feel free to use whatever prestige values you like:

 Invade Neutral Colonies with planned expenses that will occur at a time of your choosing.
 Declare War on other nations when you want using Prestige.
 Diplomacy: Raise or Lower Tension levels at the expense of Prestige.

Invading Neutral Colonies:
- Read this entire post. First, pick a neutral colony target within your invasion range.
- Design a CL naming it 'Colony Invasion Fleet'. This 'ship' will be used to incur the expense of your colony invasion. 
- Cost of one million per the colony's value. So invading Southern Korea (Value 6) would cost 6 million per month plus the cost for developing the design.
- Just build 6 CL 'Colony Invasion Fleet' ships at one mil a piece. For a colony with a value of 3, build three ships, etc.
- Time is a full 12 months (a reasonable amount of time) plus any time for developing the design. Add another 1 month per each zone from your capital.
- Add one more million and one month longer build time per 50 Base Value of the neutral colony you want to invade rounding up.
- Scrap any Colony Invasion Fleet ships once the time requirement has been met. Your invasion fleet is ready to sail upon your orders.
- Raise tensions with other nations. This may lead to war with some or multiple nations if their tensions levels are already suitably high.
- If a nation's 'Home Area+Build Area' is in the same zone add 4 Tension to existing levels.
- If a nation has one or more colonies in the same zone as your invasion target add 3 Tension to existing levels.
- All other nations with none of the above add 2 Tension to existing levels. In any case, Tension levels are not cumulative, so only use the highest.
- Subtract 1 Tension from the above result if the Value of the Colony is 2 or less.
- Add 1 Tension from the above result if the Value of the colony is 8 or more.
- If raising tensions would raise them to a level of 12 or higher(12 is the War threshold), raise them to 20. Keeps events from lowering them below that threshold.
- Subtract the value of the colony from your Admiral's Prestige to represent the political acumen required to convince your nation to invade a neutral colony.

To Declare War or simply Raise Tensions:
- Read this whole post. To change a Tension Level by 1 point, deduct 5 Prestige and then double the Prestige cost for each consecutive point you change. So to change 2 points of Tension, deduct 10 Prestige, 3 points costs 20 Prestige, 4 points cost 40 Prestige, 5 points cost 80.  See step 6.) below.
- To Declare war on USA as Japan, for example, and current Tension is 8, deduct 40 Prestige from your Admiral to reach the 12 Tension level threshold for war.
- Edit the RTWGameX.bcs file's Prestige level for your Admiral, usually located a few dozen lines under [Nation0], and find and adjust USA's Tension level from 8 to 20.
- Load up your game, next turn you should be at war and your navy could be pre-positioned for a nasty surprise attack!

*Note* This method is not recommended for occupied colonies of other nations as there will likely be Airbases and Batteries that will have to also be edited in terms of ownership and that is beyond the scope of this roleplay mod. Instead, use the built in Invasion mechanic of RTW2 for any non neutral colonies.

To edit:

1.) Save and exit your current game.
2.) Find your install directory for NWS and open it. Then open the Rule the Waves 2 folder. Now open your Save folder. Finally, open the GameX folder where the 'X' corresponds to the save game slot # of your campaign you want to edit.
3.) Copy all these files into a backup folder in case you make a mistake.
4.) Open MapDataX.dat using Notepad++ v7.6.2 or higher and click CTRL+F and type the name of the Colony you want to change ownership in the Find window and click 'Find Next'. When you find the name of the Colony you're invading, the line directly above that should say the owner is Neutral. Change 'Neutral' to your nation's name. Usually this would be Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, USA, France, Great Britain, Spain, ROC, Austria Hungary, or could be Soviet Union. Does Austria Hungary use a hyphen? I don't know, look thru the .bcs file and find out. Make sure you spell it correctly and use proper capitalization. Save and exit the editor.
5.) Open RTWGameX.bcs and hit CTRL+F and type Name2 in the Find window and click 'Find Next'. This will find each entry for all the nations in the game. Scroll down 30 or so lines until you see the entry called Tension=X. Add the corresponding tension modifier to the number 'X'. If your modifier was 3 and the entry was Tension=4, you'd change this to Tension=7. Do this for all 6 nations in your game and proceed to step 6.)
6.) While editing RTWGameX.bcs, find [Nation0] and a few dozen lines underneath, find Prestige and subtract the desired amount or subtract the colony's value. Save and exit.
7.) Reload your game and you should now have a new colony and all the other nations should be pissed off about it.

Enjoy!

[mycophobia]

Since this is more or less for pure role play purpose, consider Rolling 2d6 for success check xD


Rolling physical dice for extra swag.


Also does anyone know any good naval themed dice I can buy

[garrisonchisholm]

I love this kind of stuff. Too much hackery for me (I'm paranoid about screwing up files) but still cool!

[dizzy]

Jun 3, 2019 14:29:16 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

I love this kind of stuff. Too much hackery for me (I'm paranoid about screwing up files) but still cool!

Start a new game, save it, and edit the save files. You've invested nothing and have nothing to lose. Try it. It's so easy.

[yemo]

dizzy
How did you change the white background color to something less annoying?

[dizzy]

Open Control Panel, go to Display and on that page you'll see a link for Personalization and you'll see ways to change your theme. If you want, I'll send you the one I use specifically for playing RTW. It's okay for day use and excellent in low light conditions to reduce eyestrain. Been telling tortugapower he needs to use it on his podcasts. I can send you my .themepack and you can just install that. PM me your email.

[garrisonchisholm]

Ok, I see what this does. It takes the "I wonder when the invasion will happen" issue out of the equation, and it allows you to plan a determined assault with planned expenses that will occur at a time of your choosing. The expense mechanic used does indeed cause the player to lose the opportunity costs of those funds so they cannot be otherwise used in the game. I see only 2 issues, which I would like to simply bring up for conversation.

First, given Japan as ... well, I just thought a way around this one. (If you can't build a 6/mil month ship, build multiple ships).

So (new) First, when you scrap the ship(s) you will get back a not insignificant amount of cash. Given there is no alternative when using this mechanic, we would be left to simply rationalize how the funds might be explained- perhaps as infrastructure and logistics assets freed up as preparing for the invasion ceases.

But Secondly, this would "move the chair" for the player. Instead of 'merely' being the head admiral, they would have become some voice so significant in their state that they could dictate national policy. Now mind you Yamamoto did just this, however his position was unique. I would suggest, if one is to assume that their leader is able to affect national policy in regards to neutrals in this way, that the player need to "expend" prestige equal to the value of the territory being seized, as well as limit the 'colonial grab' to regions within sea-zones where they have bases. This prestige subtraction would involve one more edit of the save.

That is my 2-cents on your very well thought out program.

[dizzy]

garrisonchisholm

I've edited the OP to reflect some of your ideas. Thank you.

[garrisonchisholm]

I was thinking more about this with a caffeine boosted brain, and I definitely see the need for it; right now if you played Japan and wanted to embark upon the conquest of SEA your war would be neatly 'edited' by neutral states, as if they were playing tag and 'on goal calling "safe!"'

When at war, and anything but a Liberal Democracy, it should be possible to also invade neutrals.
I will suggest this internally, if it has not already been added to the suggestion thread.

[rob06waves2018]

Jun 18, 2019 8:11:23 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

I was thinking more about this with a caffeine boosted brain, and I definitely see the need for it; right now if you played Japan and wanted to embark upon the conquest of SEA your war would be neatly 'edited' by neutral states, as if they were playing tag and 'on goal calling "safe!"'

When at war, and anything but a Liberal Democracy, it should be possible to also invade neutrals.
I will suggest this internally, if it has not already been added to the suggestion thread.

As a Briton and a citizen of one of the most colonial liberal democracies of all time, I have to say, why only dictatorships? The British, the French and the Dutch all spent time invading neutral countries. We British are the guiltiest, even in the RTW time frame. So I think if invasions of neutrals is implemented, it should be for everyone, though maybe with increased penalties for non-dictatorships (greater tension, possibility of unrest etc.).

[dizzy]

Added an edit to the OP detailing How-To declare war on another nation using Prestige so you can get that December 7th 1941 sneak attack going.
Edit: Added Tension Raise or Lower options for your Admiral that might like to chastise other nations' girly navy sailors or suck up to other nations' admirals.

[kriegsmeister]

I've thrown in my own little twist to this by way of using the Fleet Exercise To simulate an actual invasion battle.

1.) First step is to look up the historic navy of the possesion and/or the minor colonial power which controlled it.
2.) Design and build said fleet as best as you can replicate. Most small countries only had a handful of torpedoboats and DD's. I use 200T micro DD with 2in guns and a handful of torpedos to represent the TB. These typically build in less than a year so your "planning time" is relatively small. Some larger colonies might have small Coastal defence battleships with 6-10in guns, which of course means it will take longer to "plan" since they are more time consuming to build, but you can always just edited the build time down if you want to make it sooner.
2b.) For invasions of another nations colony, you can "build" some of the enemy nations ships by duplicating the ships data, though I would still build some destroyers for that "planning time"
3.) Build large "Transports" i.e. 1800T KE to represent your landing forces. these work best as they are the only ship type that you can build outside of war with unused displacement which makes sense for a transport. I would go with 2-3 per Value Point of the colony.
4.) Once everything is built start a Fleet exercise and assign ships accordingly. Since you don't really get a choice of where the exercise takes place, just pick a random spot near a port to designate as the invasion zone (pick a grid and write it down so you don't forget. Like a normal invasion battle, your goal is to get your KE transports to this spot (don't forget to bring your ships down to 0kts when they reach it) with the goal of getting 1-1.5x value points worth of transports to the goal.
5.) After the battle ends scrap all ships that were sunk (including those from your regular fleet!), after that you have 3 different possible outcomes
5a.) If you fail to get the minimum number of transports to the goal, the invasion fails and scrap all enemy ships and your transports
5b.) To represent the land war, keep the remaining transports and opposing ships and month by month scrap them at a rate of 1 Transport for 1 DD, 2 TB, or .5 Cruiser and above. If all enemy ships are scrapped before you run out of transports you win the invasion and conquer the nation with the appropriate file editing. If you run out of transports before the enemy does ships, then you lose the land battle and scrap the remaining ships with no edit. Now it is pretty easy to math out to see if you will win or not down the line, but do still make the effort of the scrapping mechanic to simulate the games uncertainty of success and have the sunk costs continue.
6.) Optionally you may make another Fleet exercise to simulate "Battles in support of Land combat" to continually reduce the enemy numbers. You have to go in and edit the line "FleetEx=" and "FleetExHeldThisYear=" to reset the fleet exercise if a year has not passed yet. The main thing here is I would limit yourself to cruiser and destroyer duels, and only every 4-6 months. After the battle scrap any ships sunk, and for any of your ships also scrap a transport.

I feel like this gets you a bit more involved in the process and better represents the time and cost of the invasion, as well as actually having a battle.