Brief Modding Questions

[dang]

I have added a new nation (Qing China) and have just a few things I need to know before it will work perfectly. (It's already playable but throws occasional errors and some things like rebuilds don't quite work.)

1: Where does the game look for Home Area? I can't find it in the national .nat files or in any of the files in the data folder.

2. What do the codes in semicolons in the event files do? (For example 17;;;;21 in the responses) I would like to be able to change and add events to reflect having a playable China.

3. Where can I change starting budget? I found it earlier but seem to have lost it.

[Fredrik W]

Aug 8, 2015 11:42:04 GMT -6 dang said:

I have added a new nation (Qing China) and have just a few things I need to know before it will work perfectly. (It's already playable but throws occasional errors and some things like rebuilds don't quite work.)

1: Where does the game look for Home Area? I can't find it in the national .nat files or in any of the files in the data folder.

2. What do the codes in semicolons in the event files do? (For example 17;;;;21 in the responses) I would like to be able to change and add events to reflect having a playable China.

3. Where can I change starting budget? I found it earlier but seem to have lost it.

1. The home areas are defined by having a value of 200. Actually, there are already two home areas sort of prepared for China, Northern and Southern China. I assume you have used the Spain or CSA nation file as template. All you  need to do is do make sure North and South China are in the list of possessions at the end of the nation file (Possession0, Possession1 etc).

2. Conditions and codes for effects. I need to write up a documentation of that, it's a bit complicated. You should know that events apply more or less to all nations, with some variation and exceptions depending on government type and characteristics. I would perhaps recommend not bothering with separate events until at a later stage. The intention with custom nations is that you only need three files added, the Nation file (.nat), the ship names file and the warinfo file. That means that if you want to publish your custom nations, other players need only drop those files in the data directory to play it. If you modify the events file, things get a little ore complicated.

3. The value Base resources gives the budget. HBR is historical base resources.

4. I suggest adding a line for Corruption=100 for Qing China. That is a sort of untested feature but should give it some characteristics typical of the period.

5. The trickiest part of doing  a custom nation is the war info file. There is a war editor that makes it much easier to make custom nations, but it is undocumented and not totally user friendly. I have been busy with 1.1, but once that is finalized, I will write up a guide and publish the war editor and documentation for making your own custom nations.

[dang]

Thanks for the response! I just copied the Japanese warinfo file because I took one look at that like "noooope" This may cause problems with Qing going to war with Japan, since I've never had that happen in either of my test games.