Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness Windows, Mac game

Hey guys, this time I won’t be posting a detailed article about one of the mod’s conceptual changes. Instead I’ll be talking a bit about the work I’ve done these last three weeks (somewhat vaguely, to save most of it for upcoming posts) and keeping score of the current progress so far. When the counter in the spoiler section reaches 100% I'll move the dev stage of the mod to alpha, and way closer to the beta I want to release around in a few months (most surely August).

I've talked with some friends who will be testing the alpha in around June (or a bit later if necessary). If you're interested in joining this group, write me at libertinox4Y@proton.me, or in twitter / reddit. Also, I've made a discord server but I don't use discord that much, so any patience / help in there is appreciated, as this is the reason I haven't made it public yet, sorry. If you want an invite, join the group or simple collaborate, feel free to send a message. I'll finish the details and probably make it public by next weekend.

Anyway, let’s start with last week's work and talk about the map and the provinces, as I’ve been adding a bunch of new provinces into the mod to be able to simulate modern-day economies based on services, and these are the ‘urban areas’, the administrative core of the metropolitan areas. Put simply: the cities themselves, surrounded by the greater areas (current vanilla provinces) where pop's live and produce industrial or agricultural goods, etc. I’ve thought some may see this as a perhaps conflictive addition to the mod, thus I've preferred to announce it as subtle as possible, as I really don’t want to scare anyone who might consider it ‘ugly’, ‘out-of-place’, or whatever. Fugly, short and simple.

However, I really like it, and considered it very much necessary for a proper simulation of how geopolitics works in an urban/interconnected world, and how life these days can be so radically different in urban metropolitan places as it is in rural ones (how this affects politics too) and so, I had to make it work one way or the other, and obviously, the most important reason was to construct parallel main core for the whole service economy concept of which I'll tell more in its own article, but anyway, lots of the world’s largest cities are already in the map, with all requirements like climate or continents added, trade goods (services), regions, etc:

They are absolutely playable since quite a while, with related crashes reduced to zero now, during the first week of the addition. I did come up with an interface glitch, some nightmarishly game-killer stuff, just a few days ago, but solved immediately thanks to good-almighty-constant organisation. If it ever happens to you while modding provinces: check your duplicates in map files.

As for general modding progress, this weekend’s count would be 312 cities already up and running (unpopulated, as I haven’t do pops yet), and I still need to do at least around a hundred more to cover the capitals of all nations (the remaining) as well other necessary cities depending on specific economy sizes. There are a bit more new provinces as I also tweaked and play to create some new borders, but left it for later:

(List of largest cities, Urban area, Population, Metropolitan area, World's largest urban areas in 2020, and more)

Again, I’ll talk more about cities later on, but if you like the concept, rest assured it’s going very well so far with a lot of work done already. I’ve also added some flags, including Russia and modern Germany, as seen in one of the latest screenshots. I did Andorra because I had to do the province and anyway, one of you guys in here asked about it and I thought it’d be cool:

The Vatican has also been worked a bit this week. There was some slight localisation adjustments, but nothing too fancy to tell. Also, I worked on my excel files to calculate pops distribution of the map now that I’m getting closer to finishing essential new provinces. Along this, I think I may finally have the first branch of the defence ministry tech tree designed and listed. We’ll see.

Anyway, I think that’s it for this weekend. I’ll be sharing a bigger post anytime soon. Take care, and thanks for staying in touch. Lib, out.