Libyan Civil War Mod 2.0 file

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU DELETE THE OLD VERSION OF THE MOD BEFORE ADDING THIS ONE IN. It should go without saying, but I imagine that if you do not, you'll wind up with a massive mess that will crash immediately.

2.0 brings a FULL overhaul to the mod, which was torn down to nothing and completely re-created to iron out some fundamental problems that existed in the game since the early versions.

1. The map has been completely redone. The original provinces were honestly much too small and too restricted to large towns. Also, I was experimenting with having roads as provinces which to be honest the AI didn't like very much, and it was also quite finicky and ugly to click around on. All provinces have been expanded somewhat to be more playable, and the roads system has been removed. Now, settlements and small hamlets dot the countryside immediately surrounding the main roads that pierce through the desert. There are a handful of large impassable provinces which will flip to your control if you control enough hamlets surrounding them. The coastal region has been expanded so troops can move more freely throughout Tripolitania and Cyrenica. Every province is now a city, too, and all province positions have been fixed. No more seeing your troops go to the middle of the map when you click on a neighboring province.

2. New game mechanics: I really disliked how the earlier mechanics functioned on a basis of regional militias, since this was actually very unrealistic. Now, there are a handful of militias for the secular, islamist and socialist side. For example, the Libyan National Army (secular), the Libya Shield Force (islamist), and Brigade 93 (socialist). If these militias gain and control enough territory, they will declare their own version of a regime and tag-switch to it immediately. For example, if the Libyan National Army controls enough territory, they will declare the Republic of Libya. If the Libya Shield Force controls enough territory, they will declare the Islamic Republic of Libya, and so forth. This frees up the militias considerably to act independently, and allows for very complex civil wars between factions to develop. There can be an Islamist government fighting a Secular government that is itself fighting multiple other secular governments or militias.

3. New foreign support mechanism: This one is pretty straightforward. I figured out how to correctly influence progress on the battlefield. The secret is war exhaustion. Any regime or militia has an appropriate backer that would like to see it take over all of Libya (for example, Russia may back the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Saudi hardliners may back the Feb. 17th militias). If you have no support from a foreign backer, your war exhaustion will quickly be high and will keep you from raising many troops. If a foreign country backs you, your war exhaustion will stay low and you will get an influx of manpower and some cash to raise troops. This really helps turns the tide in battles and is quite realistic. I've seen a government control 80% of Libya and push on Tripoli only to have the Tripoli government receive foreign backing and push back their armies quite easily.

4. New coalitions system: There are three possible coalitions in the game, although currently only one is functioning, and that is the NTC. At the beginning of the revolution, Libyan militias can decide whether to throw their weight in with the NTC or not. The NTC is physically represented on the map as its own tag. However, if the NTC falters or fails, it can fall apart, and split into a myriad of provinces controlled by all the militias formerly making up the NTC. If the NTC wins and seizes Tripoli, they will also dissolve and split into many militias, paving the way for an organic second civil war

5. Additional AI tweaks: AI now behaves much more realistically due to the new map and defines.lua tweaks, although the AI still does struggle at times with the infamous MoTE "frozen armies" bug where the AI just freaks out and lets the armies walk back and forth in a circle until something around them is disturbed. I've tried to eliminate this and failed, although research continues.

6. Stability increases: The game is not perfectly stable, and during the second bookmark may crash 10 years or so after the start date. I will try to find out what is causing this in future updates. For now, though, the first bookmark seems completely stable, and the game will usually run for many years without crashing, giving you the opportunity to save every year and hopefully not lose any real progress. In the old mod, and in previous mods, there was a major factor inhibiting stability due to the way code was injected. Now, code is injected differently, by spreading out the injectors instead of only using one tag. Therefore, stability is much higher and there won't be so many crashes