Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness Windows, Mac game

2024.04.19, Leaders and parties.

Hey guys, I’ll be sharing a post every weekend with updates of the modding progress. Today I think it might be a good idea to talk about the concept of political leaders instead of political parties (as presented in vanilla), and how political parties are treated in a new way in this mod, hoping to represent the ever-changing politics of the last century.

I think we all love the way political parties appear in the vanilla version, but because of the dynamism of political shifts in modern geopolitics, I had to make a lot new parties all the time for many nations through several decades, often accumulating way too much parties (imo), or most often even, I had to update a single party’s platform in cloned versions with the changes and the new dates range. The purpose was to make viable immersive agendas and competing interests depending on the parties and their ideologies, but also their geopolitical contexts.

This was OK at first, but after becoming too hard to do with detail on so many countries (including fictional ones), and more importantly, when a better idea came up while working on the technological schools, treated more alike organisations in CWE, which is IMO the best treatment the system has received so far, I thought that the visible aspect of this element in the diplomatic screen was a cool way to incorporate leaders.

However, the lack of support for tech_schools conditionals in the modding itself made it very hard to make a smart use of the element. If rulers and leaders were treated as such, it would end up much more complicated in the long term as for having to flood the game with hundreds of event_flags, keeping track of each of them all, and using them as triggers for decisions to push the possible outcomes of the eras in a run by assuming a political leader’s personality more accurately. Too hard.

More than a cosmetic addition, the idea of rulers was to feel the difference in-game of a Donald Trump and a Vladimir Putin, despite them sharing somewhat a ‘similar’ ideology. How could we make Conservatives in the USA feel different than they do in Russia, as a conservative leader in one nation would still have a different culture than another? That was the question, and even after retaining a somewhat Conservative party in both countries and adapting their issues to each own, parties themselves are usually product of what their leaders decides (or according public opinion), as have been ever since the rise of mass politics during the first half of the 20th century.

So, was there a way to keep both concepts and make them useful to each other? Yes, I think. If the issues were adapted to become the agenda of the leaders, leaders could then choose technological schools limited according to these issues by a decision, and then these schools would then be presented as political parties, shown too in the diplomatic screen, and offering not only agendas of their own, like pushing technologies (which have also changed to cabinet projects) which are more of their alike, and reducing what isn’t their focus, but also, adding some possible national modifiers. So this way, possibilities were enough to make a grander modern simulation:

Of course, the change was still possible while using the same old parties system, but when the personality and agendas of leaders came into play, something was also obvious: it’s almost impossible to replicate this on all the existing political leaders countries have had since 1908 to modern day without facing the same problem as before (much larger even) but, summarising them all into political profiles, something sort of what Hearts of Iron 2 and 3 does, we could simulate a dynamic competition between leaders in every nation through several decades, almost generationally, which also has a big weight in national politics, and therefore still see political parties and other cabinet forms (non-partisan, eg.) in nations through the world.

Historic leaders like Roosevelt, Tito, Thatcher, Hussein, etc, could still be ‘flavoured’ along this new system with lesser yet deeper historic events, both national and international, in case their political profile was already in power… So a political profile of let's say... ‘Staunch Revolutionary’, ruling Cuba in the late 1950s, would trigger the event and conditionals of Fidel Castro in such country, and push Castro’s agenda nationally and internationally from there. Obviously, limitations on the number and agendas of profiles according to the real-nature of politics in a region should also be implemented to produce a more easy-to-mod and also immersive, realistic result based on the real evolution of history.

This was the start of many new ideas that have been added since, and which I’ll be mentioning later on. Thanks for reading so far, and I hope you guys are as excited for the results as I am. I think I will be creating a PDX forum thread soon, in case you’re over there too and want to check and say hi. Feel free to share your opinions, as I will gladly read them, and please keep in touch. Your support is very welcomed.

Regards, and take care… Lib out.

P.S. Today is the anniversary of the First Federation of Venezuela after 214 years, back in 1810, which led to its full independence and the subsequent creation of Gran Colombia, so cheers to that. This, of course, will be possible in the mod, for those of you who love cultural unions!