SMAN's World at War: WW2 Scenario Civilizations Pack

[sman1975]

This mod adds the 19 custom Civs to the game. These Civs were included in both the "SMAN`s World at War: WW2 Scenario" and the "SMAN`s World at War: WW2 Scenario on Any Map" mods, with some minor adjustments. They are focused on mid-Twentieth Century capabilities, and are scoped as such. They may be less-capable than other Civs in a game starting in the Ancient Era, but when the Modern/Atomic (Great War/World War II) Eras begin, they will be quite formidable, indeed.


Included Civs: This is a list of the 19 included countries in this Civ Pack ***:

- Bulgaria (Boris III) *
- China (Chiang Kai-shek) **
- Czech (Edvard Benes) *
- Finland (Carl Mannerheim) *
- France (Albert Lebrun) **
- Germany (Adolph Hitler) **
- Greece (Ioannis Metaxas) **
- Hungary (Miklos Horthy ) **
- Italy (Benito Mussolini) **
- Japan (Hideki Tojo) **
- Norway (Haakon VII) *
- Poland (Felicjan Skladkowski) **
- Romania (Carol II) *
- Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin) **
- Spain (Francisco Franco) **
- Turkey (Kemal Ataturk) **
- United Kingdom (Winston Churchill) **
- United States (Franklin Roosevelt) **
- Yugoslavia (Dragisa Cvetkovic) *

Footnotes:
* These civs have a few custom unit models included in this mod

** These civs have many, many custom unit models included in the "Unique Units" companion mod

*** Details about Unique Abilities, Unique Buildings, and Unique Units can be found here:
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/2243273955/2841165820095189243/


Unlike other “SMAN`s World at War” mods, this mod can be played without any other “World at War“ mods enabled. It is balanced for a normal BNW game in this case. If the main “World at War” mod is enabled, a compatibility script will make the appropriate adjustments so these civs will play correctly in the WAW environment.

Ideally, this mod will be played in the main “World at War” and “World at War: Unique Units” companion mod enabled to provide the most-detailed, immersive gaming experience.

The leaders for these civs were the ones in power at the outbreak of the Second World War, with the exception of Kamal Ataturk, who is such an exceptional figure whose influence still dominated Turkey during the war and long afterwards, it just seemed like a goo idea to include him.


The mod is compatible with these maps from Gedemon's YnAEMP mod: Earth Greatest, Earth Mk.3, Yagem, Europe Atlantic, Europe Giant, Europe Large, Europe Large New, and Pacific. I've never written a compatibility script for this mod before, so please let me know if you have any suggestions on improving it.


The idea for this mod was suggested by Steam player @BRBNick, who was looking for ways to build his own scenarios based on these civs, but that could also be played on a custom map he was designing.


STEAM Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2243273955

Direct Download: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/smans-world-at-war-ww2-scenario-civilizations-pack.28472/

 

[sman1975]

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[sman1975]

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[sman1975]

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[sman1975]

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WW2 Civ Pack Collaboration: I'm also in the process of building a stand-alone version of the mod that only has the WW2 Civilizations included, which can by played with any other mods - as requested by Steam player @BrbNick.

Nick - if you read this, I'm looking at the contents of the WW2 On Any Map mod, and see an issue with 4 of the civs.

Basically, each civ in any Civ5 game must have 2 unique "somethings" - either unique buildings, units, improvements. The civs of Czech, Finland, Norway, and Romania have extra unique units in the mod, which provides them the 2 "somethings" they need. The rest of the civs has 2 UB's.

I need to decide whether to remove those unique units, and make this mod more compatible - and playable without any WAW mods required - so it would be truly stand-alone. It would still be able to be played with the WAW mods, but they wouldn't be required.

Or, I can leave the units in, give them (and the buildings) standard Civ5 characteristics (again, so the mod would be stand-alone, not requiring any WAW mods), but add a compatibility script that would test for the Main WAW mod being enabled, and if it were, then make the appropriate changes so that these units/buildings would then behave like they currently do.

Or, I can add UB's to the civs that don't have them, and drop the units altogether. It's a more consistent approach, when compared to the other civs, as UB's tend to get more of a bonus than UU's do, since all the UU's usually do is add civ-specific artwork and no great benefit of any kind. Going this direction, however, leads me to wonder if you have any thoughts/suggestions on what the UBs would be, or if there are any promotions we could add to make the existing UU's more beneficial?

I'm leaning towards leaving the units in, adding a promotion or 2, making the entire mod pack "normal" Civ5 compatible, then adding the compatibility script to accommodate Main WAW if enabled. But, this begs the question:

Question: as this is your mod vision, which approach do you prefer?

sman1975, Friday at 7:11 AM

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Friday at 4:21 PM :

Hey, @S-Man
Yeah, I'm happy with you leaving the units in, I do want it to be compatibility with WAW mod because I make my own scenarios on big earth map mod by using the SDK Civ Tool and I want to use your ww2 Civs to make a hearts of iron sort of ww2 scenario.

"I'm leaning towards leaving the units in, adding a promotion or 2, making the entire mod pack "normal" Civ5 compatible, then adding the compatibility script to accommodate Main WAW if enabled."
I approve of that, do it.

At the end of the day, I want the ww2 Civs to have their own accurate Flags and their unique units.

 

[sman1975]

OK, Nick, thanks.

I just want to clarify: you don't plan to ever play any of these civs WITHOUT the Main WAW mod enabled?

I believe I can code it in such a way that is will work in "normal" (BNW) civ, but also be able to detect if Main WAW mod is enabled, and adjust all the things that need to be changed to make this new mod compatible with Main WAW. It's a bit of extra work, but I think it might help the mod appeal to more players if it's more openly compatible.


Here's the project as I see it:
1. Convert the "World At War WW2 Scenario On Any Map" mod to a stand-alone "World At War WW2 Civilizations Pack" mod. (done)
2. Will leave the existing UU's in the mod, and add an extra promotion or so to make them more beneficial to a civ that doesn't have 2 UB's (done)
3. Will complete a compatibility script that allows these civs to be played both with and without the Main WAW mod enabled (this will adjust things like strengths, prereq/obsolete techs, promotions, flags, etc., as needed) (done)
4. Add unit icons for all 20 unique units (some are duplicates) (done)
5. Research what edited animation files are required by the 20 unique units. They inherited them from main WAW, but if it's not enabled, the units won't work correctly. (done)
6. Code clean-up, making sure all the WW2OAM artifacts are removed from this mod (done)
7. Add militia spawn function for UK & USSR (done)
8. Testing (done)
9. Prepping Steam packet, publishing (not started, est. 1 hour)
10. Publishing on Civfanatics (not started, est. 1 hour)
11. ???

If that's it, let me know. Also, if you have any suggestions, recommendations, etc., let me know that, as well. Civs Czech, Finland, Norway, and Romania don't have the 2 UB's that the rest of the civs have, so they're a bit at a disadvantage, even with enhanced units (although Romania does have 1). It's not a problem, but if you have any buildings you'd like to add to these civs to help your mods out, let me know that as well. It doesn't take long to add a building, with finding a good icon often being the hardest/most time-consuming part...

The shell of the mod is complete. Am thinking about what promotions to add, and how much work the compatibility script will be. BTW: the hours estimates above are "work hours" - often as I mod from my home office, "work hours" and "wall hours" aren't quite the same. That "real life" thingee often interrupts... So the 8 hours of work total work may take a bit more than a day or two... or three...

Thanks for the feedback.


Edit: do you want me to leave the "National Promotions" and "Economic Handicaps" in for these civs? These features were added to provide some "Earth-like" realism that may not be applicable in your new scenarios. Removing/adjusting them is trivial, as is ignoring them. Just let me know if you want them or not.

sman1975, Friday at 4:51 PM

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Friday at 5:25 PM

No problem man! Thanks for your hard work, you're doing god's work.

Well, your WAW mod has a perfect ww2 tech tree, it goes perfect for the stand-alone ww2 civ mod, I will always enable the WAW mod.
Will it be compatible with the End in ww2 era mod?

Sure you can make the mod "normal" if you want for the other players to play it their own way, everyone has their tastes.

Oh, I forgot to mention, can you add historical dates to the mod? For example: Starting in 1933 when Hitler rise to power was and ending in 1953 when Stalin died. Just an idea.
It's just when I make a scenario with the big earth map mod the years go very fast, 1 turn goes 30 years or something, so when I'm playing in the ww1 era or ww2 and End in La Belle Epoque, I'm in turn 30 now and the year is 2301 A.D... lol fantastic!

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Friday at 5:33 PM

@S-Man
I really love your Napoleon at War (V5) mod, it's very good!

Do you have any more plans for Scenarios in the future?

Just an Idea: Can I just suggest the Crimean war of 1853-1856, it had a nickname for being called "ww0" or "A rehearsal war for the world war 1"

 

[sman1975]

Yes, the WAW "End at..." mods work with main WAW and the WW2 on any map scenario just fine.

When you say you use the SDK Civ Tool - do you mean WorldBuilder (to create maps) or do you also use ModBuddy? If you use ModBuddy to create the scenario, you would want to see the start/stop dates in the mod created there. If you're only using WorldBuilder, then you'd need to accomplish these database changes some other way (as in a mod like the WW2OAM mod does). AFAIK, WorldBuilder won't get you there.

These data points need to be changed in the "GameSpeed_Turns" data base, and WorldBuilder alone can't manage that. You'd be better off making a couple of simple text changes to the WW2OAM scenario and playing it on the map you want.

The Civ-pack mod won't do anything except add civs and units. Any additional logic, conditions, etc. would require a new mod beyond the scope of this project.

********

I have some nebulous plan for "The Great Game" scenario, set in the late 1800's, and be set on a larger-scaled map than the WW1 and WW2 scenarios. The map won't be larger (smaller in fact), but will be set to cover much of Asia/Africa, as well as Europe. Each Era was going to get its own Scenario, including a Cold War version set in the mid-1980's (pre-Gorby). Crimea's possible, just need to find the right map. My "scenario management engine" is improving and hopefully this makes developing new scenarios much simpler/quicker in the future.

There are also plans for some smaller, operational scenarios, such as Operation Sea Lion (German invasion of UK in WW2), as well as Overlord/D-Day. I couldn't decide on Barbarossa or not. But, as my time is limited, most of these plans haven't passed beyond conception.

sman1975, Friday at 5:47 PM

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Friday at 6:06 PM

Ah, Alright then, I mostly use WorldBuilder for my Scenarios, it's when I add Civs to their historically start location and do their borders on the map, I will see what I can do with the year settings, time to use my own noob skills for coding lol.

Thanks for the Tip!

Those Scenarios sound fantastic!! Can't wait!!

When you make Scenarios, do you use other people's map mods or you make your own?

 

[sman1975]

The best way to learn modding, I think, it to find a mod that's "close" to what you want to accomplish, then look at how it does things. Sometimes, all you need are a few basic changes, and you have that mod doing exactly what you'd like.

For example, if you wanted to use a text editor, like Notepad, and make two basic changes. It's ok to edit text files in a mod, although most modders think it's in poor taste. The worst that could happen is you mess up the mod. Then you simply delete the mod's folder, and the next time you open Civ5/MODS area, you get a fresh copy...

So, if you wanted the "WW2 Scenario On Any Map" to begin in 1933 and end in 1953, you would only need to make two chanes:

1. The file that governs this in the scenario is called "99_ScenarioGlobals.lua" - It's located someplace like:

C:\Users\XXXX\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\SMAN's World at War Scenario - WW2 On Any Map (v 1)\LUA

Where "XXXX" is the account you installed Civ5 under

2. The two lines you're looking for are right next to each other:

* Line #32: g_iGameStartYear = 1938 -- Year the scenario starts, Jan 1938
* Change "1938" to "1933"

* Line #33: g_iMaxGameTurns = 96 -- Max number of turns = 96, or 8 years, ending in Dec 1946
* Change "96" to "240"

3. Save the file, exit Notepad, restart Civ5, and Bob's your uncle...

This isn't a perfect example, as the mod bases its events from the "start of the war" and not the "end of the war" - which means, there is a script of events that occur during the war, and these are tied to when the war starts. A form of "war weariness" sets in, mostly demonstrated by allowing previous permanent wars to become normal wars, meaning most AI civs will start making peace more often. The "end in 6/12 months" popups have a hard-coded end-date of "December, 1945" - something I need to change, actually.

Still, it should play, more or less the way you want, although cities still won't grow very much even in 240 turns. The victory condition is simply game score, something I may adjust later on in this scenario.

Finally, if you're looking to learn LUA, I can offer a couple of suggestions:

First, basically anything you want to do, someone, somewhere has already figured out how to do it. Googling with strings that look like "Civ5 xxxxxx site:civfanatics.com" is a great help.

Second, I'd recommend to to review the code in this mod (or most of my mods) to get an idea of how things work. Not to brag much, but I thoroughly document my code, with comments just about on every line - explaining what the line is tryingf to accomplish. Absolutely no modders I know of do this. I've had several people comment on different mods saying how great they are as a tool to learn LUA - which you usually have to do, if you want to influence AI/Civ5 game behavior in-game.

Last edited: Saturday at 10:25 AM

sman1975, Saturday at 6:09 AM

 

[sman1975]

Now, back to the WAW WW2 Civilizations Pack. I can have the mod wrapped up in a couple of days, but it won't fix the "monthly" game turns problem. That requires database changes to the GameSpeed_Turns database. I can put those in, but it will apply to everyone who simply wants to play a civ in any other normal context.

As a "temp solution" - I can put the appropriate database changes into the mod, but "comment" them out, so the game engine ignores them normally. Then you can use that Notepad trick from early, "uncomment" the lines out so the game will act on them, and play accordingly. Or, I could build a QUAD (quick and dirty) mod, post it here, and you could use it to implement the monthly game turns/start-stop years. The code would be the same, just how it's implemented would change. The second approach (QUAD Mod) is better, as it leaves fewer artifacts in otherwise good code. But, it also depends on how comfortable your are at performing the concomitant steps.

EDIT - BTW: still need an answer on leaving the National Promotions and Economic Handicaps in/out of the mod.

Last edited: Saturday at 6:35 AM

sman1975, Saturday at 6:19 AM

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Saturday at 7:25 AM

Hey @S-Man
I don't know what to say about National Promotions and Economic Handicaps in/out, you can take them out or leave them be, I don't mind either way.

Thanks for explaining things and how to mod years for my Scenarios.

I appreciate it.

 

[sman1975]

Reply from @BRBNick, Saturday at 7:34 AM

I have a question about something

How hard is it to make a Manpower resource mod? Civ 5 has is it in their civil war DLC. How hard is it to make it into a stand-alone mod?

 

[sman1975]

Manpower is a "solved" problem, incorporated into several mods, such as the Civil War scenario and ones like this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783095747&searchtext=manpower

Check out slide #14 in the Description of the second mod for more details.

It's a great example of what I was mentioning in the first line of post #14. Most likely, whatever you want to do has analogues out there, you just need to find them and analyze them to see if you can incorporate those concepts into your own mods.

sman1975, Saturday at 10:20 AM

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[sman1975]

@BRBNick - I tested both Poland and USSR over the weekend - long games for both civs. Was never able to recreate the crashes you've described. I think we need to review your log files to see if we can see a problem there. With so many mods active at the same time, there's probably some kind of conflict that would hopefully show up there. Makes it much easier to find a fix if one is possible.

Other Alternative is to simply play a quick game, late starting (Industrial/Modern eras), but with only this mod active. If no errors, then add the Main WAW mod, and repeat. If that works, add the next one, etc. It may take 5-10 quick games, but hopefully it would help isolate which mod is causing the conflict.

 

[BRBNick]

I tested all of the mods that I was using in a custom map, nothing happened in the game, it runs smooth. Pretty sure what causes the crash is that I make my games very big in scenarios and I overfill the map with too much cities.

 

[sman1975]

Hey Nick, user @Lt_plaa on Steam found the source of the bug. Evidently, when ModBuddy build the mod (actually, the compressed file containing all the mod files), it corrupted the unit graphics files for some reason. I've been using this tool for years, building dozens of mods compiled hundreds/thousands of times, and I've never seem this kind of error. When you build a mod in ModBuddy, it places the entire mod product directly into your MODS folder on your own computer. So, on my computer, everything looked fine and worked fine as well. However, ModBuddy compresses the files into an archive when you upload it to Steam. Something unfortunate happened somewhere between my computer and Steam.

About a year ago, my computer crashed. Fortunately, I had everything backed up and it wasn't too much problem getting back up and running. Unfortunately, ModBoddy requires a .NET framework library installed to work correctly. Over the years, Microsoft has dropped support for this required version of the .NET libs. Was difficult to find a working version. I finally cobbled together a package that "seems" to work, but I have seen some odd behaviors from time to time. I'm thinking this error might be related to those libs.

At any rate, I've rebuilt the mod, fixing all the corrupted files (again, thank goodness for backups!), and am testing it all right now to make sure it's working as designed. All looking good as far as the fix is concerned. Am also testing a YnAEMP compatibility script, as requested by someone on Steam. I've never used this mod, so I'm not sure if the script is 100% correct. It looks like it's supposed to, but I'll let some players test if further to make sure it's all right.

A long way of saying, "Sorry about screwing up your mod!" Never have seen it work like this. Will publish the "fixed" version in a few, then download it directly from Steam to make sure we didn't explode again.

 

[BRBNick]

Sup Sman, "Sorry about screwing up your mod!" no it's alright, no need to apologize. Civ 5 and mod-buddy are old, they barely get updated anymore it's more realistic that they will have bugs by now.

Was that what caused my game to crash randomly?
Who is this @Lt_plaa?