Okay, I actually need some advice about how to include colonies that "peacefully" broke away from their colonial powers. You can't enter the game as a Civ's vassal?
I think there are ways to code a vassal on spawn. I'm not a coder, however; though there is a modding Q&A thread right in this modmod forum.
You obviously are someone who cares a lot about game efficiency. Do you have any suggestions about the number of turns? I need to balance America needing to be able to complete its first objective (defeat confederacy) without having blisteringly boring games when the Second World War rolls around.
First up, winning a war in about 8 turns would be difficult, to say the least. With the amount of devastation it's supposed to create for the South, and the bloodiness of the war, you might need to extend the date or the turns per year for gameplay's sake. Unless, you tip the war in the union's favor(Granted, it'd historically be like that). The latter would be better, it'd make for a challenging game for both; more of a war of survival for the South and a war of time for the north. The former may yeild imbalances in time.
As for the almost a hundred years wait for the next major conflict, I'd suggest a tweak to the second and third UHVs. I think the second should have a change in due date to around the 80's-2000. The second could be control those areas as mentioned, and make sure no European colonies exist in North America(Central and Carribeans inclusive) so they are busy in those years. They won't be over-worked as Mexico and Canada would help in European removal, and it won't be an entirely boring game for that near 100 years no major conflict exists.
Speaking of World Wars, should I script a "assasination of the archduke" to drive civs to war or let aggressive AIs and historical victory goals do the motivating?
I agree to something that triggers the war like that. Though I think it shouldn't be absolute. We don't want a history game on rails, necessarily.
European civilizations did exert a lot of control of local civilizations even if they weren't directly in control. I can't have too many "playable" civilizations to vassalize though. I think that the system of vassals needs to be changed slightly because control/vassalize UHVs are often too easy.
You could give the AI a code to not vassalize peacefully so easily. I forget which mod did it, but one of them did so to Mansa Munsa. In that particular mod, I've never seen him vassalized without war. Might've been Synthesis(sp?)
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