Get the rest of the story: The Legacy of House Mlechchha

EUIII was my first taste of Paradox. I think I played exclusively as England (it was that phase in my life) and never managed to play too far into the game.

EUIV I’ve owned for some time but didn’t play much at all. I always put off playing it because I knew of the existence of CKII and the EUIV Save Converter DLC; I couldn’t convince myself to play EUIV because I knew there was the possibility of playing a “nation” from 769 and using the legacy of said nation at the start of EUIV. It was the completionist – the perfectionist – in me that stopped me getting into EUIV.

Well, now I’ve finally finished a game of CKII, I finally feel at ease with playing EUIV!

EUIV Version and DLC

I’m using the latest (at the time of writing) version of EUIV, which is 1.22.2 (release date 17th August 2017) and all DLC and expansions:

EUIV Save Converter

The EUIV Save Converter is a DLC for CKII that takes the game state from CKII and makes it available as a mod for EUIV. It makes some value judgements on the state of the game world in CKII and transposes it into a supposedly similar state for continued play in EUIV.

I have a feeling that whatever process achieves this has been specialised for certain types of CKII playthrough because there were a few issues with the straight conversion I experienced. For context, I played as House Mlechchha, uniting India under my name. I could believe that India might have been left on the sidelines a little given it was never a particular focus of CKII or EUIV.

I also imagine this conversion works better for later starts in CKII with less time for the game to evolve way past any expected behaviour. Having started in 769 myself, the game looked quite different to the default EUIV start date.

Personal Touch

Getting the converted file out of CKII was easy enough: hit ESC to enter the menu then press the “Export Game” button. Boom. Now there’s a mod in <Documents>\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings II\eu4_export\mod. (Replace <Documents> with the location of your Documents folder e.g. C:\Users\YourName\Documents.)

In this folder is a .mod file and another directory containing more sub-directories (including “common”, “gfx”, “history” etc.). The file and the folder should have the same name with your primary title and the conversion date; in my case, this was “Converted_India1444_11_10”.

When you load up EUIV, you’re given the option to also load this mod. This changes the game world on 11th November 1444 to ostensibly match where you left off in CKII.

I noticed the following problems:

There was no India. Instead, there was “Hindustan”. As it happens, there is no concept of “India” in EUIV; it is replaced with either Hindustan, as mentioned, or a nation called “Bharat”.

Despite most of Hindustan’s provinces being Hindu, the nation’s religion was Jain.

Despite Bengali being the most common culture, Hindustan’s culture was Gujarati. My guess is that the converter deduces the nation’s religion and culture from the CKII leader. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given how EUIV is supposed to transition to representing something closer to the modern state and less of the feudal realm.

Hindustan has a “no_government” type, suggesting some conversion issue.

Many nations had odd technology groups. Hindustan’s was “Western”, many European nations had “Muslim”, many Muslim nations had “Western”, and there was a smattering of “Eastern” about the map.

I’m sure there were many more, but I didn’t want to spend too long hacking around with the mod files. Which is what I had to do to fix some of this stuff. The mod files are fairly easy to decipher, so I made some of my own changes.

Changing Religion, Culture, and Country

Having read through the EUIV formable countries list on the Wiki, I decided I should probably be playing Bharat and not Hindustan in EUIV. The latter requires the nation to be Muslim. The former requires the nation to be Dharmic (from a selection of others) and of one of a number of culture groups, including Eastern Aryan (which includes Bengali). This matched with my experience in CKII.

Having Bengali as my primary culture also gives me a group set of National Ideas, whereas Gujarati gets generic ones, so I feel playing as Bengali would give me a better experience in EUIV.

I therefore opened the file called “HIN – Hindustan.txt” in Converted_India1444_11_10\history\countries. I changed the “primary_culture” value to “bengali” and “religion” to “hinduism”.

This only half fixes the problem. I also need to tell the game that I’m Bharat and not Hindustan. The text file name – “HIN – Hindustan.txt” – starts with a three-letter code called the country tag. There’s a list of all the country tags in the EUIV game files (for me, this was in Europa Universalis IV Third Rome\history\countries). I found that I wanted to change this text file to “BHA – Bharat.txt”.

I’m still not there yet, though! I also had to change “Hindustan.txt” to “Bharat.txt” in Converted_India1444_11_10\common\countries. I then did a search of the whole mod folder for instances of “HIN” and replaced it with “BHA”. This was easy with the “Find in Files” function in Notepad++. (Also necessary to do it with an automatic replacement function like this because there were hundreds of instances of “HIN” in the mod files.)

This got me close to the nation I wanted in EUIV, but there were still a few fixes yet.

Changing Government and Technology Group

As mentioned, Bharat had a government type of “no_government”. I’ve seen various bug reports surrounding this phenomenon and there appears to be some incompatibility with some empire-level titles and certain versions of the converter. India in CKII gets converted to “absolute_monarchy” in Converted_India1444_11_10\history\countries\BHA – Bharat.txt, which doesn’t have an EUIV representation.

The answer was just to change this to “feudal_monarchy” and everything comes out in the wash.

In this same mod file, the “technology_group” was set to “western”. Of course, “indian” would be a closer fit.

As mentioned, the converter had actually bodged most of the technology groups for all of the converted nations in the game. I had to open all 136 files in Converted_India1444_11_10\history\countries and make a personal judgement on each nation’s technology group in EUIV.

I used the Tech groups map on the EUIV Wiki to help me decide which technology group each nation should have. Of course, I didn’t recognise where every nation would be in the game world, so I had to use EUIV’s in-game “Find” function to identify some of the nations. I also made sure to make the Byzantine Empire a member of the special Anatolian tech group (which is given the “ottoman” value in the mod file).

This wasn’t a quick process, but it means that the game is likely to run a little more in-line with history. If I hadn’t have done this, there were some Western European nations that may have ended up as technology backwaters and the New World may not have developed until very late in the game due to the geographical location of some of the automatically-converted “western” nations.

Further, the tech group actually determines which areas of the map you can see by default. If I’d continued playing as a “western” Bharat, I could see all of Europe, but not much in my proverbial back yard. This would apply equally to many of the AI nations and would probably cause all sorts of problems.

Vassals

The Save Converter assigns a number of vassals to a country depending on a number of factors, including the state of vassals in CKII, the “level” of the country and its vassals (e.g. level 3 for empire, level 2 for kingdom), and the government type.

In its infinite wisdom, the Save Converter assigned me two vassals. I was initially a bit miffed at this given the lengths I’d gone to to unite India in CKII, but then thought a bit about it; some of my vassals would probably have a thing or two to say about the conversion to statehood in EUIV, and some of them might have convinced me to remain as vassals rather than immediately be subsumed into the entity of Bharat.

This also gives me some extra diplomatic mechanisms to play with at the start of the EUIV game.

Of course, this also applies to the other nations in the world, so I expect I’ll see a few differences in the political layout to what I’d come to recognise as familiar in CKII.

Age of Discovery

With all of that said and done, I’m about ready to dive into the deep end of EUIV; a whole new set of game mechanics to unpick and get to grips with and the status quo in this version of 1444 is quite different to the historical one, so existing walkthroughs are of limited use.

Quite what I want to achieve with Bharat in the next four centuries or so I’m not yet set on. I think I’m poised to dominate trade in the South Asia region, which could be a springboard to further ventures.

I’d like to colonise South Africa and perhaps the South Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. I also like the idea of colonising – by which I mean conquering – Britain in an historical switcharoo. Nothing too ambitious…!

Next Time

I’ll begin by examining my starting position in EUIV. There are a lot of new concepts to engage with, but I’m hoping that number will be fairly small to get around to unpausing the game and having a rough idea of what to do first.

Get the rest of the story: The Legacy of House Mlechchha