Paradox Interactive’s popular strategy games allow the player to alter the course of history and mold the wold as he or she would like to see it. Each game takes place during a specific time period, allowing players to reenact World War II, the Victorian Era, or other historical periods. Paradox Games are also known for using text files for most of the data used by the game. This makes them a hit with the modding community; small changes are easy enough for the casual user, but in-depth mods are possible by the more tenacious.
Here’s a quick and easy tweak that takes care of a question I’ve seen asked several times on various message boards: “How do I make my game last longer?” All of the Paradox games have a predefined time period in which they take place, and it’s not uncommon for players to want the game to go on just a little bit longer to see the outcome of a particular plot or war. The standard dates are:
- Europa Universalis: Rome – 280 BC to 27 AD (Or CE, if you prefer)
- Crusader Kings - 1066 to 1482
- Europa Universalis III – 1453 to 1821
- Victoria II – 1836 to 1936
- Hearts of Iron III – 1936 to 1948
The following tweak is known to work on all of the above games with the exception of Crusader Kings, which has a separate process listed below. (It should be noted that Crusader Kings II is in development and will use the latest Paradox game engine.) CK built on a different, older game engine than the other games and has a different file structure.
Changing the Date
- Navigate to your game’s installation directory, and find the “common” folder.
- Locate the “defines” file. In EU: Rome and EU3 this will be a .txt file. In Vic2 and HoI3, it will be a .lua file. Lua is a scripting language that is heavily used in Paradox games. These files can be edited with your favorite text editor such as Notepad or Notepad++.
- Change the “end_date” value (it’s right at the top) to your desired ending year. You can add on the extra ten years that you think you need to conquer the Iberian peninsula or add on a hundred years just to see what happens. (Apparently you can also raise that pesky maximum child bearing age, see below.)
- For Crusader Kings, the process is the same except the file is called “1066_scenario.eug” (there is one for each scenario) and is located in the Scenarios folder.*
The only caveat is that you will not see any new content, technology, or scripted events in the dates that follow. Extending Victoria II to 1939 won’t result in WWII starting – the game’s history database just doesn’t contain that information. (That is, of course, what Hearts of Iron is for.)
Happy history making!
*Thanks to the Elvenshae and the Penny Arcade community for some of the information in this post.