All of the Paradox games have lengthy documentation, but who uses paper manuals any more?  Having the strategy guides or documentation open while playing these games is often useful, especially if you have the real estate on your monitor to do so.  Unfortunately, the expected “Full Screen” toggle is not present in the options screen.  While windowed mode is not “officially supported” (as per the manual) by Paradox, it’s easy enough to enable:

How to Activate Windowed Mode

1. Navigate to the game’s installation directory.  (This will vary from system to system, depending on whether you use Steam, GamersGate, etc.)
2. Locate the “settings.txt” file and open it with your favorite text editor.  I would not recommend doing this while the game is running.
3. Change the “fullscreen” value from “yes” to “no”.
4. Enter a resolution small than your current system resolution.  For example, if your current system resolution is 1920 x 1080, enter 1440 x 900.  This will give enough room to play the game and still read through the manuals.  I suggest sticking with known height/width combinations.
5. Play game and read manual simultaneously.

Czechoslovakia 1936 - what can go wrong?

This will work on the current EU engine Paradox games, EU:Rome, EU3, HoI3, and Vic2. You could tweak some other settings while editing the text file, but I would recommend against it.  Anything else you might want to futz with is available in the Options menu in-game and editing them yourself increases the opportunity for error.

The good news is that Paradox has their own screen capture utility built into the game:

Pressing F11 while playing will take a traditional screen capture.  This takes everything visible on the screen and stores it as a bitmap file.  Yes, a bitmap file.  Not a .jpg, .png, or even the rare .tga, but a .bmp.  Below you can see the dogs of Sardinia-Piedmont invading the peaceful Swiss.  Jerks.  Click any of the images below to see the full-sized picture.

Pressing F12 while playing creates a snapshot of the world map.  Suitable for framing, this 5616 x 2160 file will let everyone know exactly how far the British empire had spread.  On October 10th.  In 1890.  Black indicates terra incognita.

At the time of this writing, Steam has just started rolling out their new “Cloud Screenshot” feature, which takes a screen capture and shares it with your friends.  This is also apparently bound to F12, so we’ll see how that develops as it gets rolled out to more users.

The eagle-eyes among you might notice that I linked to .png files instead of the original bitmaps.  WAIMObandwidth?  The original screenshot .bmp was 8 MB and shrunk down considerably as a .png file.  What’s really funny is the world map: it started life as a 35 MB bitmap, but when converted to a .png it shrunk to a paltry 246 KB.

Happy mapmaking!

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

1. Navigate to your game’s installation directory, and find the “common” folder.
2. 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++.
3. 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.)
4. 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.

I recently picked up Panzer General 2 from Good Old Games, going off the seemingly omnipresent comments that it’s “one of the best strategy games ever made” and is still considered by many to remain the best in the series.

Good Old Games, public relations gaffes notwithstanding, fills an important niche and allows players to easily play older computer games on modern systems.  Panzer General 2 installed and ran flawlessly on my Windows 7 64 system, but there was one glaring problem: the game always ran in full screen mode.  Not only does this blow up the game to giant proportions on my 23″ monitor, but the 1920 x 180 resolution and 16:9 screen ratio give everything that Fat Albert squash.

I looked high and low for a simple fix to this problem.  Alas, there was no config file I could edit or easy tweak to make the game run in windowed mode.  ”It shouldn’t be this hard,” I said.  ”Surely, someone has come up against this problem in the past and resolved it.”  My quest took me on a whirlwind tour of the darker, more Geocities-esque corners of the internet where strategy grognards talk about games from 1997 and how they can be modded.  Animated flags gifs were abundant.

Modding brings up an interesting side note – there is still a huge fanbase that plays and modifies Panzer General 2.  I found several mods that ran the game at higher resolutions, added new graphics and new scenarios, and generally gussied up the game.  OpenPG2 is as good a place to start as any, if mods and updates are what ye seek.  What me be seeking, er, what I was looking for, however, was the original Panzer General 2 experience.  Just in a window.

Finally, I got a tip on some software from one of the forums I frequent (thanks, spelk!).  My informant directed me to another forum where old strategy games are discussed, specifically Steel Panthers World at War.  Over there they’ve been using a not-really-translated-into-English Japanese program called D3Windower to run SPWaW in windowed mode.

Skip Down to Me If You Just Care About Windowed PG2

The software in question is D3Windower, and has been used with some success on other older yet still awesome war games.  There’s no full English translation for the software, but the package linked above has enough translated that you can get the game you want running to work.  Here’s the step-by-step instructions:

1. Download and unpack D3Windower.  It will come as a .rar file, which you will need to unpack using 7-Zip or similar.
2. Launch D3Windower.  The main window will contain a list of whatever games you want to run in windowed mode.  To add a game, click the “+” button.  Browse to the PG2 executable (C:\Program Files (x86)\GOGcom\Panzer General 2) and click okay.  PG2 will now be listed in the main window.
3. Highlight the PG2 executable and enter the Settings screen by clicking on the folder icon with the tools on it.  (Hovering over said icon will reveal that is is indeed Settings.)
4. Enter 1200 and 800 for the screen width and height, respectively.
5. Switch to the Window Mode tab.
6. Uncheck the Direct X 1-7 button.  This is important!  Leaving this checked will cause PG2 to crash at launch.
7. Verify the settings, and then click on the Computer icon to launch the game.
8. ????
9. Profit!

That’s all there is to it.  It’s not complicated by any means, but considering how long it took me to track down the solution I hope this post will be helpful to those who come after me, or didn’t see my post in the GOG.com Panzer General forum.

Happy Panzer-ing!