Shattered Europa
Have you ever wondered what the game would be like if every location was its own, independent country? This mod answers that question!
This mod is not ironman or savegame compatible, obviously.
Every country in this mod is playable!
The New World and Indonesia were decolonized for this mod – this is because EU5 seems to have a soft cap on how many tags are allowed, and crashes if you exceed that number; so some regions had to be removed for this to work.
At first, this mod loads and runs extremely poorly; but performance and stability both get exponentially better as the world consolidates over the 1300s. Loading can take upwards of 20 minutes on slower machines. Months take 30 seconds – 2 minutes to tick over, with freezes on the month tick. The game occasionally crashes on or before the month tick – this is as a result of EU5 being poorly optimized, and if you turn on monthly autosaves, you can pick up from that autosave and the crash won’t repeat itself.
This mod is not inherently compatible with any other mod that impacts the map. However, it is very easy to generate a Shattered Europa version for any other mod, as the "shattering" process is done using a python script I wrote that should be agnostic to the actual map itself. Please contact me if you want this process done for another total conversion.
An observation, you will notice that the AI countries will constantly declare war on tags they do not border without a CB. The AI will then make this country a vassal or fiefdom in the peace deal, instead of actually expanding normally. The EU5 AI is truly a work of art, emphasis on the "art" and definitely not on the "work". At least it’s better than 1.0.8, where the AI would just declare these wars and then get force peaced (so never expand at all).
As a final note, this mod can and should be taken as evidence that EU5 1.0 has a ton of underlying systems issues, both in terms of its engine clearly being poorly optimized (an 5x increase in tags doesn’t make the game run 5x slower, it makes it run exponentially slower), and in terms of its AI as noted above. The crashes seem to be a direct result of a memory leak of some description, or at least really poor memory management; and this ballooning memory over the course of a game (which is noticeable even in Vanilla, but not significant enough to impact stability) is a clear failure of the engine – as is the soft cap on tags, which also seem to reach some form of memory usage maximum before reaching a stack overflow (which really should not be happening here lol). In addition, as tags get conquered over time, performance gets exponentially better. This mod acts as a good stress test for the engine, and it is one that the Eu5/Jomini engine very clearly fails.
(tl;dr rewrite in rust necessary)
Source code available here[github.com]
This mod is inspired by Shattered Europa for EU4 by Comrade Doge. That mod is actually fun to play; and achieves this by not having nearly as many countries as this mostrosity I’ve made.
