Historical Border Adjustment
A mod that fixes the recent border gore to improve historical authenticity and reduce border-gore. I added a picture (fifth picture in the steam mod gallery) to show which and to what intensity areas have been worked on.
Currently adjusted areas (still room for improvement):
- Germany (exterior)
- Western Poland
- Switzerland
- Northern Italy
- Balkan
- Catalonia
My first priority is external borders (towards other countries), then internal (within countries) and then conclude with colonial borders. Currently, the Lowlands and France are next.
If there are some errors (wrong culture, religion, province name refers to something outside its zone), be sure to contact me and I will rectify it immediately. However, I have to remain impartial therefore, if you wish for your change to be implemented, I need to be provided with sources first. If you feel like you can help, write down in the comments! All help is appreciated, even if it’s just slight polish or pointing something out. I often make mistakes and any help in correcting them is welcome. Finally, If you have any interesting flags you want me to add, send me a link in the comments; I already changed the flag of Germany to the 1871 black-white-red tricolour.
To clarify, my objective was to make the province forms feel more natural (by province shapes being subject to natural boundaries such as rivers, hills and mountains) whilst still being compatible and respectful to 1444, 1812 and 1914 borders at the same time. Some provinces currently look a bit too ‘blocky’ and they will be polished in time, but there are other provinces that simply look absurd and have a higher priority than the rest. For now, I just want the shapes to look suggestive to what they should look like so I have an easier time polishing later.
NOTE: This is a work-in-progress! I only started working on this on 12.06 and I will continue working on this over the next few weeks. I have exams until July 15th which means I won’t be very productive unless small fixes need to implemented. You can start a campaign at any point because I will not be adding any new provinces or anything that might rupture save files. I believe only the localization won’t be updated as that is tied to your save-game (because you can change those names at will in-game).
I would like to point a technical limitation: there’s a limit to how precise you can make the border shapes. The smallest changes I can make is a unit of pixel in provinces.bmp and that accounts to about 1 mm^2 on your screen when fully zoomed in. That means I cannot make any alterations that are smaller than 1 mm x 1 mm. However, the border is rendered differently depending on the surrounding pixels hence some combination could be made to make things fit. Also, regarding the size of the mod: the file-size is 35 MB only because of a single mandatory file: provinces.bmp. This file corresponds each province on the map to its data in the game files (province name, development, trade value, etc).
Finally, I have to apologize for the quality of pictures. Each image is right above the 2 MB threshold and sadly, any compression reduces the quality significantly. Hopefully, the quality is still good enough to discern the provinces in the pictures. It is likely I won’t be uploading ‘before-after’ pictures for this mod because I feel like you should see the end-product as it is so you can decide whether you want the map to look like in the images or not.
