Darkest Hour

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This dev diary is all about DH's new claim system.

Posted by CaptRobau on Jan 8th, 2011

Darkest Hour - Dev Diary #5 - Claims

Hello again, it is Monday and that means it is time for another Dev Diary. Well actually we have more for you today. As things were a bit hectic over the weekend i didn't have time to write the Diary as long as i would have liked to we will give you a small one first. And finish up later in about 3 or 4 hours with another one.

Claims

We're here today to talk about one of the new concepts introduced by Darkest Hour: Claims!
What are claims? And what is the difference between claims and cores? Here are the answers to these questions!

Claims are basically used for diplomatic purposes and are useful to assert the desire of a country to own and control a province. There are no economic benefits of claiming provinces: they are counted as non-national when it comes to IC/MP/Resources or revolt risk and there will be no way to transform those claims into cores. However, claimed provinces are counted as national when it comes to diplomacy or country release. That means that a claimed province appears in the "Have claims against..." section and can be asked with the "Demand Territory" mission in the Diplomatic tab. The AI won't secede provinces it has claims on to allies/puppets even if those provinces are cores to that ally. In most cases claims will be used by players just to "redraw" the map in the way they wanted it to be after a successful war, especially in case of partition. Think about the partitioning of Greece for example: Italy, Germany and Bulgaria can claim different provinces and they won't secede them to their allies (even if those allies have cores on them).

So, how does claiming provinces work? Via the right-click menu it is possible to add and remove claims to single provinces, areas or regions. Claiming non-owned province increases belligerence and removing claims from such provinces decreases it (both values are set in misc.txt). Claimed provinces can be seen best on the Diplomacy map mode - they use lighter green than cores and also a black dot as opposed to the red one used for cores.

However, there are some limitations to avoid exploiting this new mechanism: it is not always possible to claim provinces of another country. New claims can be freely set to war enemies, but can be set to neutral countries only if policy allows that (interventionism must be high enough). Moreover claims cannot be demanded from countries that you are guaranteeing at the same time: for example Germany cannot ask for provinces from Poland if it is guaranteeing its independence!

Another new useful feature is that peace negotiations now take into account cores and claims:
- Insist on Demands automatically adds all claims and cores the initiating country has to the demanded provinces list;
- Beg for Peace automatically adds all claims and cores the receiving country has to the demanded provinces list;

Automatic Release of Nations

Another very interesting new feature introduced by Darkest Hour is the Automatic Release of Nations. First of all, claims are taken into account when a new nation is released and are considered like extra provinces. Moreover, Darkest Hour reviewed the automatic release of countries done by the AI, which suffered many limitations: the AI could release a country in its release = { } list only if it was a democracy, it was at peace and there were no more Axis powers. These limitations were removed and now even Germany or the Soviet Union can release countries during the war.
Moreover, if it no more necessary to control all the provinces in the minimum list in revolt.txt: minimum, extra and claimed provinces are all taken into account and if enough of them are already under the control of the AI nation, it will release that country.

Yeah, but what does that mean in terms of gameplay? Well, we know that after the end of WWII the Allies released West Germany and South Korea whereas the Comintern released East Germany and North Korea. But what if things went differently? What could have happened if the Allies had recovered part of Poland? Couldn't this situation lead to a Democratic Poland and a Communist Poland? Or had the Soviet Union conquered all of Germany and half of Netherlands, wouldn't they have created a East Netherlands opposed to the West Netherlands freed by the Allies? Or maybe even a North Communist Italy opposed to a South Democratic Italy!

With these new mechanism (and with new "communist" countries implemented of course) it is possible to recreate a dynamic situation after the Victory in Europe. No more bundled by fixed events, the AI will be able to release nations as soon as possible and the outcome of the war will be different every time. The Rush for Berlin will be even faster now and with greater consequences!

So, to conclude this Dev Dairy, here are the changes to the code regarding claims:

code:

- manual claims can be enabled or disabled from misc.txt (diplomacy section : Allow manual claims change in-game for players: 1 - Enabled, 0 - Disabled );
- there is a new provinces list named "claimedprovinces" available for countries which can be set in scenario (INC) files and in revolt.txt (claims = { } list);
- there are new event commands to add or remove claims: type = addclaim which = [prov id] / type = removeclaim which = [prov id];
- there is a trigger to check for claims: claims = { province = a [data = tag ] } # check if that province is claimed by TAG (or country in question if not specified);
- it is possible to set in misc.txt the increase and decrease of belligerence for adding and removing claims (does not apply for owned by enemies or claimed province via event command);
- there is a new policy modifier in policy_effects.csv that regulates claiming new provinces of neutral countries;

And here are the changes to the code regarding the release of nations:

code:

New misc.txt parameters ("ai" section):
* Use new AI release rules - all countries can release puppets even when at war. 1 - Yes, 0 - No
* Masters become master of new puppet's puppets too. 1 - Yes, 0 -No
New parameters for country creation (revol.txt):
* claims = { PROV_ID ...} - populates claimedprovinces list
* min = X - allows release if at least X provinces of minimum list are controlled by releaser country. By default (no min_prov entry or min_prov = -1) it is equal to provinces in minimum list.
* min_extra = X - allows release if at least X provinces of extra list are controlled by releaser country. By default (no min_ extra entry) it is 0.
* value = X.X (0.0 - 1.25) - used by the old release model (when no min or min_extra are defined). When "score" is above that value the country will be available for release. By default (no value) it is 0.51.