Build status:
Shatter your Victoria II world at any time you want, in any mod.
Shattering means breaking all extant vassal–overlord relationships, and having every country release as many independent countries as possible. This can be done on 1 January 1836 or at any later point. Do it once or repeatedly through a campaign, it’s all up to you.
Grab the 1.0.0 release.
Extract the shatter folder and the shatter.mod file from the provided archive, and place them in
your favourite mod folder. Both the folder and file must end up side-by-side.
In the Victoria 2 launcher you should see an entry for the mod:
Example launcher picture featuring the older 0.1.0 version
Make sure that the mod is selected in the launcher (as pictured above) so that it will be loaded by the game.
This mod has been designed so that load order should not matter.
Once a game has been started you can verify that Shatter has been loaded correctly by looking at the decision screen. It should include the following decision somewhere:
You can be playing any country for this to be available. Activate the decision at any time to be presented with Parameter events that allow you to pick the right kind of shattering for your purposes:
-
- History-based release: set up new countries by relying on their historical data for picking techs, inventions, and government type. Appropriate for shattering precisely on or shortly after a bookmark e.g. 1 January 1836, but can result in large tech deficits otherwise. Some countries that are set up to appear at a later point may have their historical data tuned for that date, resulting in oddities.
- Parent-based release: set up new countries by relying on their parent country for picking techs, inventions, and government type. Convenient for shattering on a later date, with the drawback of sometimes imposing an inappropriate government type. This has largely the same effects as releasing a country through the Release Nations tab of the Politics screen except that shattering will only ever produce independent countries, never puppets.
-
- Releasable countries only: stick to countries that are allowed to be released through the Release Nations tab of the Politics screen. Special cases (usually: revolt tags, some cultural unions) will not appear on the map.
- Allow unreleasable countries: try to release everything, consequences be damned.
-
- Enable core revokation: countries lose cores on the countries they release. This mimics the behaviour of releasing a country through the Release Nations tab of the Politics screen.
- Disable core revokation: countries keep cores on countries they release. This tends to benefit large countries.
Each parameter is picked on a per-activation basis, or can alternatively be saved to be re-used for all subsequent shatterings for this campaign. Saved parameters are stored on a per-country basis, and can be reset through the decision (without actually shattering anything).
Once all parameters have been picked, or if all parameters were already saved, you will be presented with the following choice before anything is performed:
The event gives you five options:
- shatter the world, breaking free all vassal countries & releasing as many countries as possible by trying to follow normal gameplay rules
- shatter your country only (though released countries may still retrieve their cores from other countries)
- do nothing (in case you activated the decision by accident)
- reset the saved parameters for the country you are currently playing, without shattering anything
- do nothing, and dismiss the decision for the country you are currently playing (you will not be able to shatter the world again as that country)
If you do decide to shatter the world, the game may turn unresponsive for a short period of time. Please be patient, there is a lot of processing to be done.
Countries that release others will see their cores revoked on their former lands. Your country will not be given preferential treatment and will be undergoing the full shattering process as well.
Once the world has been shattered you will be offered the choice to dismiss the Shatter decision for the country you are currently playing. This is convenient if e.g. you only intended to shatter the world once at the start.
The shattering process is best explained as a set of rules:
- countries are released in generations: for a given shattering the initial countries constitute generation 1 and they release the countries that will constitute generation 2
- the process repeats until shattering is complete: generation 2 will release generation 3 and so on
- capital priority rule: existing countries attempt to release non-existing countries of which they hold the capital before they do other countries (this is a global order)
- non-union priority rule: existing countries attempt to release non-cultural unions before they do unions (this is also a global order)
- core recovery order: countries from a given generation recover their cores from all countries of preceding generations (but never from their own)
- no full overlap rule: a country will not release another that has cores all it, nor will it turn over its entire territory during core recovery
- unciv priority rule: civilised countries do not recover cores held by non-Westernised country
The no full overlap rule prevents non-existing cultural unions from subverting the overall process. Consider for instance most 1836 maps which feature many German countries (some tiny) and no united Germany yet. Without the rule and because German cores usually fully overlap these countries, the map would easily end up with a very solid Germany—quite the opposite of shattering.
The same logic applies to non-union countries that fully overlap another as well, which usually act as a “variant” government or quasi-cultural union. A good example of this is Bolivian cores fully overlapping Peru-Bolivia on 1836 maps based e.g. on the New Nations Mod.
The unciv priority rule is to avoid creating colonial provinces.
Since shattering is always performed in the same order behind the scenes, the process always produces the same result (given starting countries and cores on the map and which country initiates the shattering). The shattering rules are designed to mitigate this as best as possible. Unfortunately random results are harder to achieve in Victoria II mods than you might think.
A side-effect of the design is that shattering is very process intensive.
This mod has only been tested with Victoria II with its two expansions. It should be compatible with any mod, as long as the following holds:
- event IDs
634736xxxare available
The image as well as its variants that can be found in the mod proper are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. They are derivative works of Point of Impact by Bill Harrison, itself available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
| Troubleshooting Guide | Having issues running Victoria II? Try our guide! |
| ccHFM | An unofficial, ongoing effort to maintain HFM |
| The Country Workshop | Collection of odd alternative starts and fantasy countries designed on a whim, provided as a submod for ccHFM |
The first real release beyond a simple proof of concept. Shattering results in better defined countries.
- implement shatter parameters, to customise shattering behaviour
- prevent AI countries from picking event outcomes reserved to players (i.e. dismissing the Shatter decision)
- implement capital priority rule for improved consistency and final borders
- implement core recovery for improved final borders
- add and document a couple other shatter rules
- add the option to shatter just your own country
The original release. More of a proof of concept, with serious limitations.