Scenario Variables and "Events" Without a Recipient

**Kemalakkus** · January 23, 2019

Scenario variables: Integer values that events can get and set - manually or to a specific value like how much money a civilization has. They would be great help for scenarios where I want an event to check something from the past as well, like whether a certain decision was made in a previous event. I don't know the maximum amount of money a civilization can have, but if it was M then I believe a range of [-M, M] for variables would allow the player to store any value they could want in them.

"Events" without a recipient: Events that are not necessarily a decision made by a country to shift the environment, but a random or specific shift in the environment enacted by... the game? They would be more useful in updating the variables mentioned above rather than make uninformed changes on the player's country which may be annoying.

Variables would be a huge step up, and IMO urgently needed for scenario design while events without a recipient would come in handy for neater design where there isn't a specific country that needs to be alerted about something.

For example, I have events in my "WW2 August 1st, 1943" scenario that annex certain groups of provinces back into the Soviet Union when they are liberated from Axis occupation. It would be only sensible to get rid of those events' possibility to occur if the two sides achieved a status quo peace without one or more of those events having occurred. The Soviets once recognized the German annexation of that territory and wouldn't aggressively reorganize it into their administration when they get hold of it in another war! The best that can be done at the moment is to make the event non-repeatable.

If scenario variables and events without recipients were a thing now, I would have made use of both of them in my scenario: Say I created a scenario variable called a (initial value: 0), and an event without a recipient that fires when Germany and the Soviet Union are not at war and sets a to 1. If I now added a prerequisite to those re-annexation events that have the event fire only when a equals 0, that would be my goal achieved. The Soviets would only be able to re-annex that land when they have been at war with the Axis since the beginning of the scenario, and thus never given up the land!

Other examples I can think of where variables to connect two or more decisions that are far away in time would be useful are:

The German Empire choosing whether to unconditionally support Austria-Hungary in the period between Franz Ferdinand's assassination and the actual outbreak of the war where they will or will not be forced to join based on whether they have promised support
The same concept above for the Allied guarantee of Poland in a 1939 scenario (the choice to support Poland would have been made at that time, so probably more useful for a scenario that starts from further back in time)
Japanese choice to prepare to respond to the American Hull Note with an attack on Pearl Harbor

Edited January 23, 2019 by Kemalakkus

**Kemalakkus** · January 23, 2019

Another good addition with this would be to add the option to include tooltips in event outcome choices. There will definitely be situations where we need to inform the player of the future results of the choice they're making if variables ever become a reality. While we're at it, why not add descriptions to events as well?