French invasion of Mexico

[grimjaw]

Just a couple of questions. I couldn't find it when I did a search.

In the full campaign, when does the event fire for the French invasion of Mexico? Does that simulation still happen in CW2, even though it's all AI now?

If that event fires, does it depend on certain circumstances? I've been playing around with foreign intervention, and I managed to get it to fire early on (beginning of 1862). However, there hasn't been any French incursion into Mexico.

jm

[samba_liten]

I've seen the invasion a few times. The French AI does land troops in Mexico. I lost track of them after the landing, due to FOW.

[grimjaw]

I remember seeing the event fire in the logs in previous games, but until recently I never bothered to turn off FOW to see what was going on down there.

[grimjaw]

What I was really looking for was the time of the event. From what I read, the combined French/British/Spanish fleets arrived in the beginning of 1862. So the event should fire around that time, yes?

[grimjaw]

... yes, first quarter 1862. However, I think the intervention goes no further than Veracruz unless FI fires. Either that, or it's never simulated. As of the intervention (it's mid-March 1862 in a game I'm running right now), the Mexican forces are for all practical purposes permanently fixed. The French units in Veracruz cannot proceed beyond that because all the regions adjacent (I figure all of Mexico) is marked as neutral to the French.

So is there a way to tweak FI so that it fires, using a console command? If it's a value in the .hst file, it might as well be a needle in the haystack. I've found some values that seem to correspond to resources, but nothing yet that screams "I'm the FI value!"

... nevermind, I think I found it. It's stored with the CSA values, not a global one.

Unless something changes with the ChangeFaction command, the French intervention is limited to Veracruz and the game never simulates it. It's there for some flavor, but given that:

- France can't advance past Veracruz, even though the event says Mexican territory can be entered by France and
- the Mexican units are all either permanently fixed or the turn-count-to-unlock goes past the end of the game by almost 100 turns

... it might as well be an image that says something happened, instead of putting any troops down there. The Mexican and French troops will improve from militia to regulars, but the pictures for their units aren't there. The mechanisms for all this are there, but it's not implemented. Future paid DLC content? Wouldn't surprise me.

[grimjaw]

From what I can see in the files on 1.04, the only thing that's simulated about the intervention is the the landing of Comte de Lorencez, and maybe the initial placement of other French forces. The events that unlock Mexican territory have MaxOccurs set to zero, and the events that unfix Mexican units have the same occurrence setting. They'll never fire.

Also, I see the reason why there were no French Forces in Mexico in the game I was playing. If FI fires before 2/1, the events placing French intervention forces in Veracruz won't fire.

[Captain_Orso]

Many times events that are set to 0 are done so so that another event can set them to fire. You need to look for another event which references the event which unlocks the French and Mexican forces.

[grimjaw]

I know what you're saying, and that's what I've been doing. An example of what you describe I see in Foreign Entry.sct regarding GBR and FRA events for declaring war. By default they are set to MaxOccurs = 0, and the foreign entry event sets them to MaxOccurs = 1. However, there's no event I can find that changes that setting for unblocking the Mexican territory or unfixing their troops. It should be easy enough to see in any unmodified game running a full campaign, past mid-1863, where the French intervention fired. Turn off FOW, switch to MEX or FRA and see if the unlocked forces in Veracruz have access to surrounding territory. I suspect not, nor will the Mexican forces with fixtype < 999 be unlocked.

The scenario framework for it is there but incomplete, or cobbled together from the previous game; I don't really know. It references unlocking Spanish and British forces in Veracruz (which would have simulated the combined fleet there initially), but never creates forces there to unlock in the first place.

[ohms_law]

It's just unfinished, I'm sure. The map didn't extend that far in AACW.

[grimjaw]

That's one of the things that's so frustrating, IMO. There's all this huge, beautiful map and a chunk of it, while being set up for activity, is in practice just scenery.

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The image above is one of the things I'm talking about. See the missing portrait? This happens to French units as well. I don't know about the British units, but I think most of their forces are regulars. The French and Mexican model templates are based on CMN conscript models, but many of them don't customize the TrainUpg value of the specific nation model.

Example: a Mexican rural cavalry regiment will have it's own model, and it's TemplateUID points to CMN conscript cavalry. The Mexican model file does not specify a TrainUpg value, but the CMN file does (a CMN regular cav), which is what the Mexican model file will use. As soon as it upgrades, the portrait disappears. Not a big deal, right, since in CW2 I can't control the foreign forces anyway? Well I don't know about the AI, but if I ChangeFaction to MEX, once this upgrade happens I can no longer manipulate the upgraded units. I can see them, but I can't move them. If the unit is part of a brigade, I can't manipulate the brigade.

This is really what got me looking into the whole thing in the first place. I've been updating the model files to add TrainUpg values to the foreign units so that when they upgrade to regulars they don't break. It doesn't involve more than adding the value to the nation model and then regenerating the models.cached file. Someone will come along shortly and tell me I should be using the DB for this.