The First World War Mod: The Italian Job

I’ve been hard at work expanding the map of the WWI mod.

With a month of effort, I’ve added Italy, Anatloia, Switzerland, and the Caucasus.

I’ve also added one of Turkey’s colonial posessions: (a slightly ugly) Libya.

It’s quite a big expansion, but why these regions?

Because Italy and Turkey represent one of the final building blocks of the early-game, the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. This war, which saw Italy seize Ottoman Libya (or ‘Tripolitania’) as well as the Dodecanese Islands, will be the first to play out in the game (unless I decide to model the French occupation of Fes, of which the Italo-Turkish war is a direct conflict). A bit like the Spanish Civil War in vanilla HoI4, this is an early point of excitement in the game.

Some History

Italy had long coveted Libya: identification with classical Rome brought many Italians to view the territory as theirs to inherit, and some lawmakers hoped that sending Italian emmigrants to an Italian colony rather than America, they could mitigate their population drain in the south.

The ageing Ottoman empire, though militarily weak, was propped up by the Great Powers - out of fear of the chaos that would ensue in the event of its collapse, and out of a desire to prevent any other power from gaining from its dissolution.

It was French support that eventually gave Italy a chance to strike. In 1902 the two countries came to an agreement over their rivalry in North Africa: France sought to control Morocco and, if it could count on Italy’s support in doing so, Italy would receive France’s support in taking Libya, when a territorial rearrangement arrived.

That moment came in 1911, when France marched on the Moroccan city of Fes in response to an uprising against their steady penetration of Morocco (this resulted in the Agadir crisis; a standoff with German gunboats and yet another flashpoint foreshadowing the Great War). France promptly gave Rome its blessing - as did Britain and even Russia - to invade Libya. Conversely, Italy’s official allies in the Central Powers discouraged its invasion. This episode was one of several crowbars with which the Entente pried Italy away from Germany and Austria.

The war had many firsts, notably the first use of airplanes in combat, both as reconnaisance and for bombing (the latter wasn’t very effective).

It’s fortunate for me that the war can be considered a result of French actions: I plan to launch the mod with a French focus tree, but not an Italian one. For this reason the wargoal is currently given to Italy by a French focus (though Italy starts with cores on Libya, and I plan to add other methods of them gaining th wargoal).

Mapping Italy & Turkey

It’s been a while since I posted about my map-making process.

I work in an enormous photoshop file - a file that’s now three years old.

It contains all the data pertaining to my map. Above you can see:

Province Outlines: These are drawn in the key-colour of their state. I use a python script to fill them with unique colours, and another script to assign them to states and strategic regions.
Terrain
Railways: These are interpreted by a script.
Victory Points: These are written by a script called placenametyper.py, which sends a written name like those above to my clipboard. I paste these into the map, colour their 3x3 pixel dot based on the victory point’s value, and then use placenamer.py to read the image and put the VPs into the game.

There are other layers of information, too. Above are buildings and state levels.

State Levels are the colours of each region. Purple is a metropolis region. Browner ones are lower level, with less building slots.
Buildings are placed with coloured dots.
- Yellow for infrastructure
- Orange for civilian factories
- Green for military factories
- Shades of blue for naval bases

Above is the population map. I decided not to try and research all the populations of all my states in 1911 (many of my states are from a time before or after 1911: I added the borders of Weimar Germany, for example, even though these weren’t internal administrative borders of the German Empire).

Instead I do this:

Define the population of each country at 1911 in a script.
Have the script read this map.
Distribute according to the shade of green. A brighter green means a higher pop density. This also makes the process size-agnostic.
Allow a few states to have their known population hard-scripted - this is mostly for my city-states, such as Paris, Istanbul, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Fiume.

To draw all of this as accurately as possible, I use guide layers.

First, I find a good base-map and warp it until it fits onto my game map (which, you may have noticed, has a weird squished projection so I can fit the sea route to India into it).

Then I make this warped map into a smart object. I open the smart object to view it in its original projection (normally Mercator or something).

Then I can place smaller source maps onto it, and use these source maps to inform my states, railways, and victory points.

When I save this smart object, I can see my markings projected onto my game map.

I use a huge variety of source maps, usually as high resolution, clear to read, and close to 1911 as possible.

A good source map can save you hours of research, especially for things like city names (which can change both outright and in their transliteration to English). River placements are also often a bit off, which can result in me placing a city on the wrong bank of a river and not noticing until I later look at Google Maps, if I even notice at all.

The best way to find them is using Google Advanced Image Search to find something larger than 2MP, and typing something like Ottoman Empire Map 1900 Detailed. It really does take hours to find something good.

The first thing I do with a new map region is draw the rivers. This needs to be done first because many other layers need to follow the rivers. Cities and railways need to be on the correct side, and above all rivers should weave between the mountains on the heightmap.

This is honestly a very boring process, in which I need to squint at Google Maps to try and find various river tributaries so that I can assess if they’re wide enough to be a Large River Crossing (dark blue).

Then, I begin drawing states. I try to find states that

Match my desired size
Allow the player to do fun things, e.g. go after irredentist territories, release historic countries, etc.

For example, see below:

Orange is Italy’s administrative borders in 1911.
Yellow represents other important historic boundaries. The borders of Lombardy-Venetia, for example, or the borders of other pre-unification states.
Green (if you look closely at the Swiss border) is a bit of land called Sondrio that Switzerland tried to get during the Vienna Conference. There were actually quite a few cases of this: Switzerland was a grabby little bugger after the Napoleonic era.

Turkey’s borders were more interesting to draw.

Orange is administrative regions (Eyalets, Viyalets, and Kazas) of the Ottoman Empire.
Blue is the outline of one of the Greater Greece (or Megali Idea) proposals, specifically the one put forward by Venizelos at the Paris Peace Conference.
Green is borders of the Treaty of Sevres, which was served to the Ottomans after the war but thrown away when Ataturk regained control of his country and threw back the Europeans. Sevres actually saw Italy, France, and Britain occupy much of southern Anatolia and gain economic influence in yet more territory, but these regions mostly align with the orange Viyalet borders.
Red is Turkey’s modern borders.
The Yellow stream going from Siirt to the Black Sea is the boundary of Wilsonian Armenia. Like Sevres, this proposal was backed by the West but discarded after Turkey defeated the new Armenian state.
The two yellow states between Turkey and Tiflis are Kars, which was ceded by the Ottomans to Russia following their 1877 war.

Next it’s city names.

This is a lengthy process. My mod uses a special rural terrain for towns, and the usual urban one for cities (I added this so that a battle of Ypres might feel a bit more entrenched, and to punctuate the map more, given that trench warfare is bound to be so stagnant). This, and the need to rank cities by victory points, means I basically need to find which cities and towns were the largest in 1911. For countries like Germany and Britain this is doable. For Italy and Turkey, finding census data is a pain.

Purple, Pink, Red, Orange, Yellow is the order of victory point values, largest to smallest. The purples are the great capitals of Europe: your Parises, Viennas, Berlins … The pinks are more like Great Cities or second cities: Lyon, Prague, even Belgrade.
Yellows are towns and villages. They almost always use a rural terrain type.
I try to have at least 2 VPs per state.
It may look dense (compared to vanilla, it is), but my intention with VPs in my mod, from the beggining, has been to have a lot of them. World War 1 was a fight over places as small as Bethune and Asiago.

Now I begin drawing my province outlines.

As mentioned earlier, they get filled in with unique colours by a python script.
They need to align with the rivers. I normally move my borders to fit the rivers, but sometimes I have to move the rivers to fit the borders.
Often I start messing with the terrain to represent fun regions better. An obvious example is the island of Venice, which is much bigger than in real life.
As I’m on a budget with my province count (too many and HoI4 will slow down), I try and reserve the density of provinces for more interesting areas. There’s probably going to be more fighting on the Austrian-Italian border than in Corsica, so the latter gets fewer provinces.
I then add terrain. Deciding what is and is not a mountain, as with rivers versus streams and cities versus towns, can be really hard, and requires a lot of squinting at Google Maps and Wikipedia.

This part of the process is quite therapeutic: a good chance to listen to some music. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the new region in game for the first time.

Finally, I add my placenames for my python to interpret, as well as railroads, supply nodes, and other game data.

Railroad colours are purple to green: purple is the lowest level, green the highest.
Supply nodes are the blue 3x3 squares that sometimes sit on top of a Victory Point. I try to place enough that you can man your borders without getting a supply warning from the game.
Because I decided all my supply nodes ought to sit on a named Victory Point, this often means I need to add even more Victory Points to serve as Supply Nodes for the few blind spots that make it into the map.

Almost done. Now I add strategic regions, for which I also use a python script (exactly the same one I use to assign provinces to regions).

Vanilla HoI4 has strategic regions lined up with national borders. e.g. the Lowlands airspace region ends at the border of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. This creates a situation where you need to decide if you’ll send your planes to the enemy’s airspace, which helps if you’re pushing, or keep them in your airspace, which helps if you’re falling back.
I hate this gameplay and promised to abolish it. For this reason, I try and have my air regions stradle national borders.
I also try and give my strategic regions geographic names, to distinguish them from states.

Save, process, launch, crash, debug, try again.

Eventually we have our new map region, which I give to its owner nation. Then it’s setting up the new nation, its armies, its techs … there’s still a lot to be done. But at least we have a new chunk of map: