rderekp / the-grand-combo

The Grand Combination is a deeply ambitious and complete Victoria II overhaul that aims to improve historical accuracy and detail by adding plausible alt-history paths, immersive flavor to all nations, and designing new mechanics to make Victoria 2 feel new and refreshed again.

The Grand Combination

TGC is a complete game overhaul that started as an attempt to merge all the various disparate HFM and HPM based submods into a single modding experience, this objective has been reached long ago. Nowadays, the team aims to improve historical accuracy and detail by adding plausible alt-history paths, immersive flavor to all nations, and designing new mechanics to make Victoria 2 feel new and refreshed again.

Features

TGC has the currently largest, most accurate, and well-made Victoria II map from Vanilla and all other mods, including an expanded 25% larger map with hundreds, if not thousands, of additional provinces, an improved map projection, enhanced coastlines and borders, flavor, new pops, buildings completely revamped and fixed economy and much much more. As of our motto, "No detail in history is too small to not be represented

A better map requires better people living on it; TGC's superior culture map is meticulously designed to highlight the sociocultural intricacies of each location.. The assimilation mechanics have also been revamped so that the player can interact more effectively with this superior cultural map.

TGC, like many other major overhauls, is no stranger to additional historical content and flavor. From fresh events and decisions to new formables and plausible alternative historical pathways, the player can pursue and satisfy their geographical and roleplay desires.
One thing we strongly try to avoid is "railroady" content, focusing our modding efforts on a mechanical and detailed approach rather than novel-style gameplay is our focus as a team, this lets us provide with options not just to the player but also to the AI, making the game more intriguing, flexible, and unexpectable.

When playing TGC, there are always cool "look what the AI did this time" moments during your campaigns.

Banks and Universities provide the player with new playstyles and methods to spend money. Universities are costly, but they provide prestige and a steady source of research points, giving the player the opportunity to pull ahead on research and become a technological powerhouse. Development banks will assist local landowners in developing their farms and considerably increasing farming capacity, allowing the player to develop their economy by investing in RGOs rather than just industrialization, creating a never-seen before playstyle.

Our two new PoPs: Pioneers and Tribesmen allow for a never-seen experience when it comes to expanding and colonizing new lands. Pioneers, who are usually seen in lands ripe for colonization are a special pop that can work as both a farmer and a soldier, a worker always ready to get his trusty rifle and protect his land. Tribesmen are similarily unique PoPs, in the sense that they are harder to integrate into western society, and have no plans in working with settlers. Why would a native pick up a hoe and start farming as soon as someone steps into their lands? These two new PoPs open room to vast possibilities in terms of flavor, immersion, and gameplay, something which you may never see in any other mod.

TGC's Economy won't stagnate, quite the contrary, it will get stronger as the game goes on. There's no Liquidity Crisis or stagnation on TGC. You can keep playing after 1900 and expect the Roaring Tweenties to really be "Roaring", as the economy will keep growing more and more.

The player's voice is always heard in TGC, the team makes constant polling about important decisions to help guide the mod's development.

The Grand Combination is the home for this mod where you will find the most recent updates, discussions and answers. Please visit if you would like to suggest improvements, report bugs, tell us something interesting, be part of the polls or discuss history in a civil manner.

And we are always looking for new developers interested in helping the development of the mod! Hit the discord up and go to #modder-recruiting.

Submods

Given how TGC completely overhauls the map and the game's mechanics, most (if not all) map mods and addons won't work here. Of course, to compensate for that, TGC has 3 map skins for players to pick from besides the default one: Pastel ThickBorders, a high contrast, improved version of the default map. HFM Style Map, a map with a color scheme similar to HFM's default map. And the classic Belle Cartographie, a map skin aiming to mimic old victorian style maps.

In the default mod, the culture colors of Europe have been changed to reflect the distinct language groups of the region and how closely related they are to each other. This rolls back that change to the HFM style of culture colors (for cultures inherited from HFM).

Our Direct Immigration submod adds two new buildings working as province selection buttons. These buttons, along with decisions enabled through Options decisions, can be used to move pops around where you want them.

With it, it's possible to influence migration with ease to adjust the country's population in whatever way the player sees fit, making it feasible to deeply shape the country's demography.

TGC's official music submod! With hours of carefully curated classic and folk music, to enhance your Victoria II gameplay. Each music was carefully chosen, and assigned special playing conditions, from war, peace, country, culture, even war exhaustion and level of westernization!

• Songs carefully hand picked with proper research and analysis.
• Fully overhauled western music.
• Different songs for different cultures.
• Different songs for different game situations.
• Completely new non-western playlist for asian countries.

Due to download size constraints, The Grand Orchestra is stored in another repository, which you can access by clicking here.

With the Endonymic Localization submod, by Guy from the Land of Phillip II, countries' names will be changed to their native names instead of english. For added immersion during gameplay.

The features listed here are just a fraction of what TGC has to offer, it's a full overhaul after all. New map, new provinces, tons of flavor, interesting but non railroady event chains, improved reform system, useful submods, fixed economy, no liquidity crisis, new mechanics like improved pop growth, ideological spread, improved assimilation mechanics and much much more.

Installation and Technical stuff

1. To get the latest version, click the green button that says "Code" and click "Download ZIP". warning: read below

2. Go to the mod folder in your Victoria 2 install directory.

• If you got the Steam version on Windows this will look something like C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Victoria 2/mod
• If you got a non-Steam version on Windows it might be something like C:/Program Files (x86)/Paradox Interactive/Victoria 2/mod

3. Delete the old versions of the mods, if you have any.

4. From the ZIP move everything into the mod folder.

By the end of the process, your /mod folder should look like the picture above, and you be able to select the mod in the Launcher.

• BEWARE: There is a chance that due to the sheer number of files, Github Browser zipping process can corrupt your download, therefore the mod might not work for you. If that happens, follow instructions below on how to download the mod (its very latest version) via Github Desktop app or download the zip from latest pre-packed release (usually somewhat outdated).
• Fresh off the press version: You can use the GitHub Desktop application. This is slightly more complicated but preferable since downloading the zip through the browser can lead to corrupted files being downloaded which can cause the game to crash. For instructions on this go to the #install-instructions channel on the Discord.
• Slightly stale: Stable pre-packed zip releases: https://github.com/rderekp/The-Grand-Combo/releases

For Increased Performace on 64-bit PCs):

1. Download laa_2_0_4.zip from the site: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/
2. Open the .exe
3. Select your V2game.exe
4. Check "Large Address Aware Flag"
5. Save
6. Enjoy! the game now should run twice as fast now for any mod

If you have a low end pc or laptop and is running low on ram, this patch will make your game run on less than 2gbs of ram.

1. After installing TGC, go to your "Victoria 2/mod" folder
2. Enter the "TGCLowRam" folder
3. Copy the "CompressedFlagCache.zip" file

4. Go to your flag cache folder at "Documents\Paradox Interactive\Victoria II\TGC\gfx\flags"

If you have not ran TGC yet, you will need to create this folder.

5. Delete all the contents inside the /flags folder
6. Paste the "CompressedFlagCache.zip" file you copied inside said folder
7. Unpack the contents of the .zip into the /flags folder

Now your /flags folder should look like this, and TGC game will use considerably less ram:

TGC was made possible by the below developers and mods:

• u/Hammonia-HFM mapmod
• arkhometha-HPM
• Sighpie-HFM
• u/louisky58-More Stuff for HFM
• God of Cheese and Kristjan2-GOC PUIR
• vic1984-Victoria Universalis
• u/YLEK111 or kstar234 - Hearts of Ideologies
• Kspeher - GEF
• MaTi - GreenUI
• Guy from the Land of Phillip II - Localized Country Endonyms Submod
• many others

TGC Developers:

• rderekp
• Hammonia
• Kspeher
• Gelre
• champfish
• ColdSlav
• emprahtheodosius
• Frazza

Honorable mentions and ex-Developers:

• JmanThunder - Founder
• MBnomics
• vjwua
• martoeuropa
• DrFaustie
• Tenno Momonga
• bop
• Fraggy
• LouisTheFly
• anzu-3278

the-grand-combo's Issues

British flavor for a "reconquest" of the US?

I've always found a bit odd that the french get to conquer Canada and a ton of american land but the british never get a chance to go wacky. I guess there's less of an issue with yankees rebelling on part of the french, but I would find interesting if there was a way to go bonkers and say, try to hold on to Hannover or conquer the americans again.

Hard crash because of the Russia 'free the Balkans' event and subsequent war

First the Balkan situation. ALL the Balkan countries had their cores freed and are independent OR exist as a released vassal by the Ottomans themselves (Albania). I as an independent and UNSPHERED Serbia get an event from Russia to join them in a war to free the Balkans. Only problem? As I just said the Balkans are already free with the exception of Albania, however I'm left with no choice but to join them AND I get sphered the second the decision is clicked greatly damaging my economy that as a minimally indusrialized, aspiring colonial nation depends heavily on tariffs. This part is not so much a bug but what I feel is an awkwardly designed railroaded event that WOULD be good for me as Serbia in most other circumstances but actually punished me horribly for actually doing well before it kicks off. I would love for it to be reworked to at least include a decision to stay out completely as an uninterested observer or even something cute like instead choosing to fight on the Ottoman side to maintain the status quo and prevent Russia from getting more influence in the region.

The actual bug is what happens a short time after the war begins (or even before this. Tested multiple times.) The game eventually crashes every time. Worked around the crash by tagging into another country at or around the time the event appears as well as giving back a few provinces from each free Balkan country to the Turks through console so there's actually something for the war to "free." Don't remember if I tagged into Russia as well and messed around there but I might have. In any case, with my console interventions the war concluded as one would expect (territorial gains for countries like Bulgaria, Russia taking Constantinople, so on) with no further issues from the event.

Similar to the other issue I posted, I have no idea where to find the save or I'd link it as well.

Unable to form Gran Columbia any earlier then 1890

Not sure if this was intended, but the form Gran Columbia decision will not work until you get The Dark Continent due to required Columbian cores lying in the Amazon. To me it seems kind of silly that you wouldn't be able to form Gran Columbia just because you didn't own low pop/low life rating jungle provinces in the Amazon.

CTD randomly

The game crashes randomly after a period of time running. It seems to crash at the beginning of the next in game month no matter what speed im running. I tried running on the current Vic 2 version as well as the beta 3.04 version on steam. Ive had this problem on the Dev build and master branch versions.

Event 1602682 crashes the game.

Event 1602682 (Rename New England as USA in USA_Expansion.txt) crashes the game when triggered

Direct Immigration in new patch is broken

I've been trying for half a day now experimenting with different versions and modifying the game files. Immigration is not specific and for some reason provinces with immigrators (to move out of) like to move to desert provinces. there was one instance where immigration sort of worked at the very start of the game but after a year (1837) it stopped working again and went back to normal. Also the immigration selector has no effect (this is taking in account for the admin and education sliders)

Replace the capital_scope checks in Colonisation-Africa for an Africa meta-region.

#TODO: Replace the capital_scope checks for an Africa meta-region.

Game breaking bug as Imperial Japan in regards to the 'Colonial Tech Inheritence' event

Mere days after starting the game the pop up appears which is all well and good despite the fact that approximately five duplicate windows of it appear and have to be clicked away individually. However, the major problem lies in the fact that they pop up AGAIN and again and again every few days seemingly ad infinitum pausing the game each time, requiring that they be clicked away until time can progress as usual. I would try testing the 'tag out, wait for awhile, and tag back in' strategy that's worked to somewhat circumvent the other bugs but I can't find the Imperial Japan country tag name anywhere.

Options Decisions are selected after a reload, and some nations cannot be allied

When I reload a save of a game, I've noticed that the game is acting as if certain "options decisions," that are available at the start of the game, were selected even if they were not selected before I made the save.

Specifically, the treasury modifiers that reduce tax efficiency when the treasury gets too large always activate after loading a save even if I did not select the option to enable them at the beginning of the game. Also, the option to unify spherelings into puppets seems to break; I formed Yugoslavia as Russia before saving the game. Then, after loading the game again, Yugoslavia was no longer my satellite and while the game said it was no longer in my sphere, no country could add them to their own sphere even at 100 influence. Also, It is still colored in with my map color on the Sphere mapmode.

Another bug I have noticed is that certain nations (The ones I have noticed are Switzerland, Belgium, and Monastic Republic of Athos) will ask to form an alliance or will accept a proposal to form one, but less than one in-game week later, the alliance breaks on its own. Even stranger, this does not always seem to be the case, as sometimes the alliance functions normally.

Also, the decisions to rename provinces that appear after taking the Polish Integration Act do not disappear after being selected.

You can blow up the Statue Of Liberty as USA

Maybe this was intended, but I kind of doubt it.

international pariah and international isolation possible revamp idea

Hi everyone

I would like to make a proposal to remove the 0.4+ and 0.2+ daily militancy from these modifiers due to these causing literally rebel spam every 6 months. Its not very fun and I am not sure if it really makes sense either since why is everyone angry when all that happened was the international community got pissed that some random African tribes got invaded.

This mod also seems to have it harder to pass reforms since even at nearly 10 militancy a conservative government can barely pass a reform. This becomes a big issue in the late game with diverse party splits preventing a country with massive militancy due to infamy modifiers passing any reforms since that minority of radical parties in the upper house prevents anything from passing with the increased threshold of passing reforms from high militancy.

My proposal is to either remove the militancy from these modifiers or change the values to pass laws due to militancy since constant rebel spam late game is very annoying and this is a gameplay flaw which I think should be addressed in a smarter fashion then just rebel spam to prevent late game blobbing.

Please feel free to make changes or add constructive criticism to this since I really want to see this mod do well

Broken Decisions

NOT_title
allow_title

AI spams these in the current version. I might have got these names wrong.

(By which I mean the latest updated dev build)

treaty with netherlands.

treaty where you conquer Netherlands don't take province 3384, so it blocks event chain and decisions for it.

Crash

When the lowlands resistance event was fired,my game crashed.

The Reichswehr Decision for the German Confederation grants cash instead of subtracting it

I formed the German Confederation through the Crown in the Gutter event, and finally got to the point where I could reform the Reichswehr, but instead of subtracting 3mil from me, I gained 1.3m (and some change).

North Germany

It's 1866, I won the Brothers War, I have all of Germany in my sphere, I took the province Denmark owns in Germany, why can't I form North Germany?

Negative days to justify war as Tokugawa Japan

There seems to be a bug for early game Tokugawa Shogunate, it says it will take a negative amount of days to justify. So when you actually try to justify, no progress will ever be made and you are just stuck. My guess is that it might have to do with the negative modifiers to casus belli acquisition it gets with Sakoku and Isolationism, and they are for some reason making it seemingly impossible to declare war in the early game as Tokugawa

Rhineland Crisis bug

When winning the left bank of the Rhine, I just get a good chunk of the rhine but not all of it, and the rhineland tag gets some provinces and doesn't become my vassal, breaking my natural borders quest and the formation of the german confederation.

Hard crash to desktop after Heavenly Kingdom breaks apart into the Warlord Era

Playing an Italy playthrough and during my game, the Taiping Rebellion was won by the Heavenly Kingdom.

Later on, around 1903 to 1904, when China breaks apart into the Warlord Era, the game hard crashes to desktop. Sometimes I might get lucky where the game may still continue on for a few more months until it crashes from different autosaves.

brasil adquiere el río yurua automáticamente

brasil adquiere el río yurua automáticamente cuando juego con peru sin haber perdido guerra ni nada ,ademas hay una decisión que por mas que la acepto me aparece otra vez (es la decisión de la parte de la región de la amazonia entre peru y brasil),siempre me da mas 10 de infamia infinitamente.

Suggestion: British reconquest in North America

I've always found a bit odd that the french get to conquer Canada and a ton of american land and/or go full napoleonic in europe after the concert was put in place but the british never get a chance to go ahistorically wacky. I guess there's less of an issue with yankees rebelling on part of the french, but I would find interesting if there was a way to go bonkers and say, hold on to the Kingdom of Hannover or conquer the americans again.

EDIT: Sorry for double posting lul I didn't think the first one would be sent when my internet started acting up.

Hard crash because of Italy going communist from rebels, specifically the 'Communist Movement finds a country to stand behind' event and others

Italy flipped communist because of rebels during a massive European war they're participating in. If I do nothing and let time progress the event pops up. Simply mousing over one of the two event choices crashes the game. If I tag into Italy and pick the 'Choose our course' decision, and THEN tag back into Serbia the event works seemingly normally and I get a CB on them to remove their communist government. However, the event pops up a SECOND time eventually (month or two?) and the game crashes anyway. So, I tried tagging back to Italy the second time the event pops up clicked it away (no crash) and got THEIR 'The revolution subverted' (paraphrasing) which happened after a separate event where their dictator gets assasinated (related event? Coincidence?) which promptly crashed the second I moused over it.

This save might be borked. I'd love to link the file but I have no idea where to find it. Tried looking in the same place the HPM equivalent would be found too. (GCM folder in documents)

Update: the save is NOT borked. I just had to tag to a completely unrelated country (Persia) and let the AI deal with all the broken events for the better part of a year. No crashes! Positives? I can continue my game as normal. Negatives? The AI ran my country for a year...

Bug: France(or any country) can't make peace.

So I was playing UK and scramble for Africa happened. After that France declared war on some Africa minors like Futa Jallon and Kong. I declared war on them too because I had casus belli and wanted territory. So I captured them first and now they don't exist anymore. France now cant make peace and suffers from mobilzation forever. When clicking on Kong or Futa game shows France, because they are non-existent.

German confederation 1848 issues

when you form GCF in 1848 you get 2 additional modifiers/penalties when you inherit Austria. their tooltips are saying that you can remove them with cash in 1860, but in reality it is 1870 or 1880.
About outraged Europe, i think you should decrease its length. to the year 1990 is too long.
event 999362 will still be triggered even after 999363 happened.

I'm stuck in a war that I have won

Hi,

I am playing TGC as the USA. I was aiding France as an ally in Europe when I received a message that somehow war had both started and ended in the states between the me ( USA ) and the Confederate States of America. When I refocused the map on the USA I found that Kentucky had ceded from the USA, but a moment later I was given the option to take it back as a Core. I did and the map was back the way it when I left to help France.

I noticed a little while later that it had that I was still at war. When I look at current wars it shows that I have completely won the war with CSA at 100%. I cannot select the CSA to offer any type of Peace. I have tried locating it on the Map, but I'm guessing that once I took Kentucky back as a Core that wiped that out.

It's now 10+ years later and I've restarted the gave a couple of times, but with no luck. I looked up the knows bugs but this is not on the list. Lucky me.

Any suggestions? The only reason I'm not plowing forward is the numerous decisions open to the USA that require it to be at peace.

Thanks!

Jim