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We have just wrapped up this year’s edition of the Grandest LAN. For those of you who have not heard the name yet - imagine a weekend-long multiplayer game of EU4, but it’s hosted in a real, historical castle and you live next to all the other participants, forced to navigate all the diplomatic challenges facing your country by interacting with other participants in-person, in an environment where one mistake could cost you and your team your country… Sounds cool? Well, that’s the Grandest LAN for you!
To add some flavor and make the organization easier the event uses a special mod, and so today - as a slight off-ramp from what Mod Spotlights are about usually - my name is Lunar and I will be your tour guide through the Grandest LAN 2024 mod, the thought behind it and how you - someone who might not be interested in LANs - might take away a thing or two from it.
First as a disclaimer: although I am writing this summary, GLP was a collaborative effort with the heavy bulk of the work being done by my co-GM in @gasior, and I am just representing it, having been one of the Game Masters during the event.
To start: the mod isn’t your usual expansion mod, in a sense that we are not trying to substantially change the vanilla experience by adding new mission trees, events and such. Instead, the mod focuses on three pillars:
- Game Master toolkit - using the custom GUIs introduced in King of Kings we’ve created a panel available only to Game Masters, that allowed us to interact with the game world without having to rehost the game, enabling things like doing “save edits” to countries that players would relocate into, controlling the scenario and others.
- Expanding the in-castle RP scenario - with the theme of this year’s event being vampires, we wanted to add some cool flavor to the game that would bring the players closer to the role-play scenario as it was transpiring in the castle, this included a new religion, a series of AI countries that could yield the team who bested them an artifact granting them a cool modifier, a “big boss” country that the teams would have to band up against and many others - all controlled from the Game Master’s PCs
- Statistics! Since we all love cool numbers, we’ve added a bunch of new automated ways to track in-game happenings to later share it with players at the end of the campaign.
So let’s go through them one by one, shall we?
The Scenario
The theme of this year’s event was vampires, and so the storyline followed the “vampires of the new bloodline” (i.e. the participants) establishing themselves as rulers of their countries, and jointly deciding between following various vampiric ideals and philosophies. The first of these choices came when the ideals of vampiric inquisition came to grow in strength across the continent:
The Inquisition (later renamed to Order of the Dragon as it became formalized and overcame its pariah status) is a religion loosely inspired by Reformed, which allows players to switch between focuses that carried both heavy reward and heavy penalties:
On top of that, it allowed the oh-so-precious opportunity to impale your own advisors and watch them suffer, in exchange for a hefty sum of mana points (with a 15 years-long cooldown because blood is tastier when you give yourself the time to savor it)
Many decades later, in the wake of the Age of Absolutism, a new threat has emerged in the Americas, that the players now had to choose how to deal with:
The powerful nation of Enoch (played by one of our GMs), in spite of its small size, proved to be a formidable opponent that required the players to spend a long-time preparing a grand coalition before being able to best them, and the war nevertheless costed millions of lives
I will leave a lot of the nitty-gritty details of the scenario unmentioned here, as at the end of the day, this part of the mod was crafted specifically for the needs of the event, but nevertheless what I’d love you - the reader - to take away from this is that variety is the spice of life, and it actually doesn’t take that much to expand and adjust EUIV to add the things like I’ve described here. Be that new countries, religions, idea groups; if there is something that you think would be cool to add to the game I encourage you to just try and do it! Even if you don’t have much modding experience, at the very least you’ll learn something new and cool in the process :)
Blood Feuds
A major highlight of the event, that proved to be quite enjoyed by the participants in the end was the newly-added mechanic of Blood Feuds. In essence: Blood Feud is a challenge a country can issue to another to ask it for a 1vs1 duel. The catch? Both sides need to agree for the war to start, it’s much costlier to take lands and both sides are compensated in 75% of the manpower lost during the war once it's over.
Wars in EU4 MP are costly and often seen as very risky, so we’ve added this mechanic as a way to encourage players to engage in “for fun” wars where they get to show off the strength of their countries and their own ability to outmaneuver the opponent while removing the frequent risk of falling way too behind other countries, which instead would elect to just grow their economies and military in peace.
The Artifacts
Last aspect of the scenario that I will mention here is the mechanic of artifacts. Spread all over the world, from Tasmania to Nordkapp several vampiric domains stood, guarding ancient vampiric relics said to give their possessor a great power~~
Each of these domains posed a challenge to players to find them, and conquer. The victor would both obtain the physical form of the relic as well as an in-game modifier for as long as the relic remained in their control.
Screencap from Florryworry’s LAN coverage (Florry pls no kill)
The GM Control Panel
A typical EUIV multiplayer game tends to be split into sessions. A community might gather once a week to play for a few hours, and then continue the week after, giving ample time for any modifications that might be necessary to keep the game running.
Having no such time we developed an in-game control panel, accessible only to the GM countries, that allowed us to interact with the game’s world however it was needed.
The control panel served no specific, constrained purpose. Instead, it was meant to allow us to react to pretty much whatever was happening in the game.
A team has lost their country and now they need to relocate onto an AI nation? Sure! We can add provinces to their new country, clear corruption and all the bad things that AI might’ve done to it to allow them to rejoin onto it without having to restart the game
A team has struck a deal with one of the NPCs to help with converting their nation to the Inquisition? We can help with that!
The players have voted during a Conclave (a Player Council) that they should no longer be bound by the technology requirements in order to form countries like Germany or Egypt? We have a button for it!
The control panel enabled an extensive ability to influence the state of a country. What in the past would usually take a rehost and very stressful save-editing that still could turn out to have some problems, with the control panel we can do it in just a minute, without interrupting the campaign for other players.
Extra statistics
The possibly most minor and niche feature of the LAN mod, that nevertheless I think is worth mentioning, was the addition of extra statistics. Some of you might already be aware of tools like PDXTools or Skanderbeg, which allow you to extract information from the save file to analyze the progress of the campaign, but we wanted to go a step further. Using a combination of scripted effects with a yearly biyearly on_action we are able to export a lot of new variables into the savefile that can then be extracted for it for our enjoyment, which is how we are able to say that, for example, the team playing Byzantium (led by none other but AbsoluteHabibi himself) exploited dev of its provinces 80 times just in the last 30 years of the campaign alone, on top of executing 10 barrages and recruiting 2200 new regiments, among many other fun facts :)
