The Complete and Total Guide to Civilizations and Ideologies

Overview

Have you ever wanted to create your own civilization? Make your own custom ideology? Change a flag or change a name for the hell of it? This guide explains all of it- welcome to the complete and total guide to civilizations and ideologies.

The Civilization Editor

So, first things first, the civilization editor. This doesn’t need much explanation as it’s practically so user-friendly that even your grandma could do it.
I’ll keep this brief since it doesn’t need a huge introduction, so this is what I’ll say.
Use the civilization editor as the basis of your custom nations, and then the rest will just be a bunch of file-editing and moving files around. That’s it.

Part A – Creating a Custom Ideology

Okay, now this is where things actually begin to get complex. Creating a custom ideology can be stupidly hard at first but once you get used to where you need to go you should get used to it. I’ll make this as simplified and user-friendly as possible because a lot of the other guides waste way too much time talking about stuff that doesn’t matter or barely touch up on how to do them.

Navigate to your AOH2 folder. This should be under this directory.
Then, you want to click on the “game” folder
Locate the Governments.json file.

If you’re opening this for the first time, select notepad when it prompts you to choose a program to open it with.

Here, you’ll see a list of ideologies with a bunch of other weird wacky stuff. Here’s help to translate:

Name

Function

Name

Name of your ideology.

Extra_Tag

This is the game’s way of identifying the ideology in the first place. Don’t use the same ideology tag as another ideology or the game will break. Sorry.

GOV_GROUP_ID: 0

Absolutely no clue. Ask the game developer. Theoretically this implies that certain ideologies can be grouped together, sort of like how socialism and communism would be in the same general area.

ACCEPTABLE_TAXATION

This is the acceptable rate of taxation for your empire. Putting the value as 1 will mean you have 100% acceptable taxation, and putting the value at 0.1 will mean you have 10% acceptable taxation.

MIN_GOODS

This is the minimum amount of goods you are required to spend in order to keep your economy growing and your people happy. Higher amounts means more amount of spending required but more growth as a benefit.

MIN_INVESTMENTS

Same as the previous one; only this time with investments. This is the minimum amount of investment you are required to spend. More investment means higher income from provinces and higher development in provinces.

RESEARCH_ COST

This is how much it costs for you to research and gain a higher technology level; higher amounts means you need to spend more, and lower amounts means you need to spend less.

INCOME_TAXATION

This goes hand in hand with acceptable taxation; this is the income that you’re going to get from taxing your population. Higher amounts means higher amounts of income. So, if you’ve got 100% acceptable taxation and a massive boost to your taxation income, then congratulations, you’ve got a world-power economy.

INCOME_PRODUCTION

This is how much income you get from your buildings; blah blah blah, higher amounts means more income.

ADMINISTRATION_COST_(distance, capital)

This is the base value for how much it costs to actually administrate your civilization. “distance” is presumably based on how far away the province is from the capital, and “capital” is how much it costs to administrate your capital.

COST_OF

This is how much it costs to move your troops to another province, move your troops to the same province, move through your own provinces, recruit soldiers, disband soldiers, and plunder provinces. This is based on movement points.

DEFENSE_BONUS

This is how much defense your provinces gain when defending against enemy attacks. Higher values means more base-defense.

CAN_BECOME_CIVILIZED

This basically tells the game whether you’re a civilized nation or not. Putting the value as “0” will probably break the game, putting the value as “1” means you can civilize your ideology, and putting the value as “-1” means you’re already civilized.

CIVILIZE_TECH_LEVEL

No clue. I’m presuming it’s the maximum technology level your ideology can have. Just keep it as 2.0f.

AVAILABLE_SINCE_AGE_ID

This is when your ideology actually becomes available for nations to switch to. Age ID’s are basically in order and numerical, so all you have to do is take a quick count of the ages in your game and you can figure it out for yourself.

REVOLUTIONARY

Basically used for rebels. I don’t know how it works. Put it as “true” if you want to be a rebel or something.

AI_TYPE

This is the ideology that AI will act like when playing this ideology. You can pick CITYSTATE, DEMOCRACY, MONARCHY, COMMUNISM, FASCISM, or DEFAULT.

RGB

This is the color that your ideology will appear as. Plain and simple.

Now that you know what all that jumbo, mumbo means, it’s time to actually create your ideology!
Copy one of the already existing ideologies from the list and paste it down at the bottom of the document. It should be within the ] and within the “age_of_civilizations: ideologies” thing.

Before you edit ABSOLUTELY anything, it is crucial that you make sure that your bracket is aligned!
Here, the bracket that opens our ideology is not aligned with the bracket that closes the previous ideology. If these brackets are not aligned, then your game will crash! Your ideology will not function. SO FIX THIS!!!

After you’ve got that fixed, you can simply edit the values however you please! After you’re done, make sure to go ingame and test to see if the ideology shows up in the ideology selection screen. If the ideology doesn’t show up or breaks the game, check back on your ideology in the notepad file to see if you may have accidentally messed with the formatting.

Congratulations, you’ve created your ideology! Now it’s time to add icons to represent your ideology!

Part B – Making an icon for your ideology

Now that you’ve created your ideology, it’s time to use an icon to represent your ideology!

First, you need to actually get an icon for your ideology. You can make your own icon or use one from the internet. It doesn’t really matter. I recommend that you get paint.net for the following steps; it’s free to download.

Here, I’m deciding to goof off and use the AnPrim flag as my icon. You don’t need to use a flag but for simplicity I’m using one for myself.

Next, navigate to the directory shown, here we have icons, H, XH, XXH, XXXH, and XXXXH.
First things first, each folder has a “crowns” subfolder inside of them. This is where we’ll begin to drag files and start renaming things.

First off, if you haven’t already, save a copy of your ideology icon and then save it somewhere accessible. Now, it’s time to actually resize your image.

I’ll be using paint.net to do this, as it’s the easiest way for me to do it. If you’re also using paint.net, just click on “image” and then “resize” at the top of the screen.

For our first step, we’re going to resize this down to a scale of 16 by 16. When you’re finished resizing, save your icon as a new file. Keep your editing program open.

You want to save your file under the name “crown_” and then your ideology tag. For example, my ideology tag is “ap”, so my file would be named “crown_ap”. Save it as a PNG.

Next, go to the “H” folder and then the crowns subfolder inside of it. Copy and paste the file inside of that, next you want to go out of the “H” folder and into the “icons” folder and into the “crowns” subfolder inside of it. Next, open up your icon again. Next, go to image: canvas size, and select 16 by 22. Make sure that the anchor is placed at the bottom if you’re using paint.net.

After that’s done, download this icon. Make sure that the top of your icon is transparent. After that’s done, add a new layer to your image and copy and paste the X onto your image. Make sure the image is ABOVE the background layer (with the icon). Align the X at the top of your image and then save it as “crown_x_(your ideology tag)”. Drag and drop it into the iconscrowns folder along with the other crown.

Now that you’ve gotten that out of the way, there’s… STILL MORE!
Once again, go back to your unedited, original icon file. There’s more resizing to do. This time, resize the image to 16 by 14. Save it under the same name as before, “crown_(ideology tag)”.

Next, go through XH, XXH, XXXH, and XXXXH and their respective crowns folders and copy and paste your 16 by 14 crown into each of them. When that’s done, you’re finished! Congratulations, you’ve made your custom ideology and icon!
Here I’ve created a test scenario to see whether my custom ideology works or not. As you can see, it works!!

Part C – Changing Ideology Flags

So you’ve made your custom ideology, yes, but is there a way to change a civilization’s flag based on their ideology? Yes! Yes there is, as a matter of fact! And trust me, it’s a lot more simpler than the previous steps.

First off, you want to go ahead and open AOH2 if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you want to go to Editor and then Game Editor.
Then, go into Game Civilizations
Here in game civilizations is where we have the civilization tag for every civilization in the game, this includes your custom nations too. If you haven’t already, pick a nation, for this example, I’ll just stick with the United States.
Here I can see that the civilization tag for the USA is, well… “usa”. That’s all we need from now on!

Now that you’ve got your civilization tag (copy it down somewhere if you think you won’t remember it), it’s time to get a flag for your civilization! As previously, you can either make your own or use one from the internet. If you’re planning on making your own flag I suggest that you use flagmakerjr+ for quick and easy creation of flags.

Here, I’ve created my own anprim USA flag. Save your flag somewhere accessible.

As mentioned before, I recommend that you get paint.net for the following steps, as it really is the best software for this kind of stuff.
Once again, open up your AOH2 folder and click on the “game” subfolder inside of it, here we’ll see flags and flagsH.
Next, open up paint.net if you have it already and open the flag that you made/downloaded. Like the ideology icons from before, we’ll be using two different sizes for the flag.

For flags, we’ll be using a size of 27 by 18, and for flagsH, we’ll be using a size of 68 by 44. The steps to resize an image are in the previous section. When you’re finished resizing your flag in the two different formats, save them as two separate files as a png. Then, you want to save them both as the civilization tag you’re going to use, and then your ideology tag. For example, I would save mine as “usa_ap.png”. If you have to, save one with a “1” so the system can discern the two files.
Now that I have my two flags, it’s time to move them over!
Move the 27 by 18 flag over to the flags folder, and the 68 by 44 flag over to the flagsH folder. If you’ve saved one flag with a different name, (like usa_ap 1.png), make sure to delete the extra number or whatever that you put there.

After that’s done, restart your AOH2 and check and see if it works!
Here, I can see that it works! If it doesn’t work for you, check back to make sure that you used the right size, ideology tag, and civilization tag. Always make sure to double check!

Part D – Changing Civilization Names

COMING SOON

Age of History II Guide