Editing savegame to prevent campaign from ending (possibly indefinitely?)

[SapphironZA]

Hi All

I have been messing with the save file, to see if I can get the campaign to keep running indefinitely. I know it is likely a feature being developed along with diplomacy, but the devs were nice enough to keep the game files modification friendly 🤗

I am putting this here to share what I have learned so far and to see if anyone else has any tips or improvements.

The file location is here:  c:\users\<username>\appdata\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate Admirals Dreadnoughts\save_0.json

I figured out that the file contains sections for Germany and Britain and each have some values affecting the campaign.  You can "reset" the campaign by exiting to main menu, editing the file, saving it and then clicking continue campaign.

1. respect: value that controls the unrest levels
   1. 0 is normal, 100+ is high unrest and may result in campaign ending due to government change
2. reputation: value that controls the naval prestige
   1. 0 is normal, -100 is dishonorable and may result in the admiral being changed. 

I managed to get the campaign up to 128 turns before I got forced into a peace treaty.  I think victory points differential might be the reason.  I do see the file  has the following section:

Relations": [
    {
      "a": "germany",
      "b": "britain",
      "attitude": -100.0,
      "recentWarStartDate": {
        "turn": -1
      },
      "victoryPointsA": 17223.8457,
      "victoryPointsB": 42263.8828,
      "PeaceTreatyChance": -1.0,
      "LastTreatyCheckDate": {
        "turn": 0
      },
      "TreatyCheckMonthTreashold": 5
    }

I think I can edit the Victory points, but I will still see how the "PeaceTreatyChance" and "TreatyCheckMonthTreashold" value affect it.  Maybe setting one of those correctly, I can avoid a peace treaty ending entirely.

[AurumCorvus]

Just so you know, if you have sufficient naval prestige, you can survive a high unrest revolution and avoid the campaign ending that way. I tested it with 1000 prestige, which is probably far in excess.

Additionally, though I used CE not save editing, I found keeping VPs within the following ranges as fine for continuing the game: within 1-2k initially until you hit ~10k; within 5k until you hit 25/30k; and within 10k afterwards.

Hope that helps somewhat.

 

[SapphironZA]

On 12/17/2021 at 11:03 PM, AurumCorvus said:

Just so you know, if you have sufficient naval prestige, you can survive a high unrest revolution and avoid the campaign ending that way. I tested it with 1000 prestige, which is probably far in excess.

Additionally, though I used CE not save editing, I found keeping VPs within the following ranges as fine for continuing the game: within 1-2k initially until you hit ~10k; within 5k until you hit 25/30k; and within 10k afterwards.

Hope that helps somewhat.

 

Thanks, I usually set the prestige high at the start of the campaign.

So far, I have been able to keep campaign running for about 20 years, before weird things start happening, like weird fleet compositions, or persistent bankruptcy.

[SapphironZA]

Just an update on what I noticed with the new 1.1 update

The save file no longer has line breaks.  It makes the file a bit more difficult to work with manually.  

Not a big thing, but I would like ask if the devs can reintroduce the line breaks, or advise if there was a good reason for them being removed.

[AurumCorvus]

52 minutes ago, SapphironZA said:

Just an update on what I noticed with the new 1.1 update

The save file no longer has line breaks.  It makes the file a bit more difficult to work with manually.  

Not a big thing, but I would like ask if the devs can reintroduce the line breaks, or advise if there was a good reason for them being removed.

Sadly, it's not going to be changed back. This is related to a fundamental issue of how Windows handles line breaks. For a 'simple' line break, Windows requires to characters "carriage return" and "line feed" (/r/n, for those of you who care). Mac requires only the carriage return, and Linux only requires the line feed, but it makes sense to put in both so it's compatible across all systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representation

But the problem comes when you have an insane amount of line breaks, like the UAD save file. In my simple 'tech cheat' file (because I don't have an active campaign atm), I count 1777 colons. Generally, each colon would've been on a different line (as they serve as the separators between a value and a variable). So 1777 line breaks or 3554 characters. Generally speaking, each character can be a byte, so the early version would have been 3554 bytes just for line breaks. However, the new version just has commas. In this version 1777 commas is exactly 1777 bytes. (You can test this yourself. Create two text files, one with ten commas and one with ten line breaks, if you're on Windows.)

This problem is then exacerbated by the sheer number of nations. Obviously, you have the major nations (who, by 1950, will have a full suite of tech that I counted above, plus numerous ship losses, etc.), but UAD is also apparently attempting to give some ability to the minor nations (like Alaska, etc.). That creates even more line breaks. THEN, we still have ship designs. As you can imagine, after a full campaign run, there are going to be a lot of ships (and each ship design needs to know what techs went into it, so that data has to be repeated a lot). In the old version, where line breaks were used, this resulted in a lot of wasted space.

Admittedly, raw storage space is not the issue for most people. However, it is a loading time issue; the game has to power through all that wasted space, doubling the time it takes to read through a line break rather than a comma. In the full campaign, this would result in bloated loading times, and the switch to commas helps reduce that even just by a bit.

Okay, so not all doom and gloom. There is a way around: Use Notepad++, hold your cursor at your nation's starting parenthetical/bracket (I don't have an active campaign file at the moment, and don't remember atm). Notepad++ should highlight the ending parenthetical in red. Copy everything in between, and paste into a new empty file. Use Notepad++ more advanced replace function to change the commas to line breaks, edit it up, and then change line breaks back to commas. Paste it back into the original file and save.