100% World Dom - The Rise of French Canada

**eschelar** · March 12, 2017, 11:45 AM

Concept behind this campaign is to play as Quebec, assuming a role as "friendly Canadians" who are friends with the natives, welcome people of diverse backgrounds, maintaining a firm border against the US, while eschewing the formal European rigidity. Of course, bringing people together through conquest.

On the first playthrough, I will defer to the ETF 2.1 Quebec = Monarchy, although I do intend to try this at some point as a Republic or Constitutional Monarchy, not sure which just yet - probably Republic. I am actually considering doing this as a "starting campaign revolution".

Premise - Frustrated with following the commands of the increasingly out-of-touch French and British governments, the independent nation of Quebec has declared independence, offering great benefits to soldiers, shipbuilders, scientists and simple immigrants to join their great nation both in their new homeland of Canada or in the conquered regions around the world. Leadership follows the ideals of greatness as defined by Napoleon, Cyrus the Great and Genghis Khan, who all found ways to recruit armies in the places they were conquering by offering a new form of government and superior standards of living and freedom of thought and religion. If anyone is familiar with the French Foreign Legion, there's a bit of that flavor in here too. Fighters in the Legion come from just about anywhere and might not speak French, but they are brought into the fold anyways. If the French Foreign Legion was a country called Quebec, that's kind of what you might see.

Armies will be culturally diverse and feature units from populations that are common in Eastern Canada in our modern age. That would include Polish, Indian and Middle-Eastern units as well as expatriated units from France, Britain and to a lesser extent, Spain. More French units will be present due to the ease of integration for francophones. Units restricted to Europe/Middle East will be available, but regions will be respected.

MOD Details

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Government (Startpos edits):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Note: Quebec might own Louisiana. Historically, France sent d'Iberville to establish a fort there in 1699. If d'Iberville is a general for Quebec, then it would make sense that Louisiana would have become Quebec, not France... d'Iberville was born in Montreal, so it makes sense that he might indeed side with Quebec.

MONARCHY - Francois-Louis de Buade de Frontenac - Son of Louis de Buade de Frontenac - son of the impetuous Count Frontenac and Anne de La Grance Trianon. Estranged from his father until his death in 1698, Francois-Louis was inspired to travel to New France, where he quickly discovered the great respect his father had held. In the face of the tepid and disinterested leadership of Louis-Hector de Calliere, he decided to take action. Following in the footsteps of his father's military instincts, forceful, dominant personality but kind heart, he mustered a small military force of local natives hopeful of his words of peace and colllaboration, along with many of the French speaking habitants, presenting himself as the first King of Quebec. With popular support behind him, Governor Louis-Hector de Calliere had no choice but to acquiesce and the new regency began. Calliere as the head of government? Or possibly as a general?

Count Frontenac was the Governor-General at 1690. Strong defensive general, clever chap. Prevented all major military incursions (even though pretty lucky to do so) in 1690-1700ish. Died in 1698.

Alternate: Constitutional Monarchy? Perhaps the same story, but with Louis-Hector de Calliere suggesting a compromise with Francois-Louis the King and Louis-Hector in Government at head?

Alternate: Republic - Same basic story, but with Louis-Hector de Calliere as the president against a defeated Francois-Louis, who nonetheless serves as a general.

Louis-Hector de Calliere - Reputation of disinterestedness, honor, honesty, valour and decency. He was well-spoken of by his predecessor Frontenac. Chief claim to fame was his treaty of Montreal, aka the Great Peace of Montreal, where he successfully negotiated first a preliminary treaty in September 1700 with the 5 Iroquois nations, then followed by an unprecedented treaty agreed to unanimously by 40 First Nations, including the Iroquois, Mohawk, Cree, Petun, Ojibwe, Algonquians, Odawa, Kickapoo and of course the Onondaga, who hosted the event.
The intent of this agreement was also to achieve harmony among the tribes to end ethnic in-fighting. The Huron and the Algonquin had already been allied for a long time and had been working with the French against the Iroquois.
Add the fictional idea of the hope to unite all the tribes under one governmental identity with which to deal with competing nations in Europe.

It might be worth adjusting unit limits to reflect the existing cooperations between the Huron and Algonquins, along with the enthusiasm of the Iroquois to achieve peace, with significantly less enthusiastic participation by outlying areas (somewhat fictionalized here due to Pueblo and Plains, Southern tribes not really being a part of this, but included because I can't change the timing of involvement).

From Wikipedia: The French, in negotiating followed their traditional policy in the Americas, where their relationship with some of the natives was characterized by mutual respect and admiration and based on dialogue and negotiation. "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him"
— Francis Parkman
Generals:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Alwyn** · March 12, 2017, 12:32 PM

This looks like the basis for an exciting campaign, I would be interested to hear how you get on. The changes you are making look logical and well-planned. Those Muscogee Tribesmen are going to be deadly, with 70 accuracy.

I wonder if you would be interested in posting reports on the progress of this campaign in the Empire Total War AARs forum?

**eschelar** · March 13, 2017, 08:41 AM

I'll see what I can do. I usually update the campaign a few times throughout its progress, but time has become much more scarce.

I could really use some help with my mods, if you could help me out. I have so far been entirely unsuccessful at importing the exported databases effectively into my .pack files. I think the problem is that the databases aren't being exported properly. I exported from patch5.pack...

I am using your Minors1.pack, but it doesn't have the database entry for projectiles. I have so far been successful with everything else that I wanted to do, or achieved an acceptable work-around (although last night, I made some error which destroyed about 4 hrs of experimentation, won't take anywhere near that much time to get back). If you could help out by making a minors1.pack with projectiles and government type restrictions, I think that would just about sort everything I want to do.

I was doing a *lot* of wood sanding today and was going over my ideas for the archers and I'm going to revise them and attempt to add an entirely new unit, following your tutorial. See above for edits.

**onmy6** · March 14, 2017, 01:38 AM

I like your "Old notes for reference" idea better, just lower the accuracy, I tried your projectiles work around for archers the other day, just that alone seemed to give the Indians on my grand campaign game a big advantage as the could creep up silently and out of nowhere start pelting my line infantry from out of sight and out of range made it much better IMO, anyways keep up the good work

**eschelar** · March 14, 2017, 07:31 AM

Back when I started playing ETW, that was the crazy thing about the natives. They were very low morale, but had a horrible way of sneaking up behind enemy lines and pelting my units with arrows. Then I needed to chase them down with quick cavalry (which in itself was a bit of an offset to their poor defense). I also felt it was pretty insulting that they had such poor melee abilities and would essentially run at the drop of a well-timed hat. Because the changes that I would like to make will actually affect the units used by the natives in-game as well, it should be interesting to see them suddenly start winning a lot of battles against their Euro-trash opponents. For now, they are mostly just units to gain experience on in the early game. When I first started, I found them a very difficult enemy to face. So did many other people at that time. Now, even on VH/VH, they aren't even remotely dangerous. My melee units cut them to pieces without artillery or any other gunpowder units and did so with very, very minimal losses. I grew up around natives and their reputation is that they are tough as nails, have endurance for days and will pretty much never run from a fight. A far cry from how ETW paints this honorable warrior society who lived by the toughness of their hides.

One thing to remember is that I'm fleshing out many of the under-used units to bring them up to become much more useful and a bit more realistic, but I am also setting a lot of pretty low limits for these units, considering that I'm going to be creating a global domination campaign and that I have already completely blocked off Line Infantry, low end standard cavalry and standard "Militia" of all forms for Quebec. Relying almost exclusively on specialized ethnic units (that aren't historically bitter enemies of Quebec) and pioneer/frontier type units to retaliate against Europe could be very challenging, especially where almost every army will have an entirely different composition

I doubt I will be able to get a really good handle on game balance until I reach Europe in my initial playthrough. In my previous Sun-Baked Steel challenge run, it became *MUCH* more difficult as soon as I left India and started into Europe because the only unit I could recruit in Europe for combat were the Sipahis. Everything else needed to be shipped in from the Americas. This slowed my progress tremendously. While it was somewhat challenging, it was also kind of boring because I was still using the same units. I expected at least to be able to recruit Kalmuks and Tatars, but my memory had gotten confused with the Ottomans.

With my French Canada Rises campaign, I'm going to have a lot of very diverse units, but none of them will really be able to be my main backbone like Hindu warriors were because of the recruitment limits. This will make the campaign a LOT more logistical (which has always been my aim, since BAI and CAI are always so-so at best, so a race against the clock is always a challenge). Some of the units are pretty amazing, but also note that the really high end stuff I am currently considering are pretty far down the recruitment tree, so they would be best compared with units like riflemen. Riflemen should technically still be able to go toe to toe with even the best of those units and win... unless strategy is also used.

Currently, I'm sort of stalled on all of it until I can get a primary .pack file with projectiles (and hopefully government types) like Alwyn's Minors1.pack. I'm chipping away at this on the thoughtcrafting side while doing menial work at the office, but I don't really have a lot of time for this project right now. I already spent an hour or two playing around with exporting and trying all the different tools I could get my hands on and I have come up fails. My best guess at this point is that I have tried to extract the db from the wrong patch.pack file, but it might take me 3 weeks before I can get time to sit down and go through all the .pack data files and get the whole thing figured out. I have coding experience from 20+ years ago in Borland C with some BBS games, but this is all pretty new to me.

Until I can get that moving, I don't know which direction to move forwards. Given that my workload currently calls for 12 hr days, I'm really hoping that someone can help me out with the projectiles db so I can keep my focus on the unit thoughtcrafting. I had this mod 90% built with the "old ideas" before a setback, so if I'm going to re-do most of it from scratch, I'd rather do it right the... well, the second time anyhow...

**eschelar** · March 18, 2017, 11:20 PM

Been doing some reading on the history of Quebec and New France and truly astounded at how similar it is to my ideas for this campaign.

There genuinely were extremely savage and war-like guys in Quebec who were tough and hardy men, who worked equally well with foreign imported troops and with the local natives. Indeed, they worked extensively with the natives. In fact, in 1700 and 1701, treaties were made that are exactly the same as what I had in mind for this campaign as well.

The only real difference is that New France in history didn't break free and become its own nation. I can imagine that if one tiny little thing changed and one of the Hertel family had been just a little more Alpha or perhaps one of the commanders from France had interacted in a particular way, this campaign might actually have happened. Canada might be French primarily and occupy most of North (and possibly South) America. Who knows, they might even have holdings in Europe too!

Even more interesting is the movement of Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville.

He expanded New France down to Louisiana in 1699 and established a major marking point for France (from Quebec as capital) to put some "firm but gentle" stakes in the ground between the Spanish to stop their growth and allow friendly trade.

**Alwyn** · March 19, 2017, 03:34 AM

Your historical research sounds inspiring. Perhaps there were brave men of Quebec who, back then, saw the possibilities that you are discovering and dreamed of building New France into a nation. As you said, I wonder what it would have taken for them to put their ideas into action - perhaps just a few firm but gentle changes to actual history?

**eschelar** · March 19, 2017, 06:37 AM

I just finished making some notes above under the section of Denonville. He was a real jerk.

Some of the events of 1698-1701 were, I believe extremely pivotal.

In my envisioning of things, there were 3 parties who were really instrumental to the shaping of reality vs this proposed scenario. There was Frontenac, a French born man who apparently believed in fairness and kindness, Calliere, who came after him and did a lot of the paperwork stuff and the Hertel family, who were just a bunch of Klingon warriors that somehow ended up in Frontier Quebec.

I really like the idea of a scenario where Frontenac laid the foundation for repairing the relationship with the Iroquois when he reversed the extremely dishonorable capture of the entire leadership of the Iroquois some 10 years prior by Denonville. Denonville represents the most vile elements of colonialist Europe, seeing their populations as slaves, their resources as freebies and agreements as meaningless.

Add in the Hertel family, who were warriors in the extreme, but who had also been captured. Indeed, the biography of their father shows the importance to him of the idea of "toughness", which he had learned as he had grown up, but also which had affected him during his years of captivity in the Iroquois camps. The fact that his entire family also ended up fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iroquois (some Huron too, but mostly Iroquois), shows a strong thread of honor and respect between them. The oldest of the Hertel sons had sustained significant injuries in battle and had moved into low level administration as well.

One can imagine how the return of the 13 chiefs who had been banished to hard slave labor by Denonville could have laid the framework for the great peace treaties of 1700 and 1701. Given the prominence of the Hertel family at the time, both in the military and in their association with local politicians of the day, it isn't hard to imagine how this could have led to significant changes in view, fully supported by the military, the existing politicians and the new politicians arriving from France. Calliere was persuasive, but disinterested. One gets the impression that he could easily have just seen the path of least resistance already laid by Frontenac, supported by the Hertel family and even others.

Indeed, in reality, this was both a high point for the colonists of New France, when supplies and reinforcements were still coming, and a turning point as things started to decline for the French settlements in the coming years. Daniel d'Auger de Subercase took a smaller office in Acadia in 1705 and noted when he arrived that over the previous 5 years, his predecessor had done nothing but yell at his men. The fortifications were falling apart from simple decay and natural forces, the men were hungry, underfed and harassed often both by native forces (prior to the treaty) and by British forces who just wanted to move in. d'Auger brought in some masonworkers, rebuilt fortifications, acquired reinforcements from native forces, constructed his own garden, which he used to feed the local populace and made the place into something worth defending and the men proud to defend it. The high point was defending the fort to kill 400-500 of the enemy with just one loss and a handful wounded. However, within a few years, neglect from France took its toll and they were attacked by increasingly menacing British forces. Over 2000 soldiers including trained European regular forces against about 150 settlers (many whose homes and farms had been destroyed due to raiding) and about the same number of Iroquois (who had been stiffed regarding promises of payment for assistance in previous defenses) and Daniel had no choice but to surrender. Daniel was then used as a scapegoat and brought up for court martial in France, although they acquitted quickly because it was just out of ceremony to put blame on someone... Later on, when they asked for his help and offered him good money, he refused in disgust and moved the heck outta there.

These are his attitudes after the fact... but one could imagine that certain intelligent people would have seen all of this coming. Especially the Hertel family, who had been trained by a European scholar and were all considered very well educated.

Combine a little bit of foresight with the ideas of toughness and resistance to the idea of slavery - especially to a callous and out-of-touch European monarchy, surely it was just a tinder-spark away from either Frontenac or Calliere taking the urgings of Zacharie-Francois Hertel to take matters into their own hands, form their own government and stand up as a nation in its own right.

For another interesting one, check out Madeleine de Vercheres... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madele...Verch%C3%A8res

Dang. 14 year old girl defending a fort... Too bad there are no 14 year old female general units in ETW...

Does anyone know what would happen if I put a native general into a startpos for Quebec?

**eschelar** · March 19, 2017, 09:26 AM

Hey Onmy, so confused here... I'm using 4.1.2 and I'm looking in the units_stats_land and for some reason, I can't see all of the units. I can see in the filter that there are more units in the dbase than are showing. But none of the nan_ units are showing up for me in this portion of the db. I even selected specifically to filter for that exact unit, but no dice. it's just not showing.

Actually, i'm noticing a lot of other pretty strange things in the unit_stats_land... such as the models for the units not matching. It says that the model for the native_american_general unit is native_american_archers...

I'm familiar with the use of filters in Excel and I can see that there are no filters that are active, so I'm totally at a loss. Actually, it seems like this might just be the PFM being a bit smarter than I gave it credit for. I don't think there's anything wrong with the list of units, it's the same for 1.5.3 and 4.1.2.

It is very odd that the model units appear to be mismatched though... this might be totally inconsequential though, it does seem to match up somewhat.

I am a bit unsure what this means about customizing the WP units in this database, perhaps the minors1a.pack doesn't have a complete dbase under the unit_stats_land...

Going to see what I can see about doing dbase extractions with the 4.1.2 to see if I can get this sorted.

I am using the dbeditor to look at the pack files as loaded by the game. I can see that those units do indeed show up in the complete database under units_stats_land, so I'm guessing that Minors1a.pack might have been made without the WP units for a TWC/TOS reason... which is strange because they are in the other parts of the db... worst case scenario, i guess I can add them. It's also missing the localization, but I assume there's a reason for that... the project keeps getting bigger. hahah

I found that by adding lines using the PFM, it was breaking the .pack file and making CTD, but cloning the line (which forces it to the end of the file) doesn't do that.

**Alwyn** · March 19, 2017, 09:29 AM

Impressive research, you have some excellent characters! Frontenac sounds like a sympathetic character, I enjoyed your description of the Hertel family and wow, Madeleine de Vercheres - what a great story!

**eschelar** · March 20, 2017, 09:47 AM

Here's a particularly amusing segment from the life of Frontenac on Wikipedia: New France had been under intermittent attack throughout the 17th century. The people however were not subdued and for two years after the Phips attack, a petty warfare was maintained. The sufferings of the colony, infested by war parties, were extreme. The fur trade, which formed its only resource for subsistence, was completely cut off, and a great accumulation of furs remained in the trading posts of the upper lakes, prevented from descending by the watchful enemy.^[19] To meet the threat, he dispatched Jean Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes to establish a trading post and fort at Kekionga, present day Fort Wayne, Indiana.^[20] At a grand council of the friendly tribes, Frontenac took up a hatchet, brandished it in the air, and sang the war song, his officers following his example. The Christian Indians of the neighboring missions rose and joined them, and so also did the Hurons and the Algonquins of Lake Nipissing, while Frontenac led the dance, whooping like the rest. His allies, roused to martial frenzy, promised war to the death, and several years of conflict followed. At length, after three years of destitution and misery, Frontenac broke the blockade of the Ottawa; the coveted treasure came safely to Montreal, and the colonists hailed him as their father and deliverer.

See what I mean about how well this time period meshes with my idea for this campaign? Amazing.

**eschelar** · March 25, 2017, 08:07 AM

Back from my business trip and getting dug in on this again. Going through the localisation.loc and amazed at how many interesting text strings I haven't encountered. I've had dozens of highly expert generals, some that have led the way for conquering as much as a third of the planet in some campaigns, but I've never seen probably 2/3 of these strings... Not to mention the strings about disease... that would have been an interesting addition. Looks like another mod enabled that.

Nifty.

Thinking about how to make a general unit that is non-mounted, using marines or similar. Is this possible? Especially a unique general unit.

**Alwyn** · March 26, 2017, 03:08 AM

Yes, it looks like there are compelling historical stories which are eerily similar to your ideas for a campaign. If you ever decide to write an AAR based on this campaign, I would like to read it (I enjoy including historical elements in my Empire Total War AARs, even when they follow alternative history - as you can see from Éirí Amach: Irish Rising and Kite Pèp Mwen An Ale: Let My People Go.

General George Washington in the Battle of Bunker Hill (in the Road to Independence campaign) is an infantry general unit, I made this unit recruitable in the campaign in my These United Colonies mod. (However, I don't believe that this unit behaves in the campaign like general units normally do. In effect, it is a Line Infantry unit commanded by George Washington which has the ability to inspire other units - in other words, it is more like an elite unit with the 'inspire' ability, rather than a general unit). It might be possible to do this by cloning an ordinary general unit and then removing the horses - you would probably need to edit several entries in unit_stats_land, to make this work (I could not tell you which entries - 'trial and error' would be involved - I do not know whether this it would work - I have not tried doing this).

**onmy6** · March 26, 2017, 05:38 AM

Originally Posted by eschelar

Going through the localisation.loc and amazed at how many interesting text strings I haven't encountered. I've had dozens of highly expert generals, some that have led the way for conquering as much as a third of the planet in some campaigns, but I've never seen probably 2/3 of these strings... Not to mention the strings about disease... that would have been an interesting addition.
Thinking about how to make a general unit that is non-mounted, using marines or similar. Is this possible? Especially a unique general unit.

Welcome back, Yes I had alook thru that also, some amazing stuff in there, I suspect ETW was going to be twice big as the end product became
Sad really IMO, could have been absolutely amazing had they been allowed to finish it properly....sigh Oh well

**eschelar** · March 27, 2017, 05:36 AM

I will have a look at general units. I too noticed the oddities with the George Washington unit.

I might add generals of a standard type, and a few very special generals in the startpos. If I can ever get my teeth into that. Hoping that husserltw's tool works ok.

I was playing around with Sikh warriors last night with chakram, haha. Sadly, it looks like I won't be able to do anything useful with them due to empty spaces... Still lots left to do.

**eschelar** · March 27, 2017, 10:45 AM

DURN IT OLL.

PFM 4.1.2 has been going super-great... the other PFM's gave me all sorts of random troubles, but all of a sudden today, the PFM has gone completely unusable. Throwing an exception and will not run.

I removed the entire thing and re-built it, but nothing works. 4.1.2 is now DOA. Dang. I was really enjoying it. Oh well. Bedtime.

UPDATE: Back on Track!

**eschelar** · March 30, 2017, 06:26 AM

Experimented with the bows last night. I was successful in setting up several different bow ranges for different types of units. I was very disappointed to see that while some units can fire their guns *during* a charge, bowmen cannot, even though they have "can shoot while moving" and "does shoot mounted by default". I was trying to make a low range type bow type harrassment unit that could run in and out of range, kind of like Mongol Raiders used to. Nope, they need to stop, line up, clean their fingernails, discuss recent topics of interest regarding Kim Kardashian's butt, *then* fire arrows, *then* they can safely be retreated... Really CA? Really?

Also rather shocked at how poor the bowmen are at firing arrows. 60 bowmen, one volley, average less than 1 death over 5 shots... total! Granted, that's with range at 120, but it's not even at max range... Still, that's appalling. That unit burned through around 80% of their arrows before I ran out of patience. Probably 15-17 arrows per man. Less than 60 kills. That's atrocious.

I'm trying to set up some arrows that work more like direct fire and others that work more like indirect fire. I want some units on there that work like Line Infantry, but with bows. But a Line Infantry unit can carve up a unit with only musket fire at range with only 5 ammo or so expended if they can sit there unmolested. These guys can barely take out a quarter of a unit in the same time, with most of their ammo expended. I've also deliberately slowed the rate of fire for the euro_longbows to replicate a longer draw and slightly more thoughtful aim.

Good fun.

Update: the trick is oddly to set them to melee charge. They do actually throw axes and fire and such when they have the occasion. As such, I believe I will set the axemen to 2 ammo, 40-50 range.

The archers still seem to be rather horrendous, with units averaging less than 1 kill per 100 arrows. But I do like that the horse archers with low range can actually fire their volley when charging. This makes them much more interesting as harassment units, although still quite poor for anything much else... Or at least, that was with the Kalmuks I was playing with.

Oddly, when their units were facing my units, the first volley from a 120 man archer unit killed 24 out of 25 remaining Kalmuks in a single volley. Wow. They were averaging 6-9 per volley on my units when I was averaging 0-4 against theirs... No idea what's going on there.