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Sunday, November 11, 2018

Webpack boilerplate package for Imba and SCSS

Fluffball by Rum Bucolic Ape from flickr (CC-ND)

Imba looks extremely interesting - seriously, just check out the code examples on their website.

I wanted to give it a go, there was just one tiny problem - in Javascript world you can't just gem install a few things and run them like that. Nope, painless setup is just a crazy ruby idea that never got much traction anywhere else. In Javascript universe everything always requires painfully complicated setup.

I found some boilerplate example for Imba, but it was broken on so many levels, I had to start pretty much from scratch.

So here's a working webpack boilerplate for Imba with SCSS support. Feel free to fork it into your project.

What's in it:
  • Latest Webpack
  • Imba
  • SCSS (as plain old compile to CSS, intentionally no CSS-in-JS shenanigans)
  • CSS normalize to avoid cross browser pain
  • standard npm commands for development and production builds.
Everything uses sane 2 space indentation, and tries to avoid doing anything weird.

What's obviously missing is some kind of testing framework, so PRs wanted.

I haven't used it for anything more complicated than just another TODO app yet, so I don't know if there are any issues. Just report them on github.

Thanks to all the brave souls who answered webpack questions on Stack Overflow - somehow I managed to duct tape working boilerplate out of all that.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

Challenges for October 2018 SecTalks London

She loves the computer by glennwilliamspdx from flickr (CC-BY)

Last month I ran another round of London SecTalks CTF.

There were 10 challenges, and the winner got 9/10 of them during the event (and last one on the following weekend), so difficulty level was about right.

Challenge files and code used to generate them available on github.

There are no answers below, but some serious hints which might make it too easy.

For previous rounds, see posts about September 2017, November 2017, May 2018, and July 2018 CTFs.

Archive (5 points)

A small variant of the 16-level 16-way nested archive, to test for basic Unix scripting skills. This time using RAR.

MonoRSA (10 points)

It's RSA-encrypted message, but it uses only one prime, not two. This is extremely insecure, and can be trivially broken, but you still need to do some math.

BCRYPT (15 points)

Each letter of the flag was encrypted with bcrypt. It's easy to break, as long as you know how bcrypt works, which isn't quite the same as plain hashes, so it was causing a bit of confusion.

RSA RNG (20 points)

It's Debian weak RSA key attack all over. We have target's public key and encrypted message. Also a lot of other people's public keys, all generated using same bad RNG. If two keys share a prime it's easy to break them, even if direct factoring isn't viable.

Python (25 points)

Small bit of reverse engineering - small Python password validator obfuscated with one of online tools for it.

MultiRSA (30 points)

A little known fact about RSA is that it works just fine with more than two primes. So this challenge uses 16 - which is fine, except key size was not adjusted appropriately, so each of those primes is small enough to break it.

Binary (35 points)

Binary password validator, provided in two versions (Linux and OSX) for convenience. It was compiled with -O3 which made its encrypting loops unroll, and what was very trivial code turned into hard to understand vectorized mess. Then again, actually running the program might reveal something interesting.

SVG XOR (40 points)

The flag is written in SVG flag, which was encrypted with a XOR cipherer. This turned out to be quite easy, as SVG files have a lot of structure which can be used to attack this.

FPGA (45 points)

Probably the most original challenge this time. A netlist of NAND gates which can validate the flag and tiny emulator were provided. Can you figure out the inputs necessary to get the validator to accept?

This was the only challenge without anyone solving it during the event, but there were some solutions afterwards.

Tweets (50 points)

A flag was hidden in collection of Donald Trump's tweets, encrypted with monoalphabetic cipher. Great exercise for frequency analysis.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

My current GTD system

She works hard for the money... by Tamer Akça from flickr (CC-NC)

I don't know if there's any way to do GTD properly. I've been trying so many tools, and it always feels like no setup works properly, but if I don't do some kind of GTD then my life instantly falls apart and I never achieve anything, or even stay on top of everyday responsibilities.

In all likelihood if I write this post again in a few years, it will be a fairly different list. Anyway, for other people who try to do GTD, here's my current setup.

Core of the system

The most important part is private git repository which also happens to be mirrored on Dropbox using magic of symlinks.

Inboxes

One recent complication is how often I'm with just a phone, and often offline on a train to make it even worse. The least shitty solution I found is Google Keep. In the past I carried a tiny pen and a stash of post-it notes with me, but that's a bit less practical. Most other software I tried really doesn't like working with limited connectivity.

A big downside of Google Keep is that it's hard to copy a list from the web UI and paste in somewhere, without going through the hassle of exporting to temporary Google Docs document and copy&pasting from there. Someone should seriously write a Chrome extension to improve that part, and well, that someone might end up being me.

I probably should give Google Keep alternatives another try, since Google products don't have very high half-life.

Big section of the core system is inbox folder with anything that hasn't been processed yet.

I have a physical wicker basket at home for letter and related physical stuff to check.

I think on paper a lot, so I often generate a lot of paper mindmaps and lists. Once I'm done with them, they land in the inbox.

Incoming emails which requires some further actions get a star. I never delete any emails, so those stars are the only indication that it's not done. Some people delete or archive stuff and treat their email inbox as a TODO list, and that just feels really weird, but if it works for you.

Usual GTD lists

The core system contains the usual GTD lists like Projects and Next Actions.

I don't divide Next Actions by context, since there's no meaningful context for most of them.

Reference System

I have a physical reference system consisting of a bunch of ring binders with contents inside organized alphabetically by tag. That's mostly for things like bank statements, bills, and other boring paperwork which I might refer to every now and then.

I also have a ref folder on Dropbox - not related to that git repository - which contains all the digital stuff.

Emails stay in Gmail, as they're very easily searchable there.

Calendar

This is a bit awkward, as I use a mix of Google Calendar and old text file based system.

Calendars I use are:
  • upcoming events
  • saved dates for potential upcoming events
  • any periodic actions I want to do every N weeks or months - mostly boring cleanup, backups, reviews etc.
  • birthday calendar
Possibly it would make sense to move to just purely Google Calendar system.

Planning

This might be the most interesting part, as I found I need multiple different kinds of planning to make things work:
  • the usual lists of GTD next actions
  • ad-hoc planning like at start of the day usually happens on paper - by the end of the day what's left of that list goes into inbox
  • weekly goals list to keep me focused - it's typically about 10-15 goals, and I'm aiming at 80%+ Partial Success or better rating. Those lists are not meant to be modified once created. If something fails for a good reason, it fails. Any unachieved goals (including Partial Success) go into inbox.
  • rolling goals list for next 12 months - I keep it as Google Docs document and update what's in progress, done, or definitely failed with some color coding. This documents gets updated whenever needed. Every 3 months or so I archive old document, clean up done or failed things, and create a new one.

Weekly Goals List

The biggest risk of GTD is that a lot of things will get done (as far as failure modes go, it's not the worst one), but whole areas of life where progress is most difficult get neglected.

Because the most important function of those lists is helping to balance different aspects of life, anything where I achieved meaningful progress towards stated goal counts as Partial Success, even if it's still very far from being finished.

Of course since Partial Success is still not finished, it still needs to go onto the next list.

I'm aiming at 80%+ completion rate because typically a few things will just not work around due to external circumstances.

If same thing fails multiple times, then it's a very strong indicator that it needs a lot more planning.

Rolling Annual Goals List

You know how people are best behaving in January after they make their New Year's resolution, but then usually give up by March? People completely miss the point thinking that such resolutions are ineffective - they're extremely effective, you just need to refresh it often.

The list is about 4 pages of Google Docs, and lists many highly specific goals, hopefully covering every aspect of life. This includes many more meaningful goals, but also lists movies, games, and books I'd like to enjoy over the next 12 months.

Most goals on the list are very specific and measurable, but it's not always possible, so some vague entries, and some refer to ongoing practices. If the goal itself is not specific enough, I try to have some more specific subgoals.

12 months feel like about the right perspective for this list. It's really difficult to think in longer term perspective in concrete enough terms, and for shorter perspective it would be guaranteed that many life aspects will go unaddressed.

Whenever I update this list, I try to have a chat about it with certain special people.

Cooperation

The system is private and difficult to share even if I wanted. Occasionally I want to discuss some plans with others, and for this I usually use Google Docs and Google Calendar - or talk about that in person, which also works.

Other lists

I keep Waiting For lists, mostly for things I ordered.

I keep Someday Maybe lists, for things which are not really actionable, but I might get there someday.

I keep Social lists for people I'd like to keep in my life - I check it every now and then, and if I'm at risk of losing contact because everyone is too busy, I try to arrange something.

I used to have Shopping list, but since I do overwhelming majority of my shopping in Tesco online and Amazon, I just throw whatever I need into relevant basket, and every now and then order what's in those baskets.

Logs

And they're not really part of the GTD flow, but I keep a lot of different logs, measuring and writing things every day.

And everything else

And I also have beeminder setup, but it only tracks things like exercise, so it's fairly peripheral to the system. I tried to use it more, but most interesting things might be specific, but not necessarily quantifiable in the way beeminder wants, and usually giving something long term goal with weekly commitment is not actually the best idea.

That's the rough outline of my system.

Big 5 Bonus

And that's what a person who's a few standard deviation high on Conscientiousness is like. Also about as high on Openness to Experience, extremely low on Neuroticism, and somewhere halfway on Extraversion and Agreeableness.

Music I like

Piano Cat I by Nina A. J. G. from flickr (CC-ND)

I mostly listen to music on youtube - or songs I downloaded from youtube with the glorious youtube-dl to dumb devices for listening while offline.

140%

I listen to them at 140% speed. I've been watching everything at high speed so much, 140% is my neutral speed, that's the lowest I can go without anything seeming to be artificially slow.

Nowadays my speeds are:
  • 140% - neutral speed - music, movies, some denser TV shows like Game of Thrones
  • 180% - medium fast - most TV shows like Family Guy
  • 200% - fast - podcasts, audiobooks, let's plays, conference videos, nearly everything on youtube that's not music
  • 220% - very fast - some particularly slow sources like Tolarian Community College
This means I'm really limited to youtube as my only place for music, and to "unofficial" download sites as my only source for shows and movies. I tried Spotify and Amazon Prime, but they have no speed control, and that's insane in this day and age.

I guess I can watch things at 100% in cinema or when watching it with someone, but that's an exception, and it still feels artificially slow.

By the way, if you know of any source of music or streaming that has speed control, good quality, and good selection (not just in US), I'm definitely interested.

Youtube for music

The great things about youtube is that it has basically everything, it's free, and ad blockers work perfectly on it, at least on desktop. I guess they recently added some sort of subscription service for people who feel sad about using ad blockers, and I'm not philosophically opposed to that, but I didn't have any time to investigate that. 

The worst thing about youtube is total lack of metadata. Also people thanking their Patreons for a minute after each song while I'm trying to listen on shuffle. And it's basically useless on the phone with no or limited connectivity.

The so-so thing about youtube is its recommendation algorithm. It's not completely useless, but it keeps suggesting stuff to me a one line python script would know not to (if vocalist.gender == "male": return False).

Their fancy subscription service solves none of the problems I have, just a problem ad blockers already solve.

Metadata

But seriously, what really annoys me is that I youtube never bothered to provide any metadata for its song.

There's a plugin which tries to parse song titles with regular expressions, but it's not very good. It's sort of OK for "official" songs, but it's failing for almost every independent artist who mostly do cover songs.

So mostly for my own future reference, here's a list of artists I've been recently listening to a lot, in alphabetical order, manually extracted from my youtube watch history. I tried to categorize them into mainstream and independent artists, but it was fairly futile.

The List

If by any chance you're enjoying similar music, and you have any fun recommendation, send me the links.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Fun and Balance mod for EU4 1.26.1

MIDORI by Marco Mosti from flickr (CC-ND)

Fun and Balance is a mod which tries to make Europa Universalis IV a better version of itself. The mod has very limited goals:
  • fix any issues where poor balancing makes gameplay worse - making more options viable, and occasionally toning down anything that's overpowered enough to make alternatives irrelevant
  • let people have fun in any way they choose, removing arbitrary prohibitions penalties
  • reduce AI cheating, as game is more fun when everyone plays by the same rules
  • reduce forced historical railroading via events or restrictions on player actions
These goals mean that every patch the right thing to do changes, and I need to go through list of fixed I've made and decide if they're still applicable. Many of previous changes I've made become obsolete because most problematic areas are likely to be addressed by future patches.

Playing with this mod shouldn't feel like you're playing a mod, it should feel like you're playing vanilla which finally patched silly things right.

It doesn't try to significantly affect game difficulty - it might increase it slightly by reducing cheesy tactics, or maybe slightly reduce it if you're trying to play naturally.

So here's the full list of changes, ordered roughly by impact, with reasoning behind them explained in detail.

Download links

Base diplomatic relations increased from 4 to 8

In vanilla diplomatic slots are always exhausted by every nation. You absolutely need a few strong allies, a few vassals to expand, and that prevents you from having any diplomacy beyond that. All options such as royal marriages, guarantees, marches, local alliances, supporting independence of others etc. tend to get mostly unused as they take precious slots you don't have.

So the mod just doubles base limit, and this opens a new world of diplomacy.

This bumps up difficulty, as allies are much more useful defensively than offensively. It leads to much denser alliance networks, and it's much less likely to be able to get a free attack on unprotected minor. At least as long as you play with Cossacks DLC enabled.

Mercenary limit reduced to half

Both players and AI have access to infinite manpower pool of mercenaries, and close to unlimited very cheap loans.

This means defeats have minor consequences. It doesn't matter than you just killed every military age man in a country, they'll just spam loans and mercs next day. Attrition, manpower buildings, manpower bonuses, all of that matters a lot less when you can just loan and merc.

Unfortunately it's a bad idea to do any drastic mercenary or loan nerfs, as AI often loses all its manpower to self-inflicted stupidity such as parking a doomstack in a low supply province during peace time.

With some testing I found out that the best balance can be achieved by halving merc limit (both base and increase from force limit), which is unreasonably high.

This doesn't affect reasonable use mercs to supplement your manpower. You can even go vanilla style merc spam if you stack available mercenaries (administrative, quantity, aristocratic) and force limit (quantity, offensive) bonuses. AI can handle it reasonably well.

Small AI countries are mostly unaffected as mercenary limit was already higher than their force limit, but for big ones like Ottomans or Ming you can now actually defeat their army and not have army just as big show up next day.

Fort upkeep reduced to half

Forts are unreasonably expensive. Most good players just delete all or nearly all of their forts, and AIs tend to suffer from having far too many crappy forts in wrong places breaking their economy.

Reducing upkeep to half of vanilla values makes keeping or even building forts more reasonable option for the player, and helps AI economies.

Unfortunately there's no way to mod in more understandable zone of control system.

AI cheats reduction

Call for Peace and naval attrition are removed, as they're mechanics which are exclusively applied against the player. AI no longer gets extra free leader.

It doesn't make a huge difference in terms of difficulty, it's just better if everyone plays fair.

Tweaked subject settings to match wider diplomacy

Vassal annexation minimum year increased to 20 years.

Vassal annexation is just half the vanilla cost - it's unreasonably expensive considering you have to pay full core cost for something which will likely be just a territorial core.

Liberty desire from development a bit lower, and vassals don't count your marches strength in their calculations.

Colonies actually care about relative power of themselves and their supporters, but have negative base LD to balance that out.

Diplovassalization max cap increased, but penalty from their development is still quadratic.

Big tributaries care a bit more rebellious.

There's now -100 cap from annexed vassal opinion, so you're not going to accidentally stack it too high by poor annexation timing.

Liberty desire from historical friend or rival toned down.

All of this generally works well for player and AI, and doesn't require unnatural play.

More building slots

Building slots in vanilla are very restrictive, so many building see zero play, and especially AI wastes its slots on useless buildings a lot. The mod increases extra slot from +1 every 10 development to +1 every 5 development.

Improve awful idea groups

Some idea groups are better than others, and it's totally reasonable but two are so ridiculously useless people only ever take them as a joke.

So mod gives maritime ideas +50% light ship trade power and +1 merchant - so you can actually do some trading - so you can actually get some trading; and it gives naval ideas +1 free leader - so you can hire that admiral without taking a general slot from your armies.

This should hopefully move them from joke tier to situational tier.

You can convert in territories

This is controversial change in 1.26 patch. It's not a completely bad idea, as conversion was really fast and really easy - but until some outs are added (like religious ideas giving you ability to convert in territories, or replacement of outright ban with just slower speed), it needs to go.

Everybody can claim states

This feature is locked to Russian Tsardom government in vanilla, but there's no good reason for it, so I just made it available to everyone.

I thought about letting any empire-tier government do it, but game didn't like this idea (without creating a lot of government types), and there's really little downside to just giving everyone this feature.

Rival and Power Projection changes

I'd love to be able to restore rival system from early patches where everyone could rival everyone else - or at least for every great power to be able to rival every other great power.

Unfortunately that's not moddable, and it's very common that you get nobody to rival late game (and therefore very little power projection), or extremely limited choice of countries to rival early game.

The mod therefore increases power projection for great power status, for eclipsing rival, and slows down decay from actions against rivals. It also increases max rival range slightly, so early game you have more choices.

Religious Shift Decision

You can now freely switch religion to one of your capital at cost of some stability. It's disabled for Papal States, as that messes up with the game.

Disable End Game Tag checks for player

End game tag checks are an egregious case of stopping people from playing the way they want for no good reason.

I left these checks in place for AI to avoid checking them one by one if they make sense, but they're disabled completely for the player.

More formable countries

It's fairly arbitrary which countries are formable and which aren't. If you want to become Norway or Portugal and managed to shift the culture (which is admittedly very easy), why shouldn't that be possible?

Right now it keeps your original missions. It probably should ask if you want old or new missions with popup similar to one for ideas.

All those decision follow similar pattern - you need to have fully unified that culture, be big enough, and have admin tech 10. Excluded from this is anyone with existing form nation decision. Also excluded are Japanese, Russian, and Chinese culture groups, as they already have different mechanic for tag progression (forming Japan, Russia, and becoming emperor of China).

Coalition CB changes

Games sometimes need "invisible wall" style mechanics - fairly brutal means to limit where player can go. They don't have to be fun, but they should be very difficult to trigger accidentally. Normal in game mechanic, even negative ones, should be enjoyable.

Coalition system in EU4 fails this completely. It's really easy to trigger - so easy that AI minors in the HRE often have coalitions against them by 1450s - and it's completely miserable.

Most experienced players learn to play around coalition system by juggling truces, or attacking any country which joins coalition day one, or by using cheesy tactics like offering ally land as soon as possible once coalition war triggers (or in previous patches, offering 10000 gold).

If you actually try to fight and win coalition war, game makes it miserable. You can't separate white peace anyone even if you 100% them, so you'll have to keep going back then to swat their rebels. If you had any allies, they'll peace out leaving you with -40% warscore from battles and -25% ticking warscore - which somehow still counts against you even after they leave the war (that should seriously be fixed regardless of coalition issues). After a few tries everyone learns to never even attempt this unfun fight as just cheese it.

Not to mention just how ahistorical and immersion breaking it all is.

We have somewhat limited possibilities to mod our way around it. We could try to rebalance AE and tone it down a bit so you're less likely to hit the invisible wall. Or we could make fighting coalition more enjoyable.

A small modification of changing coalition CB from superiority in battles to defending capital goes very far towards making it a regular challenging war. That's how it used to be in early patches.

Burgundy event chain removed

EU4 is a sandbox game, and it's more fun when different outcomes happen in different campaigns. It's unfortunately been leaning towards very heavy railroading - Ottomans become second GP after player in nearly every campaign, England forms Great Britain, Muscovy forms Russia, Castile forms Spain, all almost every time unless player stops that, Ming never collapses or expands much etc.

It would be nice if we could make things more dynamic, so sometimes Aq Qoyunlu grows into the Middle Eastern menace, or Scotland sometimes won the British struggle, or some German minor seriously attempted unification. Unfortunately there's no straightforward system for modding in this kind of unpredictability without huge gameplay changes.

One piece of such historical railroading is going way too far - partition of Bugundy event chain. It's a totally nonsensical system where major European country gets divided completely disregarding its situation. The mod just kills it with fire.

I'm open to suggestions how to create higher diversity of outcomes.

Defender Aggressive Expansion discount increased

Being defender in EU4 sucks, as you can't use any of your CBs (during the war, or for duration of truce afterwards), can't declare anyone cobeligerent, and don't get CK2-style reparation for winning.

To make this slightly less miserable, mod increases defender AE discount from 25% to 50%. Remember that extra AE for non-cobeligerent attackers still applies.

Rebalanced Religious Conversion Rates

It's really silly that it's easier to turn a Catholic into a Sikh than turn an Sunni into a Shia.

The mod rebalances completely arbitrary conversion penalties (+4 against pagans, +2 normally, +1 or +0 sometimes) into consistent +4 against pagans, +2 against heretics, +1 against heathens.

Trade Map Tweaks

EU4 doesn't support dynamic trade map, and doesn't allow cycles, so any trade map will require compromises.

The mod adds Panama to Mexico and Patagonia to Lima link, and (to prevent cycles) removes Philippines to Panama and Mexico to Panama links.

This lets Asian powers enjoy New World trade from at least Pacific parts of the New World. The tiny downside is that Spain can't transfar trade from Philippines through Mexico into Europe, which historically happened, but that never happens in game anyway.

I'm considering much more aggressive changes, something like Better Tradenodes and Tradeflows mod, but it would require a bit more testing first.

You can use subject's religious CBs

You can declare religious war on your enemies which you only neighbour through subject.

For this both you and your subject need to have religious, and you must have same religious group as your subject (for holy war), or same religion (for cleansing of heresy).

This is mostly to reduce bordergore required to maintain CBs.

Doubled tradition gain from battles

EU4 made a strange change at some point that nerfed tradition gain from actual fighting to very low values, and it became based more on idea group choice than actual fighting. With numbers (land and naval) both doubled, it's a bit less silly, and if you're constantly fighting you should now have decent tradition level.

Religious Leagues as any Christian religion

In unlikely event that HRE will be split between some other denominations than Catholic / Protestant, a league war can happen in a different way. So you could have Reformed, Orthodox, Coptic, or Anglican challengers.

First victory by the challengers will just flip the dominant religion, you need second victory to lock the new religion.

No war exhaustion reduction while still at war

This button is only available for countries at peace, so you can actually make other countries suffer, or be forced to suffer yourself. It's no longer just diplomatic monarch point cost.

To match this, AI willingness to peace out based on War Exhaustion doubled.

Corruption Slider goes twice as far

If you're interested in rooting out twice as much corruption, at twice the cost, you can move the slider all the way to root out -2 a year. This is a necessary change to deal with corruption from too many territories.

It's obviously very expensive to go that far.

China nerf

Rebels in EU4 are too weak, and we all love seeing a Mingsplosion every now and then. So unrest from zero mandate doubled from 5 to 10.

Custom Nations Improvements

Most custom ideas get levels all the way up to 10 at higher cost. There's no penalty for taking too many of same kind of ideas - there's no power level reason for it.

Base monarch stats changed from weird 2/2/2 to 3/3/3 which actually matches average in-game monarch. Limit on distance between provinces of your nation increased to more reasonable values (so you can recreate something like in-game Genoa).

Merchant republics 20 statified province limit removed

It's a pointless nerf to a weak and unique government type.

Also for people without Dharma, Adopt Plutocratic Administration decision has province limit lifted. It's only useful for roleplaying anyway.

Longer CB on Backstabbers

EU4 has CB against allies who betrayed you which last 3 years, so you can only use it if you're willing to truce break. It's as pointless as things get, a relic from times when breaking alliance didn't create truce. The mod increases it to 10 years, but it's a very weak CB, so it's probably just there for roleplaying.

Some arbitrary decisions limits removed

A few decisions like moving capital to Constantinople and recreating Byzantium have a bit less strict limits, so you can use them even if you're doing something unusual like Serbian culture Coptic Ottomans.

Imperial Ban CB

The game has CB to take provinces from non-HRE owners, but it takes 100% AE with HRE penalty, so it's basically useless. Changed it to just 25% AE penalty, for affected provinces only.

Faster peace out

AI willingness to fight a losing war just because it's not been going long enough reduced slightly.

Some overly expensive action cost reduced

Moving capital, moving trade port, and culture conversion are mostly useful for doing weird things, and are quite overcosted, so all of their costs halved.

Everything is optional

As much as possible I tried to make every change optional, and keep it in separate files, unfortunately it's not always possible. It should be fairly compatible with most minor mods. For some popular total big mods (Extended Timeline, 1356) I can just offer separate builds.

There even used to be in-game menu for some of that, but people had performance complaints, so I got rid of it just to be sure.

I'm quite ruthless at killing off any feature which is no longer necessary. If there's balancing issue with relatively simple fix, I'm happy to include it in future versions.

If you think some of the changes cause more problems than they solve, definitely tell me about it too.

I don't always publish this kind of long explanatory blog post, but it's usually updated week or two after new major patch codes out.

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Challenges for July 2018 SecTalks London

Cat sitting on a desk by freestocks.org from flickr (PD)

Last month I ran another round of London SecTalks CTF.

I only created 6/9 challenges this time, 3 Android challenges were created by imhotep.

Challenge files and code used to generate them available on github.

There are no answers below, but some serious hints which might make it too easy.

For previous rounds, see posts about September 2017, November 2017 CTFs, and May 2018.

Hidden treasure (5 points)

As per tradition, there was a bonus challenge with a zip bomb. This time at the end of 16-deep archive with 16 branches each there were pictures with a treasure, with EXIF tags containing either the flag or information that you failed.

Android 1 (10 points)

The simplest Android challenge wasn't even all that Android specific - as the flag was hidden directly inside the .apk.

RE1 (15 points)

Easy reverse engineering challenge was just a 32-bit Linux binary, which verified passed flag character by character, in random order.

Disassembling it, you'd get instructions like:

cmpb   $0x74,0x10(%ebx)
jne    80484b7

If you arranged them correctly, you'd see the flag. Or you could just grep for all characters, and use anagram solver - apparently that was an option too.

Android 2 (20 points)

This one required actually running the app, or fairly complex static analysis. The app saved a file with the flag to device storage. If you can find the file, the flag is yours.

RSA (25 points)

This challenge was actually quite realistic.
Bob sent a message we need to decrypt.

Probably due to bad RNG, it looks like Bob and Alice picked same N for their keys, and we managed to steal Alice's private key as well.

Perhaps there's a way to take advantage of this.
And there is a way. Having private key (n, e, d) there's algorithm to factor n into p, q. It's not completely obvious, but it's fairly short to implement. With p, q (shared between both), and Bob's e, you can trivially get Bob's d. Then you can decrypt the message.

RE2 (30 points)

It was a slightly harder version of reverse engineering challenge. The only difference was that flag was encoded into Base64 before checking, which could throw people off, but binary wasn't stripped so b64_encode method was a massive hint.

Android 3 (35 points)

The challenge app is making HTTP request, which needs to be intercepted and modified to get the flag from the server.

Once you get the request it's obvious what to do, and there were hints provided how to setup proxy on Android to get them.

CTR (40 points)

Another somewhat realistic challenge. A collection of Elon Musk's tweets and a flag was encrypted using AES-128 in CTR mode. Reusing same IV for all of them.

This turns CTR mode into XOR with random keystream, and breaking XOR cipher is fairly basic. It turns out nobody remembered mode names, so I had to give people some hints before they tried CBC or CFB attacks on it.

Croatian Monoalphabetic (50 points)

This challenge was worth the most points, but in principle it was very easy, just a bit time-consuming - and I ended up giving people hints how to approach that.

It's just statistical analysis of another Latin script language. So you can start by assuming space is the most common character, then use character frequency tables for Croatian, or lists of most common words, or take advantage of the fact that flag (very long word) is embedded inside.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Which MCU movies are worth watching?

The World's Laziest Superhero by www.metaphoricalplatypus.com from flickr (CC-BY)

Not a day goes by that I'm not disappointed by what Wikipedia turned into. It went all the way from trying to be "sum of all human knowledge" under "neutral point of view" to cutting everything not "notable" enough and just mindlessly parroting establishment view.

That's tolerable when the establishment knows what they're saying, like in science articles. Well, mostly. Unfortunately this policy gets extended to domains without anything resembling genuine experts, and nowhere is it more ridiculous than with "film critics".

It's one thing to mindlessly parrot some social scientist who fudges statistics and uses questionable methodology, but is at least pretending to do science. Treating someone speaking out of their ass as a "reliable source" just because someone gave them a newspaper column to publish at is a mockery of what Wikipedia used to stand for in its early days.

There is an objective measure of film quality - enjoyment by the audience. And we have pretty good metrics of that - like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Such metrics occasionally suffer from issues like vote stuffing, demographic imbalance of voters compared with movie watching audience, less representative sampling for very old or foreign movies, and occasional overrating of most recent movies before it regresses to the mean, but it's insanity not to take these aggregates as starting points.

Even these issues are mostly overstated. IMDB filters handle vote spam quite well, voter demographics while imperfect tends to be far more representable than film critic demographics, and as for questionable early ratings due to hype, just check out how many completely forgettable movies managed to win an Oscars somehow. That reminds me, what was the Oscar list for the year of The Empire Strikes Back? It's hilarious in hindsight.

So what Wikipedia's doing? Ignoring all real data, and just parroting establishment of course!

MCU Movie Ratings

So here are the objective ratings, in chronological order:
I don't always agree with all them - for example I tend to enjoy superhero movies which don't take themselves too seriously more, so personally I find Doctor Strange overrated, and Iron Man 2-3 underrated.

But don't mind me, statistically speaking you're far more likely to enjoy what other people enjoy than what some cat blogger or film critic likes. All I can do is provide a bit of context for those numbers.

The best one

Pretty much everyone agrees that the best movie of them all is Avengers: Infinity War and it's not even close. If you plan to watch a lot of MCU movies, definitely include this one somewhere.

However, it might not be the best movie to start with. It's really good if you're invested in the story, and know at least half the characters. Otherwise, it will probably be too confusing.

Really good movies

There's a lot of options where to start. Movies establishing new characters like Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, which are also really good on their own, are probably the best place. If you're completely new to MCU, these are just the two I'd recommend starting with. If you don't like them, I doubt you'd like the rest anyway.

Thor and Captain America have some good movies, unfortunately their first movies are rather mediocre. So you can either start with their first weak movie because it gets better eventually, or just read its plot summary and get straight to the better ones. Nobody will blame you for skipping early Thors, honest.

Watchable movies

These movies are still pretty good, and they mostly don't require watching anything before.

Notable here is Black Panther, which due to the nearly all-black cast became inevitable battleground of culture wars. It's decent movie, but it's massively overrated by the overwhelmingly liberal film critics, and this generates a bit of audience backlash. It's definitely far better than the trainwreck Wonder Woman was, but every single MCU movie is far better than Wonder Woman, even Thor 1.

Forgettable movies

Unless you're really invested in the MCU, it's probably best to skip them. Personally I quite enjoyed Iron Man 2-3 movies, but I definitely have preference for sillier movies that most people don't share, and I can totally see why they did not get universal aclaim.

None of them are key to anything, and a huge added benefit of skipping them all is avoiding Natalie Portman, who according to some is the most annoying actress in Hollywood [citation needed].

So that's it for today. If you know of anyone who's working on an encyclopedia which follows Neutral Point of View, please let me know.

Hearts of Iron IV Online Division Designer

Okay, I posed... now where's my treat?? by Lisa Zins from flickr (CC-BY)

There's division designer in the game, but it takes 10 minutes of console commands to ask basic questions such as "would this division be better with Superior Firepower or Mobile Warfare".

I've seen a few spreadsheet style division designers online, but they're not really able to answer such questions easily, and I don't have much confidence in their calculations.

So I wrote a command line tool to run such calculations based on game files. And then since I was halfway to something useful for other players, I added React.js frontend, then support for two most popular mods (Kaiserreich and Millennium Dawn).

Here it is.

It's first public release, so bugs are definitely possible, and UI could definitely use more polish.

Calculation engine got amount of decent testing to make sure it matches game data (disregarding Paradox rounding), but I could have missed something, especially if it's something only mods use.

It has extra features which are not exposed in the UI right now, like selecting any combinations of techs not just year + doctrine, and forcing old equipment, and I'd like to expose that somehow perhaps. I'd also like to make calculations more transparent with some extra tooltips explaining how those values got derived.

It doesn't even try to run in old browsers like IE11.

Best place for bug reports and feature requests is its github page, but I'm on all social media, so you can contact me whichever way you'd like to. Pull Requests welcome of course.

Over the years I wrote a huge number of various command line analysis scripts and modding tools for CK2, EU4, and HoI4. This is the first one that's available online, but I guess I could setup frontends for more of them. If you have any requests, send them over.

Saturday, June 30, 2018

UK was never much of a democracy

Your Queen by garykemble from flickr (CC-NC)

The concept of "democracy" is very loaded, but let's focus on its most basic part - people vote, and whoever gets majority of votes gets to run the government for the next few years. UK fails this standard miserably.

Here's percentage of votes in Parliamentary elections received by whoever got to run the government over last hundred years. And it wasn't any better before:
  • 1918 - 38.4%
  • 1922 - 38.5%
  • 1923 - 38.0% (minority government)
  • 1924 - 46.8%
  • 1929 - 37.1% (party which "won" didn't even get plurality)
  • 1931 - 55.0%
  • 1935 - 47.8%
  • most countries continued having regular elections during wartime, but UK didn't even bother
  • 1945 - 47.7%
  • 1950 - 46.1%
  • 1951 - 48.0% (party which "won" didn't even get plurality)
  • 1955 - 49.7%
  • 1959 - 49.4%
  • 1964 - 44.1%
  • 1966 - 48.0%
  • 1970 - 46.4%
  • Feb 1974 - 37.2% (party which "won" didn't even get plurality)
  • Oct 1974 - 39.2%
  • 1979 - 43.9%
  • 1983 - 42.4%
  • 1987 - 42.2%
  • 1992 - 41.9%
  • 1997 - 43.2%
  • 2001 - 40.7%
  • 2005 - 35.2%
  • 2010 - 59.1% (coalition)
  • 2015 - 36.9%
  • 2017 - 42.4% (minority government)
So in 27 elections, there were only 2 cases where government was actually backed by majority of the votes. And usually these weren't narrow margins just a bit under 50% (like George Bush in 2000 or Donald Trump in 2016) - it's routine for parties to govern with just 35%-40% support.

In fact it's more common for a party to "win" without even getting plurality than for someone to actually get genuine democratic mandate.

There's a lot of concern about democracy fading worldwide. When you look closer, maybe there wasn't that much of it in the first place.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Challenges for May 2018 SecTalks London

そんな目で見ちゃダメだねぇ by amika_san from flickr (CC-ND)

Last month I ran another round of London SecTalks CTF.

There were 8 challenges as before. And again, the winner only did 7 of 8 on time, the last one (Monoalphabetic) only after the event.

Challenge files and code used to generate them available on github.

There are no answers below, but some serious hints which might make it too easy.

For previous rounds, see posts about September 2017 and November 2017 CTFs.

Invisible Flag (5 points)

It's a third iteration of the zip challenge.

There's a zip file containing 16 zip files inside. And each contains 16 more zip files. And so on for 16 levels, until you get to the flag.

For a small additional complication, the flag is completely invisible, and made out of different types of Unicode spaces. Replacing special spaces with different characters will reveal it.

Perl (10 points)

It's a very simple password validator written in very straightforward Perl.

The validator is mostly a sequence of commands like

s/^(.{7})i(.*)$/\2\1/;

Which removes character "i" from 8th position, and swaps everything before and after it. If the answer is empty, the validation is successful.

The easy way to solve it is to work backwards from an empty answer.

Almost Invisible Flag (15 points)

The challenge is an image with 1s and 0s written onto it in a very faint color. Once you figure that out, and transcribe the numbers into a binary file, it's a zip. Unpacking it reveals the flag.

React.js (20 points)

It's a react.js based validator. Validator is build of component layers, first layer checks length of the password, then each layer checks one character and passes the data to next layer with some transformations applied.

React Developer Tools for Chrome can be quite helpful for this.

This can be solved in many ways. You could brute force each layer with a simple script, or turn React code into a recursive function, and solve in an old fashioned way.

RSA (25 points)

For this challenge p and q are very close to each other. In fact they differ by just 2. There's a very simple attack for such case.

Monoalphabetic Cipher (30 points)

This challenge is a bit of text with flag embedded in it, encrypted by monoalphabetic cipher - all lower case letters, upper case letters, digits, spaces, punctuation each getting separate character.

The trick is that symbols used by the cipher are all emoji, which doesn't make the challenge any harder, just more fun.

The slight difficulty is that the text is not actually in English, so statistical methods can suffer a small detour. It's actually in German.

This was the only challenge that wasn't solved in time, but I don't think it's really that hard or time consuming.

I really like challenges about classical ciphers, but I don't want the solution to be simply copypasting it on quipquip.

PDF (35 points)

The challenge is a PDF file encrypted by a XOR key. The content is just a result of Chrome's print to PDF function. For extra challenge the flag is censored with a black bar over it, but that's very easy to workaround.

PDFs have a lot of plaintext inside, so there's a ton to work with, however it's somewhat unpredictable where that plaintext is located.

The key is three lower case English words without spaces.

A surprise extra challenge is that I accidentally left newline character at end of the key, which I only noticed during the challenge and told the contestants.

Javascript (40 points)

It's a very simple Javascript validator, obfuscated with jsfuck to only use 6 charecters.

I expected that people would need to write a simple JSFuck decoder, and that's why it's worth so many points, but most people just used Chrome debugger instead to solve this challenge really quickly.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Preconstructed Magic Decks on mtg.wtf

2018-05-28-13 by RobynAnderson from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

There's now a number of search engines for Magic cards, but some information is still missing from them all.

I just fixed one of such areas. mtg.wtf now has searchable contents of all preconstructed decks ever released. They contain cards from correct set, so viewing a decklist like this you can see actual cards which are in the deck. Every other decklist visualizer I've ever seen just gives you the most recent scans (like this for example), which looks really weird, especially for older decks.

You can view the decks, download decklists, or mix deck queries with other queries. For example to see which cards from Feline Ferocity are Modern-legal, just use deck:"Feline Ferocity" f:modern.

All this information is available in simple machine readable format.

Raw data is in magic-preconstructed-decks, and compiled jsons are in magic-search-engine repository.

Future enhancements

There's still room for improvement - information which cards are foil is missing, but easy to add. In theory it should be possible to find exact card printing instead of just set it's from (how many copies of which basic land etc.), in practice it might be a bit too much work.

Decklist visualizer could get extra features like sample hand, mana curve statistics etc.

And inevitably like with every project, there's going to be some errors. If you find any, please report them on github.

Monday, May 07, 2018

Wonder Woman review

Superkitty! by swxxii from flickr (CC-NC)

The movie is bad. Everything about it is bad. Like Star Wars prequels tier bad, but there won't even be any memes.

It's not about Wonder Woman

First of all, it's not even about Wonder Woman, it's all about her boyfriend. He's driving the whole plot, and she just tags along, without any sense of what's going on.

Diana (the "Wonder Woman") doesn't make any choices in the whole movie. The closest she gets to doing something on her own is choosing an outfit in a pointless shopping scene, and then she decides to dress up like him. Just wow.

Every time she suggests something (usually "omg, we got to help those people"), he just shuts her down, and then she does things his way.

The world makes no sense

Obviously the movie shits at actual Greek mythology.

As far as I can tell, the Amazons on the island are just some mortals. They have no children, and seem to be aging, so between ancient Greek times and World War 1, they should all be dead, right? Or is it some Star Trek time bubble? And how do they even speak English and all the other modern languages if they've been isolated from the world for who knows how long?

Then there's a framing device with pointless email from Batman. Like, what the hell? Greek Gods and Batman do not belong in the same movie in any way whatsoever. The comics tend to be stupid like that, but it served no purpose whatsoever.

And of course there are unexplained black Amazons, Hollywood has racial quotas to fill.

Action scenes are few and bad

There are three action sequences in this 2h 21min "action" movie.

Early on there's German army landing on Amazons' island, where the Amazons dance-fight, doing bows trick shot, and combo moves with spears, leashes, and such. Wearing the kind of "female armor" everyone has been making fun of for last 30 years. It's all rather silly, but probably still the best part of the movie.

Then about an hour of bad acting later there's storming of No Man's Land. Wonder Woman runs into machine gun fire, and the movie gives up on any internal logic. I couldn't tell - is she bullet proof or not? If she is, then why the hell is she tying to block bullets one by one with whatever piece of token armor is on her forearms? It's ridiculous every time she does it. And if she's not bulletproof, then how isn't she dead exactly? There's a lot of bullets out there, and she's not exactly waving her arms to block.

Anyway, leaving extent of her powers aside, somehow here mere presence makes all bullets miss everyone in the whole British army, who all decide to run after her, without anyone getting even a scratch.

Another hour of bad acting later, there's final boss fight which is basically shitty CGI, and least entertaining of all three.

The villain

Invincible superheroes are inherently rather boring, and decent superhero movies rely on an interesting villain to work. Wonder Woman's is about the worst, as the main villain gets like a minute of screen time within the first two hours before an obvious surprise plot twist reveal.

Villain's two henchmen get a bit more screen time, one of which Wonder Woman decided to kill, the other one to spare, for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

So instead the fighting is mostly against random German and occasionally Turkish conscripts who have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on around them. Then again, there's not that much fighting in the movie.

Morality

I think the movie attempts to have some moral message about violence being bad, but delivery is so ridiculously poor I'm not even sure what they've been going for. In the end, she ignores her moral intuitions and does whatever her boyfriend asks for. Is that the message perhaps? Do what your boyfriend says?

Sidekicks

At some point the boyfriend and his sidekick Diana assemble a team. None of them does anything. Some Native American "chief" sends smoke signals at some point, it's not very clear why. They try to do some fighting, but Wonder Woman does all the work anyway.

Acting

The only person who got any kind of character development is the boyfriend with his heroic sacrifice. Diana starts the movie as Wonder Woman, ends the movie as Wonder Woman, and her character development is, I guess getting her first boyfriend?

All the acting from Gal Gadot playing Wonder Woman was bad, so maybe they tried to salvage the movie by giving somewhat more tolerable Chris Pine playing the boyfriend more to do, until he took over the whole movie?

Conclusion

The movie has are no redeeming qualities. I watched it yesterday, and it's already rapidly fading in my memory other than the silly dance fight scene.

The only thing you'll achieve by watching it is convince yourself that critics (who for some reason love it) are all idiots, but you should probably know that by now.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Let's make Lucca Mission Pack mod for Europa Universalis 4

In this post we'll create a very simple EU4 mission pack mod. I'll use Lucca as an example. It will be more fun if you pick another country, follow along these step, while customizing your mod a bit.

This is a beginner level tutorial. It doesn't require any skills beyond use of text editors. Because we'll need nonstandard encoding support to deal with localization files, I recommend Visual Studio Code, but other than this one step pretty much any editor will do.

For some more details on how mission system works, you might want to check my previous post. To just learn the new mission system from a player's perspective, watch DDRJake's videos.

There's more to the mission system than can be covered in one tutorial, so I want to write another one covering more advanced subject later.

If you have any questions about these steps, ask them here, or reach me on any social media.

Create mod descriptor

For more complex mods it's best to keep the files somewhere safe and version-controlled, like on github, but we're starting small now so I'm going to skip this step.

Open C:\Users\(YourName)\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\mod or equivalent.

You need to create a descriptor for your mod, for this simple mod create lucca_mission_pack.mod. For very simple mod we'll only have three lines, like this:

name = "Lucca Mission Pack"
path = "mod/lucca_mission_pack"
supported_version = 1.25

name is what's going to appear in the launcher.

path is name of the folder where we'll create mod files. Create the lucca_mission_pack folder. It's best if it has the same name as mod descriptor (except for .mod extension).

supported_version tells the game which exact version the mod supports. It's used mainly to warn the user in game launcher, that the mod didn't get updated for the next version yet.

If you're following these steps in the future, change supported_version to whatever's appropriate.

At this point you can start game launcher, and see that your mod is on the list. If it's not, something went wrong with the mod descriptor and you should check it. No point running the game yet, as the mod does nothing.

Create empty mod files

Inside C:\Users\(YourName)\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\mod\ create lucca_mission_pack folder, inside it lucca_mission_pack\missions subfolder, and inside that lucca_mission_pack\missions\Lucca_Missions.txt file.

The name of the file doesn't matter as long as it ends in .txt and doesn't conflict with any in the game. For example if you call it Hungary_Missions.txt you'll be overwriting Hungary's missions from base game - but if you call it MudkipIsBestPokemon.txt it's just fine.

Location of the file definitely matters, so if you make mistakes the mod will not load correctly.

Planning the missions

If you take a short break from modding and run the game, you'll see that Lucca's existing missions are:
  • column 1 - empty
  • column 2 - generic military missions
  • column 3 - generic diplomatic missions
  • column 4 - generic administrative missions
  • column 5 - regional missions for European countries and HRE minors
It's going to be similar for most countries, except sometimes column 5 will be empty as well.

For a small mission pack we'll create a single mission group, and put it into column 1.

For a bigger mission pack we might replace column 5 as well, add missions on the bottom, or replace some of the generic missions.

Column choice is not just for the interface, as multiple mission groups going into same columns might replace each other.

Create a mission group

Let's open lucca_mission_pack\missions\Lucca_Missions.txt in text editor and setup a group for the missions:

lucca_mission_group = {
  slot = 1
  generic = no
  ai = yes
  potential = {
    tag = LUC
  }
  has_country_shield = yes

  # missions will go here
}

What we're setting up here:
  • in column 1 (columns are called "slots")
  • not generic. This is used as priority if multiple mission groups try to use same column.
  • also available for the AI. Usually should be yes.
  • available if your tag at campaign start is LUC (Lucca). List of tags is on the wiki, usually it's first three letters of country name.
  • that we want to display country shield in the interface. This is purely graphical, but country-specific missions usually do, so let's be consistent here.
For potential you can choose based on other criteria like religion, culture, capital location etc., but they're only checked on campaign start, or when explicitly told so by an event or decision.

In vanilla game, they only change on some nation forming decisions. If you start as Lucca and form Italy, you'll keep your original missions since Italy decision doesn't change missions. If you form France, you'll get your mission pack replaced.

Creating out first mission

Time to create the first mission. We'll start with something very simple. The goal is to build a temple  in Lucca, and as a reward you'll get 200 admin points.

Open missions files, and in the place we left for missions, add this:

lucca_temple_in_capital = {
  icon = mission_european_church
  required_missions = {  }
  trigger = {
    2980 = {
      has_building = temple
    }
  }
  effect = {
    add_adm_power = 200
  }
}

What it does:
  • it sets mission's ID to lucca_temple_in_capital. This needs to be unique, and will be used for localization.
  • it uses icon mission_european_church. This is purely graphical, and I wouldn't worry too much about the icons until you're happy with how your missions work.
  • it sets lists of required previous missions to empty
  • it sets mission completion condition (trigger) - province 2980 (Lucca) has temple. You can find list of province IDs on the wiki.
  • it sets mission reward (effect) - 200 admin power points
At this point it makes sense to launch the game, and check that everything is indeed working.

Try writing something similar for country of your choice.

Start mission chain

OK, so that worked. Let's create some more missions. We'll put them all in same file, one under the other.

For design of a mission chain to be good, they should somehow connect with each other. Here's an idea for a small chain:
  • first we want to build up our capital. As a reward we get some permanent claims on nearby lands.
  • second we want to conquer claims we got in previous mission, as a reward we get some points of multiple types
  • third, we want Lucca to rival one of the big baddies, proving that we're ready. It will require completing previous mission too, so we don't need to check it again. As reward we get 25 year +10% discipline bonus for more enjoyable fights agains our new rivals.
This covers the most common cases - checking that we conquered something, getting rewarded by permanent claims, various types of points, or temporary bonuses. As well as a few extras.

Plan a similar chain for your own country, for now using similar kinds of effects.

Make Lucca Great Again

make_lucca_great_again = {
  icon = mission_high_income
  required_missions = {  }
  trigger = {
    capital_scope = {
      development = 25
      renaissance = 100
    }
  }
  effect = {
    tuscany_area = {
      limit = {
        NOT = { is_core = ROOT }
        NOT = { owned_by = ROOT }
      }
      add_permanent_claim = ROOT
    }
  }
}

Step by step:
  • it sets mission's ID to make_lucca_great_again. We'll use it as key to localization later.
  • it sets required missions to empty
  • to succeed it requires that our capital has at least 25 development and 100% Renaissance institution.  I could have used 2980 (specifically province of Lucca) instead of capital_scope (whichever province is our capital) here. We don't expect capital to move, so in this case it doesn't matter, but both selectors have their uses.
  • as reward we go through all provinces in tuscany_area and add permanent claim to them, unless they're already owned by us or have our core. Areas are defied in map\area.txt file. You don't need to use areas, you can just list provinces separately (the syntax is however a bit different).
So we can load the game, and see that it works.

Try something similar for your country. Pick some capital growth conditions, pick a relevant area from map\area.txt (most areas correspond to a state), and try it in the game.

Luccan Tuscany

We got our claims, so we ought to follow it with a mission checking that we actually conquered what we wanted.

As reward we'll just get some points, but of course you can chain a lot of conquer this area - get claims on next area missions. Making them branch in a way that looks good in the UI is a bit more advanced topic, but just making this chain as long as you'd like should be straightforward.

luccan_tuscany = {
  icon = mission_cannons_firing
  required_missions = { make_lucca_great_again }
  provinces_to_highlight = {
    area = tuscany_area
    NOT = {
      country_or_non_sovereign_subject_holds = ROOT
    }
  }
  trigger = {
    tuscany_area = {
      type = all
      country_or_non_sovereign_subject_holds = ROOT
    }
  }
  effect = {
    add_mil_power = 200
    add_legitimacy = 10
    add_republican_tradition = 10
  }
}

Let's go through it step by step:
  • it sets mission ID to luccan_tuscany
  • it sets mission icon to mission_canonns_firing
  • it requires completion of make_lucca_great_again first. If you arrange mission chain so that next mission depends on one just above it (or one row down and then sideways), the UI will draw pretty arrows to make it clearer how missions are related. Other dependencies still work, just won't look quite as nice.
  • it sets province highlight when mission is mouseovered to all provinces in  provinces_to_highlight which are not owned by us or a (nontributary) subject
  • it sets success condition of owning all provinces in tuscany_area by us or our (nontributary) subject. In addition you still need to do make_lucca_great_again first. 
  • as a reward, we get 200 mil power points, 10 legitimacy, and 10 republican tradition. Depending on government type of the country, the tooltip will only show relevant rewards, so if Lucca is a republic, the tooltip will show "200 mil points, 10 republican tradition", since legitimacy doesn't matter.
Try something similar for your country, customizing rewards, and using the same area you used in your previous mission.

You can also chain claims in a few missions.

Lucca in the Major League

So now that our Lucca conquered Tuscany, let's give it a more ambitious goal - rivalling one of big three regional baddies. As a reward we'll give it a bonus.

lucca_in_the_major_league = {
  icon = mission_cannons_firing
  required_missions = { luccan_tuscany }
  trigger = {
    OR = {
      is_rival = FRA
      is_rival = HAB
      is_rival = TUR
    }
  }
  effect = {
    add_country_modifier = {
      name = lucca_discipline
      duration = 9125 # 25 years
    }
  }
}

Step by step:
  • it sets mission ID to lucca_in_the_major_league
  • it sets mission icon to mission_cannons_firing, I just used the same one as before but feel free to pick something more creative. In the end it's just a minor graphical embellishment.
  • it requires completing luccan_tuscany first, which in turns requires make_lucca_great_again. Because we put those missions in proper order, they'll be connected by nice arrows in the UI.
  • to succeed we need to rival France (FRA), Austria (HAB), or Ottomans (TUR). You can see that in this case tags are not quite what one might guess, presumably as a leftover from EU2 or maybe even EU1 for all I know. There's no need to check that we also did our conquests, as previous mission in the chain checks that.
  • as a reward we get lucca_discipline modifier, for 9125 days (25 years). We just need to tell the game what that means in another file.

Creating modifiers

This is not strictly mission modding, but modifiers are about the most common mission reward, so it's useful to know how to create them.

In our mod create text file lucca_mission_pack\common\static_modifiers\lucca_missions.txt, and put this inside:

lucca_discipline = {
  discipline = 0.10
}

And that's it. You can check common\static_modifiers\00_static_modifiers.txt in the game for more examples.

You can put as many modifiers in single file as you want, just create your own instead of putting edited 00_static_modifiers.txt in your mod.

How EU4 localization works

EU4 localization files use .yml extension, but it's actually custom format somewhat inspired by YAML format, not the real thing.

All localization files live in localisation folder, with files sorted by language.

Each file has header like l_english, and a list of IDs and their localized strings. All the files need to start with the non-standard UTF-8 BOM. If you create a normal text file without BOM, it will be ignored by the game.

If you want your mod to support some other languages, it should be fairly obvious which file names and header to use instead.

As a bonus annoyance, Paradox can't decide between American and British spelling inside their files. Folder name is called "localisation" in all their games, but then HoI4 uses localization_key to choose entry from it. It's very easy to get confused.

Localization

So if you followed along, you have a working mod with 4 missions for your country, or however many you created. There's just one more issue - the missions all use internal development IDs instead of human readable names and descriptions.

There's 9 things we need to edit: 4 mission names, 4 mission descriptions, and name of our modifier.

Those IDs we gave the missions, they all need to be unique, so it makes sense to prefix it by name of the country or mission pack to avoid accidental conflicts, but we can localize them any way we want.

For every mission ID_title is its name key, and ID_desc is the description key. Static modifiers's name keys are just their IDs.

What we'd like to do is create lucca_mission_pack\localisation\lucca_missions_l_english.yml and put the following code there:

l_english:
 lucca_temple_in_capital_title: "Builde Temple in Lucca"
 lucca_temple_in_capital_desc: "As all good Italians, Luccans need a place to pray."
 make_lucca_great_again_title: "Make Lucca Great Again"
 make_lucca_great_again_desc: "Our capital should be the greatest city in Italy since ancient Rome"
 luccan_tuscany: "Conquest of Tuscany"
 luccan_tuscany: "Some Florentines, I assume, are good people, but they'll still be better off under Luccan rule."
 lucca_in_the_major_league_title: "Joining the Major League"
 lucca_in_the_major_league_desc: "Show the world that Lucca is now one of the great powers by rivaling a nearby Great Power."
 lucca_discipline: "Lucca's Dispciplined Army"

The game uses single space indentation, but it's not too strict about this.

What it is extremely strict about is the BOM, so if you use Visual Studio Code, choose "UTF-8 with BOM" as encoding for your new file on the bottom bar. For other editors find appropriate instructions, but many don't support UTF-8 BOM at all.

If you don't know how to get the BOM working, one think you can try is copying existing localization file, deleting everything except the first line (which might look like one broken character followed by l_english: tag) and just replacing the rest of the file with your content.

Great Success

If everything worked, you should see something like this:


Debugging

If you see image like above, but using internal IDs instead of English text, then mod is probably file , but localization is wrong. Most common issue is UTF-8 BOM.

If you see some total mess in first column, like wrong number of missions with silly names like icon, you probably made a typo in mod files, and game .

Open C:\Users\(YourName)\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\logs or equivalent and search for hints. errors.log might give you line number where game got confused.

If mod was in the launcher, but when you play the game you see empty first column, mod probably didn't load at all. Or it did, but your potential tag is wrong, and game doesn't think these missions are appropriate for currently selected country. Double check errors.log and list of tags.

If you don't even see the mod is mod launcher, then mod descriptor file is probably wrong or in wrong place.

Or if none of that works, just ask, but remote debugging is pretty hard. I'll have easier time answering "I want mission to do X when Y" questions than "it doesn't work, what do?" questions.

Download the mod

It's best if you followed the tutorial and wrote it on your own, but if you want to check the files, all the files are on github.