By Garbon:

I think the two big things that anyone who wants to further customize should
make sure to get is Notepad++ (with added compare extension) as well as the
validator (where I know there was a separate branch to make it up-to-date with
what was last version of Victoria).Both can go a long way in preventing errors.

As far as my strategy to it, as I mentioned in my AAR, I'd started with a plan

to just pick up some nations and events from NNM (in fact I had used frontend's
NNM option but it created a broken mod so decided to DIY). I looked through
that mod and compiled a list of countries that I thought would make sense to
have (large focus on additional nations for Americas as well as Europe, in
this instance) and then looked at Vic2 wiki/modding guides to see what are the
bare minimum places you need to enter in a nation entry and cores to make it
appear in game. Similar thing could be done for border gore, I suppose. I did
see later than rather than editing all the provinces to add the cores for my
new countries, I could have followed the NNM setup which has a couple AI
decisions at the start of game to add cores - which would certainly have been
easier**). For localisation, I then just copied in the relevant entries into
the localisation files that converter created. Can't just copy full NNM file as
it sometimes uses tags for different purposes than those from the converter -
which means depending on nation you want to add you might need to change the
tag.

Then for the decisions/events, I took a look at what files might make sense to
include / if there were any tweaks I needed to make for my world****. Here was
generally a little safer to just grab full NNM localisation files. But then
there were times when new events/decisions had modifiers that were not vanilla
modifiers. That's where the validator proves useful as it will warn you if your
events are supposed to generate non-existent modifiers. Similarly if
localisation missing, you forgot some country files (like say flags), etc. One
thing also to watch when pulling the NNM events is if I recall correctly, their
tags for Corsica and Savoy are different from the converter, so if you want to
make sure those nations can form Italy, you'll need to adjust - but again I
believe validator warns you about references to NNM's tags that you haven't
merged over.

I avoided for the most part things from the PDM mod as those started getting
complicated with new inventions as well as national values which then require
lots of tweaks to events and may even impact things like pop files. Of course,
with validator in hand, you can get warnings about more complex things.
Notepad++ very helpful here if there's just bits of code throughout a file that
you want to copy over. I used it (with compare extension) quite a bit when I
decided that I liked some of the pop tweaks from historical project mod (such
as when pops care about slavery as an issue as few states had outlawed slavery
in my converted mod or tweaks to defines) but knew HPM has different national
values that I didn't want to include.

But really main rule, make any changes on an incremental basis and then
validate after every key step!

**in fact, with something like that, I suppose one could come up with a set of
mini-mods (perhaps region based?) to let people add possible revolter nations
as you can't really have an add-on fiddling with the actual province history
entries as you don't know what they would look like in any given converted
game. Such a mod would just need to include country entries for
common\countries, flags, history\countries entries and localisation. Though it
would still need a person to manually edit countries.txt as unlike EU4, Vic2
doesn't support separate files for loading tag entries, but I guess that could
just be a readme instruction of each module what would need to be copied in.
Only other negative I can see here is that you could run into issues with
primary_culture/religion issues for history entries (as well as language naming
in common\countries) depending on who colonized what or how cultures shifted in
Old World but it'd at least be a handy base for people wanting to do
customisations without too much hassle.

****One thing that I forgot to do was see if there were events for Vic2 that
did not make sense in my world. Spain was the main revolutionary power in my
world after French revolution failed to take. It doesn't really make sense
then for any of the Bonapartist events to occur in France. I should have copied
over the vanilla file and then made deletions given that Bonaparte never had
any power at all in my game's timeline. So additions as well as deletions can
be critical for sensible story flow.