Questions regarding map province ownership editing

[MatoGrossoDoNorte]

I'm attempting to mod the province ownership files of the game so that on game start, select provinces will have different controllers, original claimants, and home province status. For example, I want to make it so that when I start a new game at any date, the province of Bermuda will belong to the United States, not have any chance of reverting to Bermudan control, and have its population count towards the United States'  "home population."  

 

This is the first Unity game I've modded and through lots of searching I think I've figured out most of the steps but the last. 

I've downloaded and used this version of Unity Asset Bundle Extractor (https://github.com/nesrak1/UABEA/releases/tag/v6), opened the resources.assets file located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts_Data, selected the "provinces" TextAsset file and hit "Export Dump" as a .txt, and manually edited all the lines I needed to.

For example, to change Bermuda's province status, I changed "britain,,,,,,,bermuda,,,[random numbers]..." to "usa,,,,,,,usa,1,home,[random numbers]." I believe I understand the file structure as [...1890_owner,1900_owner,...,1940_owner,claimant_player,home_status,province_status,...]. If there's anything I'm messing up here please let me know. I purposely decided not to edit the starting fleet locations because I don't really care if Britain has to move their fleets somewhere else when the game starts.

After editing I imported the .txt dump to the same resources.assets file.

Where I'm getting stuck is the Asset Bundle Extractor seeming to fail to save and apply the edited resources.assets file. When I hit "Save and Apply All," I'm prompted to save a modified "resources.assets-mod"  file. I believe the next step here is to back up the original resources.assets file, close UAD and UABE if still open, move the modified resources.assets-mod file into the C:\...\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts_Data directory, and rename the modified file by deleting "-mod" so that the game recognizes it as the resources.assets file on launch. However, when I launch the game again... nothing has changed about the map. I skipped this by just using UABEA, which doesn't screw up the resources.assets file when I try to save it.

I have since verified using UABEA that my resources.assets is indeed modified, but when I launch the game the map is unchanged, and when I check the file again it's reverted back to vanilla. Does anyone know if there's another file I'm supposed to be editing and why my changes are being overwritten on game launch?

 

Here's a screenshot that shows my edited resources.assets file (directory not shown but it's the game directory) and none of the provinces I've changed to belong to the US actually belong to the US.

 

tl;dr I wanna edit province ownership/claimant status/home status and my changes aren't working.

 

P.S. I do know how to edit the saves to approximate my desired changes but 1. I have to do it every time I start a different game and 2. I haven't figured how to change province home status.

Edited October 26, 2023 by MatoGrossoDoNorte
Additional information from screenshot