[satchel]

I looked over the format of your data and didn't see any obvious errors. It all seems to be structured correctly.

Some suggestions:

When you plugged in provinces and longitudes and latitudes for the cities, did you use the correct formats of text and digits?

I realize the appeal of making "clean" versions of all these database files. That would be my ideal choice as well. But if you can't get it to work, I'd go back and mod the originals. Replace some existing data with your custom data. For example, replace some existing ethnicities with your custom ones, then replace a couple of existing nations with your custom ones, and add your cities to the cities.txt file.

I know that extra cities can be safely added to the cities.txt file; I don't know whether the other database files can be extended with extra entries, or whether custom data needs to replace existing data.

There might need to be a minimum number of ethnicities. The nations.txt data lines do have fields for up to four ethnicities, perhaps there need to be at least four extant in the database.