Giving each faction or culture a unique behaviour

**Ketzerfreund** · March 27, 2009, 01:16 AM

Greetings,

In this post GeorgiaPeanuts mentioned a certain MAINTAINANCE tag assigned to minor factions, while the tag FULL is assigned to the major/playable factions in startpos.esf (can't find the original post where either he or someone else told us the whole thing).

Well, it seems like replacing all occurences of MAINTAINANCE with FULL may make the minor factions as vivid as the major ones.

But why stop there?

I invite all modders out there to open up their PFM, load the present patch.pack file and look in the db folder for the entry campaign_ai_manager_behaviour_junctions.
You'll notice that that's the file which defines what MAINTAINANCE and FULL actually mean. Indeed, FULL has 30 values assigned to it, while MAINTAINANCE has only 26.

Now, how about defining more manager personalities like those two to make the different faction actually behave differently? Who focuses on trade rather than war (TRADE_AREA_BEHAVIOUR)? Who does especially like pirating (TRADE_ROUTE_RAIDING_BEHAVIOUR)? Who is a truly honorable ally (HELP_ALLY_AT_WAR)?

There's also campaign_ai_personalities (listing) and campaign_ai_personalities_junctions (defining); it looks like only "default" is activated, so far, by being the only one that has the only "true" boole in campaign_ai_personalities. I haven't seen where these personalities are assigned to each faction, yet. I guess also in startpos.esf; haven't looked through that one much, so far. I'd appreciate any input on that aspect of ai behaviour definition.

Thoughts?

**OTZ** · March 27, 2009, 07:30 AM

I've activated "maritime_progressive" by setting it to "true" - didn't seem to have an impact on the game...I don't have NET framework at work, so I can't play around with it until tonight.

**Ketzerfreund** · March 27, 2009, 07:44 AM

Umm... Where? What are you talking about? What "maritime_progressive"?

**OTZ** · March 27, 2009, 08:36 AM

Originally Posted by Ketzerfreund

Umm... Where? What are you talking about? What "maritime_progressive"?

I believe it was in one of the behaviour lists - but I can't be certain right now. It was in a list of all of the AI types - the only one set to "True" was "default". I tlisted the others such as "new_age" etc...

**Ketzerfreund** · March 27, 2009, 08:52 AM

Ah, yes. I think that that personality must be assigned to a faction somewhere. Just enabling it won't cut it, I guess. I've stumbled upon assorted stuff in the db folders that is either accompanied or even overriden by settings in startpos.esf. The db files are not almighty - which somewhat counters the spirit of the modular mod system...