Giving units Light Infantry Drill at the start of the game?

**Quixote07** · April 01, 2009, 02:01 PM

Right now I'm in the process of reworking native american and colonial units to improve the American theater experience. What I'd like to do is have Light Infantry Drill be enabled at the start of the game for all units, while leaving the technology where it is to enable the recruitment of European light infantry.

Anyone had any success with something similar to this? I would tie it to all tier 1 technologies, but Native Americans can't research anything.

**l33tl4m3r** · April 01, 2009, 02:17 PM

Quixote - I've moved techs around in APE.

Brought Rank Fire down to tier 2, etc.

Once way to bind multiple techs to a single research slot; move all of their positions to the same #1 slot on that tier. Am I making no sense, if not I'll screenshot it when I get home tonight for you!

--

Hope this helps!

**Quixote07** · April 01, 2009, 02:47 PM

Yup, it's a good start. I also had a pretty major breakthrough.

The "Effects" columns in the Technology effects junction and the Builidng effects junction are interchangable. I added "enable_light_infantry_drill" with a magnitude of 1 to all native american and all government (FE: Governor's Mansion, Royal Palace, that building slot) buildings. They all listed "Enables light infantry drill" in their effects window, but unfortunately none of my units actually got the ability. I tried constructing a building afterwords, in case the script couldn't effectively activate at the start of a game, but still no dice.

I know I can get this to work for regular factions using the technology tree. The challenge is getting it to work for native american factions, who can't receive technology through diplomacy or research anything themselves.

**l33tl4m3r** · April 01, 2009, 02:49 PM

Originally Posted by Quixote07

Yup, it's a good start. I also had a pretty major breakthrough.

The "Effects" columns in the Technology effects junction and the Builidng effects junction are interchangable. I added "enable_light_infantry_drill" with a magnitude of 1 to all native american and all government (FE: Governor's Mansion, Royal Palace, that building slot) buildings. They all listed "Enables light infantry drill" in their effects window, but unfortunately none of my units actually got the ability. I tried constructing a building afterwords, in case the script couldn't effectively activate at the start of a game, but still no dice.

I know I can get this to work for regular factions using the technology tree. The challenge is getting it to work for native american factions, who can't receive technology through diplomacy or research anything themselves.

You figure it out and I bet we can unlock Marathas properly, let me know if I can help in any way.

EDIT: Did you try editing the startpos.esf to add light infantry drill to the native factions at campaign start?

**Quixote07** · April 01, 2009, 03:30 PM

Nope, I havn't, because I can't edit hex to save my life

Oh, when I said indians, I meant native americans

I have gotten around it though. I added research_points to the first native american government building. Native Americans apparently only get the most basic of economic technologies, no military or enlightenment ones, which makes sense. So I made sure it had enough research_points to research any one of those first technologies in one turn, and now I'm going to add the enable_light_infantry_drill effect to all first tier technologies. Hopefully that should do it.

Update - It did not work. Native Americans lack the building requirements to research even the most basic technologies. Sounds like it's hex editing time!

**Zach_the_Evil** · April 02, 2009, 08:43 AM

You don't need a hex editor. Look in the tools sections, there's just's ESF editor. It's capable of editing save games and the .ESF files, enabling things such as victory conditions for minor factions, changing provinces around, and giving technologies to factions.