[question] How to change a faction's starting provinces?

[omzdog]

Right click on one of the array elements and hit duplicate if you want to include another faction inside that province.
The array number only indicates the number of factions inside that province, not the number of regions hence the name 'faction province manager'.

Ahh, now I'm up to date on your system.byte problem and I see that there is obviously a correlation between that integer and the number of regions in that province owned by the faction.

The ways in which the arrays are structured is eluding. Aquitania for instance has 3 elements each with 1 byte arrays, 3 gualic factions. Italia has two each with 2 bytes of arrays, Rome and Etrusca.
Manipulating it so that factions can do as you say is possible only if we can compensate for what System.Byte[] is supposed to tell us (hint: most likely the id#'s of the regions).

[Anaxamander]

I've done some experimenting with Carthage. I went ahead and gave them the Nova Carthago provinces, plus some more.

Ooh - you are CLEVER!I deleted the entry because there was already an entry pertaining to ownership for Carthage - because Carthage starts owning one of the 4 regions by default. But I can't edit the integer there, so it crashes. If you are right, maybe I can just set both ownership entries to Carthage - so one entry will show Carthage owning 1, and the other entry will show Carthage owning the other 3. That would avoid having to edit the systembyte integer we can't currently edit. You have me excited. I will try it when I get home, unfortunately about 12 hours from now.That said, I still have no clue how faction_province_manager figures out which regions it's talking about. In the entry for carthage, there's an ownership entry for carthage with a byte[1] which obviously corresponds to the city of Carthage, and there's an ownership entry for Libya with a byte[3] which clearly corresponds to the 3 provinces Libya owns...but there's nothing to indicate how the game determines that the byte[1] is carthage in particular and the byte[3] is the other 3. There don't seem to be individual entries for each Libya region; it's just all done together. Which means that switching ownership is all or nothing - I couldn't, for example, switch it so that Carthage owned 3 out of the 4 but not all 4. More work will have to be done to figure out how the game designates what particular regions are owned by which faction, rather than just the ratio in the province as a whole. If that makes sense.

I tried that with my edit. I left the province array like it was, but changed the ID to 3 for Carthage. They own them, but still no edicts. http://i.imgur.com/RZ2QSZy.png Same results for me. Even though I gave Carthage all of the Africa province, they cannot issue edicts. They can recruit and build, and it appears that they get income from the settlements. http://imgur.com/VBjgV27 As you can see, the province still shows up as contested on the provinces screen. I tried using Rome with this startpos, and CPU Carthage still had the settlements. It will be interesting to see how the CPU handles more territory.

[omzdog]

The edicts require you to wait 1 turn after you capture all province settlements.
Try waiting a couple and see if the button doesn't come up.

If its not the case, since edicts are new to TW and the current EditSF was built on the Shogun2 model, I wouldn't be surprised if we just have to wait for daniu to craft all the new features into it.

[Excalibur Bane]

Okay, I got a question, how would a total newbie go about changing ownership of most of the territories to rebel?

[omzdog]

Give all the regions the rebel faction id#, that being 1, I believe.

[Excalibur Bane]

Okay, so I gathered your all using this EditSF tool, yes?

Where about's do I change region ownership?

[omzdog]

The 11th value from the top of all the [REGION] elements in [REGION_ARRAY #] should be changed to 1 and delete the 12th value, that is your objective.

Open EditSF
Open startpos.est under 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Total War Rome II\data\campaigns\main_rome'
Click the expand buttons until you reach:
CAMPAIGN_STARTPOS -> COMPRESSED_DATA -> CAMPAIGN_ENV -> CAMPAIGN_MODEL -> WORLD -> REGIONS_ARRAY

The 11th value indicates the owning factions id integer.
12th indicates the owning factions name string.

These are the elements you have to change in theory.
I havn't tried it myself and we don't know the impact on the AI.

Do this to all necessary REGION elements, there are 173 in total. Good luck.

Might as well PM me or open a new thread if you have questions, no need to hijack this thread.

[yukishiro1]

That will transfer the settlements, but not ownership over the regions. So the rebels wouldn't be able to recruit anything from those regions. You'd need to change the province_manager_array entries too to do that. Although apparently even that doesn't fix the edicts.

[yukishiro1]

Confirm that you can enable recruitment using province_manager by changing the ownership ID, but that it won't enable edicts or count for purposes of objectives.

Also, and this is extremely odd - although Carthage now has control over Libya's possessions, Libya still has control too. When I hit end turn while playing as Carthage, Libya will build buildings in the ex-Libyan provinces. This is downright bizarre.

[omzdog]

Ghost faction?
Means there is another place to designate ownership.
We'll have to dig deeper assuming its not indicated by System.Byte[].

Also, I was thinking it could be possible for edicts to be controlled by faction array.
It doesn't make sense but it follows the trend of regions ownership being controlled by province arrays.

[yukishiro1]

I tried changing the number in faction array that corresponds to how many starting provinces a faction has. It didn't seem to do anything. It certainly didn't fix the edict issue or the issue with libya still building buildings in carthage's new provinces.

[omzdog]

Do me a favor and check if you can recruit mercenaries.
We'll cross-reference in game effects to esf changes.

Also, did you delete the starting provinces of Libya?
Actually not delete but input 0.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, I set Libya's starting provinces to 0. But again, that field doesn't seem to actually do anything.

I can recruit factional mercenaries, armies, and fleets. It's not letting me recruit provincial mercenaries for some reason. I have tried passing 6 turns and they still arn't showing up. So it seems like somewhere along the line something I did may have screwed up the provincial, but no the factional mercenaries. Which is interesting, and the opposite of what I would guess. Because it means for mercenary purposes, it IS considering Carthage as the owner of the regions.

[yukishiro1]

Also, weirder and weirder:

I tried advancing a few more turns and someone killed Libya's starting army, which I didn't edit out. When the starting army died, I got a "faction destroyed: libya" message. Now no one seems to build buildings on Libya's former provinces, but I still can't issue edicts. So it appears that although Libya was the one building buildings in its own province - how, I'm still not sure - it wasn't the thing holding up recognition for edict purposes.

[trk]

This topic is quite interesting to me since I do not understand why carthage does not control larger territory. I was casting about and noted that phanzania that has the edict capability has only one entry in faction manager array while africa has two one for carthage and one for libya. Perhaps all that one need do is eliminate one? And then the next question is how is that handled in a game. I will need to look at a save where rome has all of italia.
It would be quite realistic if carthage could issue edicts, etc over a province while the regions are with a separate faction. (Have to try that later.)
what do you think?

[trk]

I tried that but it will not work on either Africa or mauretania. In the case of Africa the game starts with a Libyan unit in lepcis. in the case of mauretania the gaetuli and the dimmidi have a unit in their respective towns on turn 2. Oddly while I can modify structures and change taxes in both provinces I can only recruit in Libya not in mauretania. I have tried both deleting the extra prov mgr arrays as well as changing them to carthage owner (3). I am afraid that until all regions are captured or those 3 units are eliminated before play that edicts and complete control are not possible. Disappointing. The really surprising thing is that there are two sets of region names. One in esf and one in the visible game. If appropriate region names are changed to carthage the money goes up roughly 2000 per turn.

[trk]

Also tried modifying province mercenary pool. The regions that can be readily controlled - iol, thapsus,lepcis,tingis. And of course it is easy to give carthage ibossim as well as gadira. The one thing that should be noted is if all provinces occupied by the factions new carthage and Libya are given to carthage then their forces experience attrition. In the case of lepcis for instance, Libya starts with units and you can add whatever you want but they will go into attrition unless you leave them with something like macomades. And of course carthage starts with a limited budget and may not have the means to support/control so many regions unless using the radious mod to add generals. Basically the game seems to establish rome in much the same way as Britain in empire and napoleon (IMO). just sayin'

[yukishiro1]

Still haven't found any way to get the province to be recognized as yours for edicts and objectives purposes. I really think it probably has to do with that system.byte entry. Setting two different entries to both point to one faction doesn't seem to work for ownership but I bet if you could edit it down to one entry with a system.byte 4 (or however many settlements that province has) would work. I've been through startpos with a fine toothed comb several times and I can't find anything else that looks like it might control so. So I think it's either that system.byte entry or it's something outside of startpos entirely.

[Caki]

It's system.byte 100%

[Jingo]

Couldn't you just change the faction you control in a savegame over and over? Use their armies to conquer which parts you want them in control of by constantly resetting move points so you can say conquer all of Spain with Carthage in 1 turn for your example. Then delete all history/unwanted experience/reset units. You'd have to create like 20 savefiles with each playable faction and bundle them together to make a shareable "mod" though rather than just one shareable savegame.