Adding legendary lord to minor faction

**grahamgrocho** · August 20, 2016, 02:05 PM

Hi. Completely new to modding TW, much less any game at all, but I downloaded all of the essentials and I'd like to try reverse-engineering a mod that unlocks Schwartzhafen but changing it a bit to allow myself to start the campaign with a fully-functional Heinrich Kemmler legendary lord. Any help?

I know there exists a popular mod "Legendary Lord Unique Starting Postions" but it appears to be a bit broken and lords are not gaining XP. I'm hoping I can make a simple mod that just unlocks Schwartzhafen for a coop campaign (my friend will play as VC), and with a proper legendary lord.

Any clue where to start there?

**Arayel** · August 20, 2016, 02:22 PM

This is mostly Start Pos editing so check out the various Start Pos tables in DAVE. Factions, Characters, Unit and Settlement related tables are all likely involved. You'll probably also want to look at some of the general tables like factions and units that also go with this just to be sure they don't conflict.

I created a mod for myself that puts LL's into minor factions all over the place (Kemmler is leading Mousillon in mine), but I didn't need any of them to be playable so didn't look at that. There are various front end tables in start pos as well so looking at them might help. The problem could arise if you need to re-script anything to keep things working, I've found that I didn't, and my newly placed Lords are all acquiring their gear and levels as they are supposed to so far as I can tell.

Quick Edit: Currently doing any Start Pos editing in DAVE leaves you without victory conditions, so neither of you will get chapters or short/long victories. It's an issue with DAVE having a blank victory condition start pos table that means BOB creates a start pos missing it. We are awaiting an update. If you don't mind these being missing (I still play perfectly fine without the 'guide' of the chapters) then don't worry too much, it probaly wont affect you too much in multiplayer anyway. It might however mean we all have our DAVE tables reset for us when they do the update which will be annoying to say the least.

**grahamgrocho** · August 20, 2016, 05:51 PM

Great advice, thanks! So do I need to use Pack File Manager at all or can it all be done in DAVE?

**grahamgrocho** · August 20, 2016, 08:01 PM

Bah. I just can't figure this out. Why the heck are there two tools to use here? So complicated to my pea brain. I will gladly pay someone $15 via PayPal to make this mod for me haha.

**Arayel** · August 20, 2016, 09:19 PM

I agree it'snot the most intuitive system in the world. There are some decent basic tutorials on the system itself by Magnus on youtube you coudl check out. But in a basic sense DAVE is simply a visual database editor for the tables the system uses. After you edit what you want there you then need to 'export to binary' to transfer those edits to the raw data collection of the toolkit, which is where BOB will build your startpos.esf and/or pack files for you from. Once you've built those you can then use pfm for tweaks, fixes, changes etc. In this mods case, unless you are an esf genius I would stick to doing it in DAVE, at least that's what I had to do. PFM is however more use when editing any other tables, especially when you can simply have the original open side by side for comparison.

If I have time I might take a quick run at this but I'm currently rebalancing another mod when in fact I should actually be doing some rl work....TW modding is wonderful procrastination tool as it turns out!

**grahamgrocho** · August 21, 2016, 10:50 AM

Ok, took another stab this morning without any luck. I think I got all of the data fields I need changed, I selected "export binary changes." Then I opened BOB tried two different things but neither worked:

(1) Selected "Data" under "Retail Data" and hitting "Start." Then moving the pack and renaming it in the Warhammer Data folder, starting up the game, etc. But nothing changed in my game...

(2) Selected "Campaigns" and making sure it was set to "Warhammer Main" and processing StartPos, etc and making a pack. And it fails everytime. Error is failing to processing the StartPOS.

**grahamgrocho** · August 21, 2016, 11:27 AM

And actually I looked into the error I'm getting in BOB. It's because I can't seem to create a Startpos file I think. It keeps saying "Startpos file not found after running the game!"

**grahamgrocho** · August 22, 2016, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by grahamgrocho

And actually I looked into the error I'm getting in BOB. It's because I can't seem to create a Startpos file I think. It keeps saying "Startpos file not found after running the game!"

Let me rephrase, as that was more of a complaint than a question haha:

Is there anything that would prevent a Startpos from processing? How would I know if Startpos edits are conflicting somehow? Or where to look? Again, thank you in advance!

**Arayel** · August 26, 2016, 03:57 PM

If it's failing to process the startpos then you did something wrong in the files before you exported them. As to what you did wrong I'm afraid that might come down to trial and error...i find once you get toa certain point it's only worth making small numbers of changes at a time so if it does go wrong you have an idea where.

When looking at BOB you want to go to the middle column, click the small plus next to campaigns, then main_warhammer and put a tick in startpos.esf . A new dialogue will open, simply select the top option "Campaign / Process start pos" and then press start.

After this has run go to assembly_kit\working_data\campaigns\main_warhammer to find your new start pos file. You can then copy this to the data\campaigns\main_warhammer folder and overwrite the one that is there. REMEMBER to back up the original first (though it's easy enough to get back if you do mess it all up).

Hope that helps. Start pos editing is a pita