Problem editing "start_pos_characters.loc" Rome 2

[hossein22]

Hey there everyone,
I'm new to this website and I don't know if I'm posting this in the appropriate place.
I'm working on a mod in which I've made the "Etruscan League" playable for GC. I've tried my best to make it as close to the original factions as possible, which means creating faction traits, faction group description, faction description, a map that I've tried my best to look authentic, and so on.

The faction appears in the GC menu and all seems fine:


It also appears in the CB and there seems to be no problem with it whatsoever, I've even played a couple of battles with them and it works just fine:


The problem is whenever I try to play with them in the GC the game crashes, the error box says: "virtualalloc (at place 2) returned null!". I've tried everything and nothing works. I've followed a couple of different tutorials step by step. The only thing that I cannot change is the "start_pos_characters.loc" because I cannot open it either in "PFM" or "Rusted PFM":


I'm guessing because of the changes in the newest patch and introduction of the family tree mechanism I'm facing this problem.

Now I have 3 questions:
1. If the problem occurs because of the said issue, is there any way to fix it without using the Assembly Kit? (I cannot download it from the TOOLS and I've tried everything, believe me: EVERYTHING! Including reporting, I'm guessing that's because I'm from Iran and you know, the sanctions)
2. If the problem occurs because of anything other than the "start_pos_characters.loc", can anyone guide me to some tutorial on how to fix it?
3. If there is no way to fix this without the Assembly Kit, is there any place to download it from other than Steam? Has anybody uploaded the data files?

Thanks so much in advance.

[Gyrosmeister]

In order to make a faction playable you need to:
A) Go to startpos factions on the AK and tick the boxes "playable" and "is major"
B) process startpos (for these things I would recommend to revert to the old launcher) with BoB (do not tick the create .pack file, you only need the starpos file)
C) Once done add the startpos file under the correct directory in your pack file (campaigns>main_rom)

D) Speaking about your pack file you need to do the following:

1. Create (at least) two political parties, one should be playable, give whatever traits you want there for the ruling party (the player's party, the other(s) can have the rom_dummy_effect_bundle)
2. Go to factions_political_parties_junctions or something like that and add the two parties you created to the Etruscan League

That's how you unlock a faction.
In order to make the politics functioning give the Etruscans a "senator total" (200, 300, 5000 or whatever) in factions_tables and go to political parties power effect bundles and pick the rows from any faction and replace the party name with the ruling party you created.