Question about bribe resistance

[es157]

Hello.

I'm playing a modded version of MTW2 in which, for some reason, it appears that it's completely impossible to bribe named characters and settlements away from another faction. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how low their loyalty attribute is, they will always respond to bribe attempts with an outraged rant, saying their loyalty is not for sale or something of the like.

It is still possible to bribe diplomats and army captains normally, for relatively low prices.

As a matter of testing the phenomenon, I used cheats to increase my treasure to nigh infinity, and then to reduce the loyalty of a character I wanted to bribe into the negatives. The character in question had no army, only his own bodyguard. His faction had only one city, and I had more than one hundred. He still refused my bribe offer.

I already checked EDCT to make sure there was no generic hidden trait granting extreme bribe resistance.

So my question is what could possibly be different in this mod compared to vanilla that made it impossible to bribe characters? I want to re-enable the possibility but can't find the appropriate file.

[Callistonian]

There is a section in descr_campaign_db.xml called 'bribery' that has probability modifiers.

[es157]

Oh, indeed. That will help.

But, it seems my whole section is identical to vanilla. Is there anywhere else I could look at?

[Callistonian]

The only factors that I'm aware of that affect bribery probabilities are those descr_campaign_db modifiers and character trait/ancillary attribute levels. Since the modifiers are vanilla and you can bribe other character types, bribery obviously hasn't been disabled in the mod. I haven't seen any confirmation that the Loyalty attribute affects bribe resistance. I also have no data on the BribeResistance attribute but its name implies it does something in this regard, so you could check if the mod sets this attribute to a high value in a trait/ancillary that all characters have (or conversely if the Bribery attribute, which I also have no data on, has been set to low values for all diplomats).

Keep in mind that changes in descr_campaign_db or the traits/ancillaries files will only affect new campaigns. The situation with the one character belonging to a faction with one region left is fairly anecdotal and doesn't tell us much (that could be the leader/heir or have some special trait/ancillary).

[es157]

As I thought. Seems those two files are my only concern.

About my anecdote, I would certainly mention it if the character was a leader or heir (he is not), but I can't say much about his traits right now. Though, after doing a quick check on EDCT, I can attest that no trait exists that gives an extremely negative Bribery value to diplomats or an extremely positive BribeResistance to named characters. All such values are in the order of 1-3 at most.

A mystery indeed...

By the way, there is a very small chance that this info is relevant: the character I tried to bribe in the example did not belong to the ruling family. He was a named general but from outside the family tree.

[es157]

An interesting finding: it appears that a character will never accept a bribe if his faction's power is "supreme".

And it also appears that the loyalty trait affects bribery chance.