Modding Lesson 1 - Ancillaries

Hello students, i decided to start the first lesson with ancillaries. First of all what is an ancillary (Archistrategos):
Here is the first part general about ancillaries, the second tomorrow.

Image 1
Attachment 344782

Characters are gaining ancillaries with a max of 8 ancillaries per character. Ancillaries are usefull, informative and they use ui so they could be beautiful too. Also they are easier to develop than traits. Now let's look how to create our first ancillary.

These files are the ones that we need to backup first and then work the ancillaries. data/export_descr_ancillaries and data/text/export_ancillaries.

Let's start a bit of code:

export_descr_ancillaries

Code:

;Ancillary: seleukid_dioiketes ;seleukid_dioiketes : <Influence> 1, <Construction> 5, <TaxCollection> 5 Ancillary seleukid_dioiketes Type faction_office Transferable 0 Image Seleukid_Office.tga Description seleukid_dioiketes_desc EffectsDescription seleukid_dioiketes_effects_desc Effect Piety 1 Effect Construction 5 Effect TaxCollection 5

The first 2 lines are comments:
;Ancillary: seleukid_dioiketes
; o seleukid_dioiketes : <Influence> 1, <Construction> 5, <TaxCollection> 5

That means that we can write something to help us understand our ancillaries more easy. We can always of course skip these comments and don't use. But i recommend to use comments. For example the first line says the name of the ancillary and the second the bonuses that it gives.

Ancillary seleukid_dioiketes <--- Here in this line is the name of the ancillary
Type faction_office <--- Here is the type of the ancillary, if the ancillary is unique we could use again the name of ancillary as type. But if we want for example to make many ancillaries of the same type for example governor of town x, we need to name the type king in order to restrict later one ancillary of this type per character.
Transferable 0 <--- Here we can decide if we want the ancillary to be transferable from character to character or not. If we want the ancillary to be transferable we must change the 0 to 1.
Image Seleukid_Office.tga <--- Here is where is the ui for our ancillary. The location is inside data/ui/ancillaries. Attention we must use exactly the same name in order the game to find the image. Not for example Seleukid_office.tga

Description seleukid_dioiketes_desc <--- Here and
EffectsDescription seleukid_dioiketes_effects_desc <--- Here are the lines that we must write to the other file the text for our ancillary. In the first we must write the text of the description and in the second the text of the bonuses. We would see them later.

Attention remember always to keep backups and use notepad++

Finally here are the effects:

Effect Piety 1
Effect Construction 5
Effect TaxCollection 5

Attention Piety is for Medieval 2 only, in the Rome Total War is Influence
Attention download Docudemons from here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=4066