Mercenary help

**Promethius** · September 14, 2007, 04:24 PM

Firstly I'd like to say hello to evrybody here at TWC.

Secondly,I was wondering if there was anyways of making it so that all the mercenary units you can get during the campaign can be put onto the unit lists of all factions during the custom battles. I know some factions get mercenaries (Greeks get Cretian Archers,Britons get Barbarian Mercenary Cavalry etc.),so I was just curious as to how this is done.
I've been looking around at the various tutorials and I haven't found anything on changing a units faction. If anyone could enlighten me on this then it would be most appreciated.

**makanyane** · September 14, 2007, 05:01 PM

to get the mercenary units available to other factions in custom battle you need to give them ownership of the unit in export_descr_units.txt. that is in the line at the bottom of the units entry.

There is a complication to that; mercenary_units seem to have a problem with the interface if they are assigned to another faction as well (eg the unit card does not show up) so you need to make a duplicate unit by copying its entire entry in EDU and giving one version a different type name (first line), remove the mercenary_unit attribute from that and keep that as just slave ownership. Other one can have ownership by all factions / cultures.

To make the unit actually appear in battle without problems for other faction ownerships you also need to add texture lines for the relevant faction to that unit in descr_model_battle.txt

**Promethius** · September 14, 2007, 06:08 PM

Ok,thanks for the quick reply,but is there any chance you could put in a little more detail? I'm new to modding Rome and I know where all the files are and what does what(sort of),but the middle paragraph has confused me a bit.

**Vegas_Bear** · September 15, 2007, 04:42 AM

Look here - C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\Data
you are looking for the text file - export_descr_unit.txt. Make a copy of this file first. Scroll down to a merc unit and add slave, barbarian, carthaginian, eastern, egyptian, greek, roman to the ownership line. Now these mercs are available to everyone for custom battles, nothing else needs to be done.

type merc illyrian
dictionary merc_illyrian ; Illyrian Mercenaries

ownership slave, barbarian, carthaginian, eastern, egyptian, greek, roman