Respawning Units.

[Lord Dakier]

Is it possible to make certain hero units respawnable.

Basically King Drugal is an evil Dragon King and he's been woken from his eternal sleep so he's no in the best of them. To make this giant killing machine beatable we need him to be able to die. But if he dies then the undead faction in our mod is screwed cause they're army sucks without Drugal. So Drugal needs to be able to come back. We dont want to make it possible to have 2 Drugal's either.

Any Help Guys?


Thanks For Reading
Lord D.

[HouseOfHam]

Sure. Give him a unique ancillary in descr_strat.txt. Make sure that ancillary doesn't have any triggers, so no one else can get it. Then, use a background script to check if that ancillary exists. If it does not, respawn the king on the next turn.

And, just for RP purposes, give him an Immortal trait that adds "Immortal" epithet.

monitor_event FactionTurnStart FactionType undead
      and WorldwideAncillaryExists kings_personal_slave false

        spawn_army
            faction undead
            character King Drugal, named character, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 16, , x 10, y 10
            unit undead king unit, exp 0 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
        end
        console_command give_ancillary "King Drugal" kings_personal_slave
        console_command give_trait "King Drugal" Immortal 1
end_monitor

[Lord Dakier]

Thanks Ham, wont this make him a general aswell?

[HouseOfHam]

Yeah... Isn't that what you want?

[Lord Dakier]

I dont mind it too much to be honest. King Drugal is the leader of our undead army anyway, Is it possible to make it so he does not age using background scripts?

[Thor the Bassist]

I think not - even if generals do live forever they end up reverting back to age 0 at age 128 anyway.

[Aradan]

Btw, spawned named characters that don't belong in the family tree, can cause "cloning" which results in CTDs.

[HouseOfHam]

Btw, spawned named characters that don't belong in the family tree, can cause "cloning" which results in CTDs.

Could you explain a bit more what you meant by "cloning"?

[Lord Dakier]

Is there a way to make him never ageing then, or a way around it?

[Aradan]

Nope, can't do immortal, respawning characters, RTW engine has limits. Scripts are the only way to go here, it seems.

[Lord Dakier]

Hod on, If he were to do of age would the respawnable script not come into action?

[Aradan]

If he died in any way (assassination, age, battle), then his unique ancillary (that's used to track him down) would disappear from the world, so the script would detect that and spawn him again.

[Lord Dakier]

So it really does not matter then, thats good to know.

[Aradan]

The engine creates a clone of the character, same unit, same traits, same ancs, same name, same age, same portrait, etc. The clone character sometimes is invisible (no model on strat-map). If you kill him (the clone) then the game CTDs. This only happens with named characters that are not part of the family tree.

[Lord Dakier]

so cant you script him into the familiy tree lol.

[Jubal_Barca]

Would it be possible to give an ancillary like this to a whole family tree? So a whole faction had respawning heroes? And is it possible to add extra conditions, say so that generals can be killed off permanently under certain circumstances?

Also, is it possible to make a whole family totally infertile, so that there is only, par exemple, one generation in the whole tree and no new births are ever added?

[Lord Dakier]

You got an idea hear Jubal?

As long as we can make it so that King Drugal is respawnable and cannot be brought then I'm fine with it.

[HouseOfHam]

Aradan, I don't think that could happen as long as the only way for a new one to spawn is via a monitor that checks to make sure they're dead.

Jubal, you'd have to give each respawnable character their own unique ancillary and have a separate monitor for each. There is no way to prevent new characters from being born from marriages or offered via man of the hour type of events, though.

[Aradan]

Well, I've seen clones in both VI2 and FATW (now removed of course). I'm not saying the spawn command is firing twice, the engine does this automatically, even when the character exists on the DS. I *think* when it has too few members and it's trying to adopt. It's not related to the script or any monitor, it must be a bug with adoptions of non-family member named characters imo.

Actually, you can make it so that *no* new characters will be born/adopted/married intoi the family. You just remove the general_unit attribute from all faction units, so any new members will automatically die. That leaves only the existing on DS family members (who are of age) and any spawned ones.

[HouseOfHam]

Actually, you can make it so that *no* new characters will be born/adopted/married intoi the family. You just remove the general_unit attribute from all faction units, so any new members will automatically die. That leaves only the existing on DS family members (who are of age) and any spawned ones.

Evil! I like it!