Need help with adding extra starting armies to a faction

[Terafis]

I've tried to add more armies to ai factions at the start of the campaign through the .esf

The way I tried was by going into the army_array and copying an existing unit (militia for example) then renaming the unit commander (which was the same for the copied unit) - ctd on load

Anyone tried and succeeded in this?

I feel it would greatly enhance the difficulty if upon starting the campaign the large pre-established factions have multiple full stacks (to represent their standing armies) - and the smaller factions have at least 1 stack of troops

This *should* give the ai a kick-start into actually invading neighboring provinces while the player has to build up his army

Of course the main problem would be when the player chose to play one of the altered factions with the massive starting armies - however that's a hurdle that we can try and jump later on

[Seraphim]

well, there's a section in the unit which defines it's ID number. every unit in the startpos.esf has one, but as of now, I don't know if anyone managed to find out how you need to create a new ID number. BTW: It applies also for factions, cities, armies, regions, and so on...

[Cursisanafou]

I was able to clone and change the IDs without causing a CTD but the game didn't recognize the ID or something and the army never actually showed up.

you can clone units to an army and they will show up, they don't have a unique ID... but i don't know how you can completely clone an army... probably has something to do with the binary values that we are not able to edit at this point in time with the editor.


Edit okay i got it to partly work... got to work out some errors... i found out that the second number under military force is the character general of that military force... so i changed some IDs and clones the character... but when i try to make a general of that particular unit the game crashes... looking into this now.


Edit: Alright i looked into it, found out that the generals body guard has a number as to which character is created when you click make general on the unit.

So i got it to work as far as i can tell.... you can change the IDs as long as all the IDs match up correctly....


Edit: Quickly found out that you should not merge the army with the one it was clones from... I'll try changing the units ID and see if it allows me to merge units.

[Cursisanafou]

well i screwed something up now i can't even move the army without a CTD...

This is pretty complicated haha.. =(

edit: okay the CTD comes from the general...

it's frustrating because i can move the general out... move the units out.. merge those units with the army it was cloned from but if i merge the general with anything.. settlement..army.. whatever it CTDS... but you need to have a character for the army otherwise the army doesn't show up...

I'm going to try some more drastic measures that will probably break the game.


Well it didn't totally break the game... but i had it so i could move the troops and stuff... the one character couldn't combine with the other without a CTD... the troops i had cloned were in dublin and if i tried to move them out as one it would use up movement points... moving the army in ireland to dublin would CTD the game... moving the army in dublin out and merging with the army would drop a general character on the campaign map but i could move the army around without crashing... the general character was just stuck permanently on the campaign map without a flag.

The process is pretty straight forward... but i don't know what i need to change to make it so merging generals and such doesn't crash the game..


Edit: sorry for all the posts and edits =P

[Terafis]

Thanks for the replies Cursis

I was just trying to boost the number of units in the existing starting armies, rather than create new armies - so changing the individual unit id's of the new units made this possible?

[Cursisanafou]

Actually you can just clone the current units... just don't copy the first guy.. which is the general's bodyguard.

You don't even have to change the unit IDs... although i only tested it for a few turns... it could potentially create a problem later on...

As for creating new armies... maybe once we can change binary... or i could have easily overlooked an ID or something somewhere in the character array for the general. But i did go about it pretty thoroughly.

Edit: Also as for creating units of types other than that are already in the startpos.esf i'm not entirely sure.

Just be careful because you can make a mistake and sometimes you can't get info back...