Minor Faction Units and Prestige

[EmperorJulian]

Greetings, I've been debating whether or not I even want to continue to make use of ETW and part of my research into that has lead me back to the modding forums, and to some questions that I've had since Version 1.0. I haven't seen too much in the way of mods to fix the minor nations, and so I'm looking into the possibility of fixing them myself; if its possible and if the time investment wouldn't be on the astronomical side.

Basically my questions are these: is it possible to fix the unit rosters of the minor factions, i.e. Morocco can't recruit artillery and Dagestan seems to have access to every unit possible. I'd like to balance things out to make those nations more plausible and usable but I've not the foggiest idea how and there's apparently no tutorials out there on what to do -especially- since in some cases I'm looking to -remove-, not add, units to a particular nation. Any help here would be appreciated.

I'm also curious as to how to get prestige to work properly for minor nations, most of the posts I've seen on that front are from early 2009 and there appears to be no further movement in that direction, was making it work a project that was simply abandoned?

Finally, I've had a particular, personal ambition to replace the Italian States with Tuscany. However, Tuscany is not a faction in a proper sense, it has flags and units, but it's not complete either. I don't know if bringing such a quasi-faction into existence is even possible; and the tutorials deal with using Emergent nations, not quasi-nations (Tuscany, Switzerland, Khiva, etc). So I'm wondering if it can be done, and if so would it take, again, an astronomical amount of time to do?

Anyway hopefully you guys can help me out, as these questions would be important to addressing my interest in sticking with ETW at all, in the long run. Cheers!

[Lazy Knight]

you seem to be long out of touch with modding

To answer your questions:
Units can be assigned to Factions in any way you want.
To make minor nations get proper Prestige, you have to make them Major nations. but this spams the prestige screen.
Creating a faction is totally possible, HusserlTW has a great tutorial about it. However instead of replacing the Italian States with the Tuscany Faction, I would suggest to rename them and give them units, flags, etc.

[EmperorJulian]

Yeah sorry about being out of touch but this is the first time I've even looked at ETW since, April 2009? I guess. I'm still doing my research into modding, though the reason I posted here was the fact that I wasn't finding what I needed. I was wondering if I was looking in the wrong places for one thing. At any rate, I haven't given up yet so there's always that. I'll do some reading on the .org as well, cheers!

[Lazy Knight]

okay, if you ask more detailed I can also give more detailled information.

For now:

How to assign units to factions
A unit is defined in the unit tables with it it ID. It gets its stats in the unit stats, abilities in the unit to unit abilities. It is also bound to one or several buildings by the buildings units allowed table. That's the problem of most minor factions. They do not get an ordnance building line, so you must assign their artillery to the royal palace line. Another problem can be the AOR of the unit. It is defined in the unit tables and assigned to regions in the startpos.esf. If building and AOR fit, only thing left is the faction assignment.

There are two tables controlling that, the units to groupings and the units to exclusive faction permission tables. The first only gives a positive statement, you can add a unit to each faction of the group in there. You can refine this with the latter table. You can either add units to only one faction of the group, or deny individual unit acces to a faction of the group. You find the group listings in the factions tables.

Last but not least I recommend you Download our Mod, Imperial Splendour ( ). You see it all in a very structured manner in there.

[EmperorJulian]

Okay, well let me give you some examples of what I'm wanting to do, and what I think would help with certain non European Minor factions I want to play as.

1) Dagestan - frankly this faction is a mess, its been a mess since 1.0. I'm not sure why this nation in particular in the black sheep of ETW but it is the way it is I suppose. The issue is Dagestan has access to all sorts of European Units that it shouldn't be able to use. It's not a European power, and I can't imagine why it would be able to recruit line infantry, for example. What I'd like to do in a case like this is -remove- access to a large number of units that the Faction should not be able to recruit to begin with. It would make Dagestan's unit lineup very small (fine by me) but at least it would be a plausible unit lineup.

2) Morocco - one of my favorite factions, but sadly it needs units added AND removed. Firstly, Morocco can't recruit cannon, at all. It needs to have access to the standard eastern artillery lineup that you'd see in any other Muslim state. It also needs Afghan Hillman removed, Afghanistan is a -long- way from Northwest Africa. If memory serves, the same kind of unit cleanup is needed in Persia too, another faction I'm very fond of.

3) I am looking to switch out the Italian States for Tuscany. Tuscany has units and flags and I've been told I could just edit the Italian States to make use of those resources to transform it into Tuscany. I might be interested in changing Westphalia for Hesse as well, if the time to complete such a project is reasonable.

4) I want to tone down the Marathas majorly. I'm not the only one who wants that however it seems, and I might simply be able to use other mods for that purpose.

Anyway I'll check out your mod too, thanks for suggesting it.

[Lazy Knight]

(we cared for points 1 and 2 in our mod, anyways
Dagestan is in the "Russia Poland Group" So go to units to groupings and find out which units they can recruit
Create a new "unit to exclusive factions permissions" table, and deny all those units from the dagestan roster, the lines should look like

<unit> chechenya-dagesta false

the same way (after finding moroccos group, I think it is barbary group) you can add units to morocco, just add the lines

<unit> morocco true

after your lines on Dagestan.


3) I am no expert on this. HusserlTW has written a tutorial about making new factions, I am sure the details are covered there.
4) you can try and increase their units upkeep, propably the easiest way to slow them down