Editing Troops (xp, number, etc) using ESF editor and Savegame

[Raga]

Hi,

This is my second tutorial, my first describes how to change character details here. If you've read that, you're probably familiar with the ESF editor and savegames by now. If not, the first thing you're gonna want to do is download the 1.4.6 ESF Editor updated for Shogun 2 (not the 1.4.8 which corrupts savegames). By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:

A. Change the size of a unit
B. Change the experience of a unit.

(I'm working on adding armor lvl, weapon lvl, accuracy lvl and charge lvl, and will hopefully have those soonish. I'll edit this post when and if I do.)

This is how to edit units:

1. Get ESF editor version 1.4.6 ESF Editor updated for Shogun 2. The 1.4.8 currently corrupts savegames, from what I can tell by saving them in an ETW format. I haven't had issues with 1.4.6

2. Backup the savegame you want to edit. REALLY DO THIS. The editors are still under development, and the last thing you want to do is kill that really awesome savegame you've got going. I called my backup "safe" and my editable save "editable". Original, I know.

3. Open up the ESF editor, and open "editable". Expand as follows:

campaign_save_game
campaign_env
campaign_model
world
faction_array
1st faction_array
faction

4. You may have noticed that all of these are exactly the same as editing your character. Never fear, we will now go into editing the unit. Expand some more:

army_array

NOTE: There may be a whole bunch of army arrays (depending on where you are in the game). They are organized, as far as I can tell, with the most recent army created at the bottom. This means, if you want to find a specific unit to edit, seperate them from the army, then save, and they will be off on their own as a single unit army at the bottom.

army_array
army
units_array

NOTE: Now you may see a big list of units_array. They are organized in the same order as your army cards are in the game. In other words, the first unit is the general, etc. This makes it a bit easier to find the unit you want.

land_unit

5. Check the name of the unit is right by selecting land_record_key

6. Select Unit (still under land_unit). There are a whole bunch of numbers. You want to edit the ones in RED. From what I understand, this is what they mean:

first and last lines: Unit ID Number? I think this is a way to identify one unit of spearmen as opposed to another and serve as an easy way of dealing with these units ingame for combat and such. DO NOT CHANGE, unless you are experimenting with how they've made the game and are interested in programming and don't care that the file will likely be unstable/crash.
2nd line: ? No idea.
3rd line: current soldiers. You can change this to make a unit full strength
4th line: max soldiers. You can change the maximum number of soldiers. I've tested up to making 120 man general units. I'm interested in what others get, or what the break-points are. I'm guessing you could probably manage around 225, and that it'll depend on the computer.
5th line: ? No idea.
6th line: ? No idea.
7th line: xp points/progress. You know that yellow bar next to the XP level in the game that grows until the unit levels up? This is that yellow bar. I don't know what point levels correspond to what levels, and haven't tested much. I'm quite interested in this, since I don't think that a lvl 5 unit will reach level 6 until the experience points catch up (these points don't increase just by increasing the level, but do effect the yellow bar). If anyone tests that, please post it!
8th line: xp lvl. This is the xp level for the unit. Change this to whatever you want. I've tested up to lvl 9. Interested in what the limits are.
9th line: ?
10th line: campaign movement speed?

7. Save the game in the esf editor, and open in shogun.

8. (Optional) If any of you do testing and find out what the limits are for the max xp, which xp points correspond to which level, and if the game has a hard limit for unit size, that would be awesome.

Hope that helps!

[quantum2000]

First line - unit unique number
Last line - previous game created unit number??? -something for developers......at least units created on later turns have higher numbers and they never repeat

Fifth line - available movement points for unit.(Remember that army can move as far as the unit with lowest movement points)
Sixth line - unique commander attached to this unit ID(general,daimio,colonel?)
Nineth line - basic movement points available to unit(without general,roads and other bonuses)

[Raga]

Awesome!

[thedjcon]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djcon/5614863997/I was able to increase some troops up to 900 (1200 on one but haven't battled with them yet) Here's a screenshot of a small army

[Dark_1]

Any chance of doing similar listing for the characters and navies? Atleast cannon numbers, sailor, marine and gunner numbers seem to be in the damage section, xp is in the same place, but not so sure about the rest. I am also trying to locate the unique stats of generals, like the influence radii etc.

I was able to increase some troops up to 900 (1200 on one but haven't battled with them yet)

Does those massive armies give much strain for the processor and graphics card? I am also dreaming of those really massive battles the real Shogun candidates (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu) fought, like the Battle of Sekigahara where Tokugawa faced alliance from the western Japan or atleast some of the more common battles fought during the era with tens of thousands of participants. Now the unit costs are too expensive to gather even 30k armies (even with units averaging 100 members, one maximum army would be about 2k troops and upkeeping even ten of those would be way too expensive without owning most of the provinces or cheating... alot), that were quite common with the major daimyos of the era...

7th line: xp points/progress. You know that yellow bar next to the XP level in the game that grows until the unit levels up? This is that yellow bar. I don't know what point levels correspond to what levels, and haven't tested much. I'm quite interested in this, since I don't think that a lvl 5 unit will reach level 6 until the experience points catch up (these points don't increase just by increasing the level, but do effect the yellow bar). If anyone tests that, please post it!

From my experience, the 20k seems to correspond to xp level 9. The number also seems to be either exactly or a bit multiplied number of kills the unit has done, which is why I never allow enemies to flee the field (wouldn't anyways, as massacring the runners is way too enjoyable anyways, especially as vengeance for any suffered losses, but even less after this fact).

[thedjcon]

I've tried the same procedure on the navy that I did with the troops & even though it reflects the increased troop when you hover over their icon, once the battle start it resets. There isn't much of a slow down when I did a battle with 4 troops & 1 general (1k & 500). Took about 3 mins to load & a slight increase in ram usage (from 4.84 to 4.97). The processor went from 18% to 23% on an amd 1055t with most of that usage being a single core running about 80%.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djcon/5...in/photostream
There was a frame drop when my 4k troops approached the walls at the same time but after the enemy lost about 500 troops it played smoothly

[thedjcon]

Good news, increasing your troops does not increase their cost so you dont have to increase your cash.
Do not increase line 8 (XP) past 4. When ever you select that troop the game will crash ( I tried from 5-20)
As for navies a weird thing happened which I think is pretty cool. I changed lines 3 & 4 to a desired number which was 400 which when playing a battle the value would reset so I also changed lines 10,11 & 13,14 under Ship_Damage_Info to 300,100,300,100 (to equal 400) when playing a battle the value reseted but it reseted to the maximum amount of troops that ship can PHYSICALLY hold which was 53 (Mori Bow Koyaba) it gave me 7 on the sword & 46 on the bow.

[Raga]

Good news, increasing your troops does not increase their cost so you dont have to increase your cash.
Do not increase line 8 (XP) past 4. When ever you select that troop the game will crash ( I tried from 5-20)
As for navies a weird thing happened which I think is pretty cool. I changed lines 3 & 4 to a desired number which was 400 which when playing a battle the value would reset so I also changed lines 10,11 & 13,14 under Ship_Damage_Info to 300,100,300,100 (to equal 400) when playing a battle the value reseted but it reseted to the maximum amount of troops that ship can PHYSICALLY hold which was 53 (Mori Bow Koyaba) it gave me 7 on the sword & 46 on the bow.

Interesting about the xp. I've tested up to level 8, and had it work. I'll try and update this weekend as to stuff I've found out since first posting, but there's a lot. For those of you interested in figuring stuff out on your own, going through the PFM Data files can be pretty instructive, especially for stuff like experience levels

[pilekasis]

Interesting about the xp. I've tested up to level 8, and had it work. I'll try and update this weekend as to stuff I've found out since first posting, but there's a lot. For those of you interested in figuring stuff out on your own, going through the PFM Data files can be pretty instructive, especially for stuff like experience levels

It some times crashes for me at lvl 8+ I don't get it why does it crash? Is developer so strict with us modders? It just feels bad when you cannot mod xp levels and more... devs should patch all of thies problems!

[MiniNapoleon]

Another good tutorial. I tried 300 for a unit max and got there with no problem. I also had 5 as my xp and i selected the unit and didn't have nay problems. Keep making these tutorials they're really helpful.

[sinople]

@Raga : may you update your first post with the new informations ?
Thanks in advance

[gatorreefer]

Suppose I have two stacks of units and want to make the stats/exp of 2nd army exactly like the first. Can clone be used for this? Will this cause a crash since each unit has a unique ID number? Am I supposed to copy/paste/clone just certain parts?

Thanks.

[Raga]

Suppose I have two stacks of units and want to make the stats/exp of 2nd army exactly like the first. Can clone be used for this? Will this cause a crash since each unit has a unique ID number? Am I supposed to copy/paste/clone just certain parts?

Thanks.

Cloning is a bad idea in general. First off, the tools, especially those used in this tutorial, have issues with cloning and new entries period since the tools are based off the ETW ones and have issues with saving in a TWS2 readable format, ie game comes out corrupted. Second, even if cloning worked in general, there may be unit-uniqueness check issues, positional information conflicts and even, if I remember correctly, troubles arising from information as to their commander built into the unit/army data. So, I do not believe clone would work well. Sorry to say, its far easier to just buy up a new army, or double the troops for each unit in your army and then split it in two.

[Zorgrath]

Units land & naval experience thresholds
land_level_01: 800
land_level_02: 1800
land_level_03: 3800
land_level_04: 5600
land_level_05: 7800
land_level_06: 10700
land_level_07: 13600
land_level_08: 16000
land_level_09: 20000
naval_level_01: 250
naval_level_02: 750
naval_level_03: 2000
naval_level_04: 3600
naval_level_05: 5800
naval_level_06: 8700
naval_level_07: 11600
naval_level_08: 14000
naval_level_09: 18000

[variag]

Is there a way to change the battle time limit in the save games using ESF? Where would this line be located?

[cesteban]

Is it possible to add honour or loyalty using the ESF Editor?

For some reason, I have a feeling that one of the arrays (CHARACTER_ARRAY or ARMY_ARRAY) contain it. Please help?

[KnightFandragon]

ook, so, I Dld the 1.4.6 ESF thing but when I open it up there is no editable to click to open anything.

I see Open ESF, Open save game and about, there is alos the save as and stuff.

When I open ESF or save game it gives me some error about unhandled exceptions. The buttons on the bottom are Details, continue and quit. Unsupported ESF type. Its the save game file made by the game from Shogun 2. Is there some where i need to move the savegame before it will be read? Its in appdata, CA, SHogun2, save games or something like that.

[kugkings]

That's because you're using an outdated utility. You want EditSF 1.0.8 (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...kmarks-feature)

[KnightFandragon]

Ok, thank you, I got it working and edited a full stack to rank 5, both as a test and because veterency in TW games makes no sense to me. Ive got a British NTW grand campaign going and ive run with the same stack since about turn 10 and im now over turn 100 and yet none of the units are beyond rank 3, ive got like 5 rank 3 and the rest are rank 2, mostly because I bought them that way. My question is how the heck do we gain and keep vets in TW series games? We have to fight to gain vet but they die and lose it. I notice this same issue in STW2, even my edited rank 5's are losing their rank5 slowly but surely. 3 of the units are now rank 4, one is currently stuck with like 80/120 men after a battle I just did. I get them into the fight to get kills but they lose men and the raw noobs kill the ranking. I know we can combine units together but that just takes away from veterancy and my unit stack count.

So, do tell, whats the secret that im missing?

[kugkings]

You've got me. You could try a mod that changes the way units gain experience, like radious' mods, or try to make your own