negative traits

[paperhero]

How can I stop negative traits from being assigned to my character? I have read that one of the best ways to make money is to have only 2-4 characters upgrade upgrade all your settlement economic upgrades, and that one powerful character can double the money you receive from that city. The problem then is when the computer randomly assigns this character a negative trait which then undoes much of your work in building this character up. This has greatly diminished my enthusiasm for playing this game, and I would vote for all negative traits be removed.

[Mank]

I understand your fustration, creating a really "great" general in M2TW is certainly a handful!

The first thing that might help is to take a glance at delra's "A short guide to greatness for your kings, governors, and generals." This guide REALLY helped me understand why the game would sometimes give me a bad trait for one of my generals.

Beyond that you certainly can go into to the code and specifically eliminate some of the negative traits you don't like. The main file you'll want to edit for that is located here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SEGA\Medieval II Total War\mods\Third_Age_3\data\export_descr_character_traits.txt

If you're hankering to mod the game to your personal taste, I can warmly recommend alpaca's "Traits, Triggers, and Monitors" guide to help give you a sense of how to manipulate the code to your satisfaction.

I hope one of these will help you find a way to enjoy the game more!

~Mank

[alreadyded]

Your characters receive negative traits from having certain buildings (brothel, etc.) and also from having your settlements taxes on low when you press end turn. There is also a small chance that they will get negative traits when they come of age as well. Don't build brothels and set your settlement's taxes to high before ending your turn and you should get positive traits instead.

I feel the same as you, negative traits that cannot be avoided ruin the game experience so I removed all of them. It was a lot of work to find them all (lead to a few crashes along the way) so I wouldn't recommend trying unless you are familiar to modding. My files are not compatible with vanilla however otherwise I would post it here for you.

[Loki_999]

YDon't build brothels and set your settlement's taxes to high before ending your turn and you should get positive traits instead.

This is why I don't bother having generals in cities. I know the financial advantages, but its just too much micro management which would kill the game for me. Every turn having to check every settlement and change the tax rate where necessary (which really doesn't fit with RP and kills immersion - "Yeah about to finish building that armoury, best bleed the peasants dry for a few months" - huh? How on earth should that give you good​ traits?). And then also having to pop your generals our of the towns every few turns so they don't get fat or whatever traits they can get from being stuck in a town for too long.

Its the worst feature of TATW/Med2 for me.

[paperhero]

This is why I don't bother having generals in cities. I know the financial advantages, but its just too much micro management which would kill the game for me. Every turn having to check every settlement and change the tax rate where necessary (which really doesn't fit with RP and kills immersion - "Yeah about to finish building that armoury, best bleed the peasants dry for a few months" - huh? How on earth should that give you good​ traits?). And then also having to pop your generals our of the towns every few turns so they don't get fat or whatever traits they can get from being stuck in a town for too long.

Its the worst feature of TATW/Med2 for me.

I agree. The problem is I am playing Rohan, and I think I will be overrun by Harad and Mordor without some exter income. I am playing on the hardest level, maybe I should start over and play on a easier difficulty? What does the difficulty and battle difficulty levels change for me and the computer? I think the difficulty level changes how well you will do on auto combat which is stupid because sometimes I get tired of the battles and want to do the auto combat, but because I have selected a higher difficulty I am penalized for doing so.

[Flinn]

This is why I don't bother having generals in cities. I know the financial advantages, but its just too much micro management which would kill the game for me. Every turn having to check every settlement and change the tax rate where necessary (which really doesn't fit with RP and kills immersion - "Yeah about to finish building that armoury, best bleed the peasants dry for a few months" - huh? How on earth should that give you good​ traits?). And then also having to pop your generals our of the towns every few turns so they don't get fat or whatever traits they can get from being stuck in a town for too long.

Its the worst feature of TATW/Med2 for me.

concur

I usually pay attention to only two or maximum three generals to become good governors (provided they already have some good basic traits/features) per each campaign, and they will spend their lifes in big and rich cities (MT or Pelargir for Gondor, Mistrand for Rhun, Umbar for Harad, etc), basically I invest a small part of my time to train them to be used only where they will make the difference in mid and long term, for the rest is useless and will only ruin the atmosphere.

I think that having a couple of very good governors/administators for a successful faction is quite realistic and lorish in some extention, but truly, once you got to understand how things goes in TATW for economy and you learn your path through development (for some hard faction like Gondor maybe you have to make some tries before you succeed ), there is no true need for trained governors (in any case you can get by adoption some decent governors) and generally if you don't turtle you can get over economy issues after 40/80 turns depending on your faction.

[Loki_999]

I agree. The problem is I am playing Rohan, and I think I will be overrun by Harad and Mordor without some exter income. I am playing on the hardest level, maybe I should start over and play on a easier difficulty? What does the difficulty and battle difficulty levels change for me and the computer? I think the difficulty level changes how well you will do on auto combat which is stupid because sometimes I get tired of the battles and want to do the auto combat, but because I have selected a higher difficulty I am penalized for doing so.

What difficulty are you on? I play on medium campaign difficulty which i still find a reasonable challenge and presumably less mindless stack spam. Rohan for me though was one of the easier factions to play. I did do the clever thing of going all out for Isengard at the start, while while risky paid off and the rest of the campaign was fairly easy after that as you are free to focus on Mordor which relieves Gondor. Rhun can also become an issue later but Rohan vs Rhun is fairly comparable in terms of battles, so not too nasty.

[Wizad]

How to avoid negative traits and gain positive traits:
Every time you get a negative trait, look up the trait in Salisian's guide posted below. Press ctrl+f and look for the name of the trait. Some traits have a new name in TATW, but it shouldn't be hard for you to know which one's which. In the guide, there is a short specification of the triggers that activate the trait, try to avoid these triggers. There are also 'antitraits' listed. Antitraits usually have the opposite characteristics, EG one gives +10% tax income, the other gives -10% tax income. Look up the beneficial traits and try to activate the triggers as much as possible.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/931592-me...war/faqs/50116

On difficulty:
A harder campaign difficulty will cause the AI to give a higher priority to neighbouring settlements and crusade targets. A harder campaign difficulty also makes diplomacy a little harder (not sure on this one!).
A harder battle difficulty will increase the moral of the AI, making them harder to route.

You can also ask these questions in the Official Questions & Answers thread.

[ThaDoews]

You can remove those negative traits with cheats. Google it and you will find all the answers to that
But try - IF the trait is on lvl 1 - to change it by doing its antitrait thing. If the trait is over lvl 2, it's a no-going-back-trait....

[TokiWartooth]

I want to do this in Medieval 1 but an internet search provides nothing. I've dug through the files and know how to use the campaign start file easily enough. You can also mod units and buildings. There are no readable files for traits other than the localization files that is the text description part of it. No triggers in localization files. Is there an unpacker or anything to unlock files? I already know how to do this for Med 2 by the way. Thankfully Shogun 1 simply has zero traits. Good traits are nice, but I'd rather have none than 50% good/50% awful. There are no in-game console commands for Med 1 traits and stats either. In Med 2 you can remove traits with console commands, but it's better to just stop them from the source file.