How to edit start date to get gunpowder much earlier?

[stwn]

While I greatly enjoy the mod, what I've always liked the most is the late game: gunpowder and pikes, pretty much. however, that is locked by SS 6.4 until a specific amount of turns has passed / a year is reached.


I know there -is- a way of making this happen much earlier by editing some .txt files but I've not done this in years and have forgotten.

What do I change in which files to just get all the gunpowder units as early as possible alongside the pikes?

[jurcek1987]

You can change the start date in data/world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign/descr_strat.txt. But you'll also need to adjust event dates in descr_events.txt (same folder). Alternatively you could remove the event requirements for the units in question in export_descr_buildings.txt.

[Lin117]

In the desc_strat file (located where jurcek indicated) there is a line towards the topish:

start_date 1220 summer

That's a Late Era campaign example, obviously. For Early Era it will state the appropriate year (1100?).

Change the start date to the year you want it to start. However, as mentioned, if you set the start date to, for example, 1300 summer, any events in SS designed to occur before 1300 (such as the 4th Lateran Council) won't occur which may cause you to never be able to access the technologies/units associated with that event. So you then have to go into descr_events to change the start date for those events to any point after the new start date you've set so that those things will still occur.

Method 2 is to change the turns-per-year of your campaign so that you get to the gunpowder era at a faster rate, but be advised this will also cause your generals to age faster and for your campaign to reach its end date faster.

[stwn]

Thanks, I think that helped: I've changed all the ones which look like pike / shot.

[Lin117]

Looking at it closer I may be incorrect. It seems that Turn# is used to determine when an event occurs, not Year. Based on that, changing the start year or turns-per-year won't affect how long you have to play before a technology becomes available, it will likely make events occur on the incorrect year however.

If you set the gunpowder event to turn 2 (along with probably some of the metallurgy and matchlock related events), it should pop up the gunpowder event after turn 1 or 2 ends. I'm not sure if there are other event triggers required for certain pike/shot units and I haven't experimented with changes to desc_events myself, but to the best I can tell reading the desc_events file I can't see any reference to the year the events occur, only what appears to be turn # references.

If someone who knows more about desc_events knows otherwise, feel free to correct me.

[jurcek1987]

Nah descr_events has years not turns. Example from SS:

event historic ENGLISH_ARCHERS
date 170 190
;(c. 1270–1290)

So changing just the start date wouldn't do you any good (I think), you'd still have to wait the same number of time. You'd need to set dates that have already passed to 0. And pike and shot is just one of many events for late era units, there's tons more. For a complete list check export_descr_buildings.txt in data folder but it's very complicated so you might rather check this (some things are outdated though)

http://www.stainless-steel-mod.com/