How to limit the General Bodyguard to a single mount?

[es157]

Hello.

As the title probably gives in, I'm interested in reducing the general's bodyguard to a single mount, and hopefully make his entire human retinue disappear. I know the general must always have human bodyguards, so I'm planning to just make them invisible. However, my trouble is with making all of these bodyguards fit on the back of one animal (in this case, a dragon). I don't want the general to have several dragons no matter if I set the unit size to small, medium, large, or huge (I always use huge, for reference).

The problem is, I'm fairly good with texts, images, maps, and scripts, but modding units (other than their stats) is almost completely unexplored by me and I know very little of it. The main reason being that I lack the tools (and possibly the skill) to make models and animations. So I hope I won't need those, but I will still need some advice.

So far, my general starts with a minimal bodyguard (with six "men"), but it starts to grow as I pass the turns, and very soon it is reaching the 50s, which results in some ten dragons appearing on the battlefield. I wonder, how do I address this? Any advice would be helpful.

[Callistonian]

People have been asking about this and proposing solutions since Medieval II was released and, as far as I'm aware, there are no solutions short of hacking the game and writing a trainer (see EOP).

We can have single-mount elephant artillery units, but as you're aware, this doesn't work if they're used as the bodyguard since the bodyguard size continually increases. You can try giving the general traits with negative BodyguardSize and/or PersonalSecurity effects but I'm sure people have tried this and failed. I vaguely remember reading that negative values for these attributes have no effect, they're equivalent to setting to 0 (i.e. won't prevent the BG size from increasing by other means). It may be worth testing this again though.

You can also try increasing the number of crew per mount (I'm not sure what the limit on this is) so that the number of mounts increases more slowly as the campaign progresses. But this obviously isn't ideal.

[Gigantus]

Reducing the soldier number of the BG unit to 1 in the EDU is possible, but you still face the issues hat Calistonian describes. Plus the game's unit size multiplier will still be applied to that number.

[es157]

I would totally approve of putting 50+ invisible men on the back of a single dragon, if that is possible.

So my question is, to be more clear, how do I add more soldiers per mount, and what is the limit?

Also, what are all the variables that increase a general's bodyguard size during the campaign, other than personal security?

I should also have specified that I'm referring to the dragons of Daenerys Targaryen, so it would be okay if the bodyguard ended having up to three dragons, but not more than three.

[Callistonian]

The number of riders per elephant is specified in descr_mount.txt. According to Jojo, limit is 15 per elephant. But that won't actually affect the number of mounts.

The number of mounts is the second integer in the soldiers line in EDU. The number of soldiers (first integer) only affects the number that shows up on the unit card on the strat map or in the custom battle menu, it doesn't affect the number of riders or mounts on the battle map (unless you set number of mounts to 0, in which case the game uses number of soldiers as the number of mounts so the total number soldiers displayed on the unit card in battle will be number of mounts * number of riders per mount). You can set number of mounts to 1 and this will be multiplied by the size setting and rounded up giving you 1 dragon on small and 3 on huge, perfect for Daenerys. You may need to suppress her leader/heir hard coded BG cap increases using traits. See here.

[es157]

The number of riders per elephant is specified in descr_mount.txt. According to Jojo, limit is 15 per elephant. But that won't actually affect the number of mounts.

The number of mounts is the second integer in the soldiers line in EDU. The number of soldiers (first integer) only affects the number that shows up on the unit card on the strat map or in the custom battle menu, it doesn't affect the number of riders or mounts on the battle map (unless you set number of mounts to 0, in which case the game uses number of soldiers as the number of mounts so the total number soldiers displayed on the unit card in battle will be number of mounts * number of riders per mount). You can set number of mounts to 1 and this will be multiplied by the size setting and rounded up giving you 1 dragon on small and 3 on huge, perfect for Daenerys. You may need to suppress her leader/heir hard coded BG cap increases using traits. See here.

Did you just give me a perfect solution? Let me get pen and paper to take note haha.

Yeah, I was entertaining using only one dragon for Daenerys, one for Jon Snow, and possibly one for (f)Aegon Blackfyre, but if my best alternative is giving all the three dragons to a single person, so be it. It will make Daenerys too overpowered, but I guess that's realistic and better than having nine dragons.

I suppose I will also need to take Dany's personal security attribute to the minimum possible, thus making her annoyingly easy to assassinate.

[Callistonian]

I looked into this a bit more and I think I found a way to have only a single elephant mount even on huge size setting. Could be just what you're looking for if you want to split Daenary's dragons into multiple units. See here. You don't want to change PersonalSecurity because I think (unconfirmed) this also affects assassination chance. Using BodyguardSize will work fine.

[es157]

I looked into this a bit more and I think I found a way to have only a single elephant mount even on huge size setting. Could be just what you're looking for if you want to split Daenary's dragons into multiple units. See here. You don't want to change PersonalSecurity because I think (unconfirmed) this also affects assassination chance. Using BodyguardSize will work fine.

Oh yes, personal security definitely affects assassination odds. Naturally, determining those odds is the main thing personal security is used for, as far as I know. If I could do the trick without reducing that attribute, so much better.

I will definitely test your method, but it will probably take me some time to read through and do step by step. It seems a bit complicated on a first read.