Hello.
Someone might remember seeing me asking a nearly identical question a couple of months ago. Indeed, in the previous occasion I was given a solution that I was too busy to test at the time and soon forgot to do until the post was forgotten. Now I have looked back to it and attested that the proposed solution did not work.
Explaining myself, in the descr_strat file I've tried to establish starting diplomatic relations between the factions as any mods do, and verified in my campaign that most of the relations I wrote are featured correctly, but a sizeable minority of cases exist in which the relations return as neutral (called "Reasonable" by the game) even though I have established that the two factions should hate each other. I have been unable to detect any typo or other element to explain why the game ignores some relation lines but not others.
Following advice (I think from Gigantus), I deleted everything from the descr_faction_standing file in order to make sure that the starting relations were not being altered by said file, and in doing so I verified that nothing changes. The error persists.
Giving an example, in my descr_strat I have:
Nonetheless, france and england start the game with "Reasonable" relations instead of "Abysmal".faction_standings france, -1.0 england
faction_standings england, -1.0 france
I remember vaguely that the same problem sometimes occurred in RTW, in regards to starting alliances and wars.
Is it possible that I really am the only player who frequently bumps into this problem? Doesn't anyone know what causes this? Probably some rule regarding how the descr_strat file is read by the game.