Test Results: Variable & Realistic death

[CaesarBR]

Look in the settlement_mechanics file for this:

      <factor name="SIF_DEVASTATION">
     <pip_modifier value="5.0"/>
     <castle_modifier value="0.8"/>
         <city_modifier value="1.3"/>
         <pip_min value="0"/>
         <pip_max value="500"/>
      </factor>

The max value sets the maximum level of devastation per region. I believe the modifier values set how fast devastation goes up and down.

I'm using Stainlles Steel mod and it has just this about devastation:
</factor>
<factor name="SIF_DEVASTATION">
<pip_modifier value="1.0"/>
</factor>

if I make this number lower it will solve the problem??how much you suggest???

and...how can I get rid of the devastation visual effect in the map?

[ZaPPPa]

I'd say add the <pip_max value="500"/> to your file and set the value to whatever you want as a maximum. I think 500 is a good number myself.

[calarrick]

Help -- I cannot seem to find any file matching the one that is being modified per this thread. I have the "gold" package that includes the original game and the Kingdoms expansion.

[Chim]

You need to unpack your game with the unpacker tool. It's in the tools folder in vanilla's installation directory.

[meznaric]

Sorry to bring up an old thread. So I changed the <family_tree> part of the file to have age of manhood set to 12 and now after a bunch of turns I start getting "Unspecified error".

I also changed the number of kids to be 8 and then later realised that this could cause troubles so I put it back to 4. This did not take care of the errors though.

Has anyone had something similar happen?

Edit: OK, so I just realised that the game does not crash when one actually has more than 4 kids but when one of the traits increase. Can I use the console to take control of other factions and kill off all the extra kids?

[ZaPPPa]

When changing 'manhood' it is possible to push characters in a void. For example, if your change it from 16 to 12 and you have a 14 y/o child in one of the family trees at startup, strage things may happen.

When I changed manhood to 12, I went through all the family trees and adjusted the ages of characters to make sure they were either a child below 12 or an adult with traits and everything.

I personally changed the manhood age in DLV. I believe that the education feature pushed manhood too far back. In medieval times you were squired at age 12-13 and you could become a knight between 18-21. Royalty often, obviously, fasttracked this process. Mind you, I also play with 30 as max_age. It makes the game so much more interesting.

[Oldgamer]

Zappa,

Could you post a copy of your descr_campaign_db file, where all of these factors are stored? I'm using one you posted a number of pages back, and I've got way too many 80-90 year old men in my kingdom.

[ZaPPPa]

Here it is.

You can also change the <max_age uint="110"/> to 90 and <max_age_before_death uint="111"/> to 91 to kill off your characters at an earlier age.

[ZaPPPa]

data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt

Mind you, changing this file is not easy. You can quite easily introduce crashes if you don't use proper formatting.

[meznaric]

Aha. I think that worked. One thing one has to be careful about is to change the age of the kids so that no two kids of the same person are of the same age (the game doesn't allow twins it looks like hehe). If they do have the same age the campaign will not start.

Out of curiosity, what would happen if one were to add kids with a negative age?

[uanime5]

One problem with lowering the age of death is that it also affects agents. Since most agents start out between the ages of 25-40 they almost always die after 1 turn. Is there any way to decrease the starting age of agents?

[Oldgamer]

Since employing your new stats, ZaPPa, several of my 80-90 year olds have died, I lost one family member at the age of 59 (from natural causes), and the king is 71, having passed completely through his 60's.

It looks like it's working well.

@uanime5
I've lost one agent, but the fellow was well into his 70's, when he died. My other agents have made it through 13 years of gameplay (note that I use .5 timescale, which means that I have two turns per year).

[ZaPPPa]

@uanime
OldGamer is probably on to something.. it is possible these numbers only work for the .5 timescale (2t/y). I have only ever run DLV as a mod, so I never tested this on any mod that uses a different timescale.

Your agents should not all be dying between 25-40. Changing their starting ages is possible, but it is patching the problem, not solving it.

You are correct that the game does not allow twins and the children should be old-to-young in the family tree.

@OldGamer,
Glad to hear it is working for you.

[Ashantai]

I used settings so they reached old age at 30, but the other two settings were 100 and 101. It worked great, if quite frustratingly!

I deliberately used 30 since it would give 16 years to produce an heir before they started dying, and that was my concession to history.

In a test run on vanilla, I ran through the 225 turns ending up with 11 faction leaders - one lasting until 78, one dying shortly after taking power at 37.

So thanks, Zappa and others, this is a very interesting and useful little modification

[caralampio]

I have "resurrected" the 'too old to fight' and 'senile' traits that are buried in export_descr_character_traits by giving them triggers (they are not in effect normally because they don't have triggers). I am playing SS which has an old age of 65 and 1.5 years per turn. Other values in that mod are max age before death 105, max age 90 and manhood 14.

The problems are, #1 characters only last a couple of turns or less after reaching 65, and #2 65 is a bit too young for becoming senile (well it could happen but not commonly). I wanted to tweak the game so characters could last more years being old, and luckily first thing I see coming into the subforum is this thread (thanks to Ashantai for the timely "bump" ).

Correct me where I'm wrong. And pardon the long reasoning but I want to get it straight:

It seems that in this mod the chances of death are linear (well they are linear in vanilla as well but then they are linear 50%- two years average and you're dead!) What I mean is, you get about the same number of people dying at 18, as you do at 19, at 30, etc. and as you get dying at 50, 63 or 80 correct? So the life expectancy would be about in the half of your "old age" span of 82 years (18+41=59).

While that average doesn't seem too wrong, and is very near to vanilla's usual age of death, it also means that if you start with 100 characters, half of them will be dead at or before 59. And those will not even be bunched towards the age of 59, but linearly distributed along the line 18-59 years.

Then we will have the other half of the characters dying at ages 60-100, again linearly distributed along all those ages. Max-age will kill any diehards at 100 no matter their good health, right? Those few reaching advanced age would fit in very well with my senility traits...

In other words, if you start out with 100 characters, about 12 will die every decade. 12 will die before 30, 24 before 40, 36 before 50 and so on. On the other extreme, 12 will make it to the 90's, 24 to the 80's, 36 to the 70's and so on.

I think an old age span of 40-80 might give better results. No very-young deaths, then about 25 deaths per decade. 25 before 50, 50 before 60, 75 before 70. 25% of people will reach the 70's... Still a lot of old people, but less than with the other version.

[caralampio]

Hmm... Nobody seems to be around.

Anyway: I made an extensive probabilistic analysis using the formula found by ZaPPPa (testing a theory by playing first is too random and too long, and many games are needed for a representative sample).

I created a mod based on the age values I calculated, then played a campaign with it. Result: 76 turns into the game, the pattern of age at death has come out exactly as predicted by the probabilistic analysis!!! I will continue the campaign to the end to get complete results, but so far it is good.

Great work ZaPPPa. However you deduced that formula?

+rep

[ZaPPPa]

Hey,

Wow, talk about a golden oldie being pulled from the grave... . Good thing there's e-mail notifications for me for this thread.

I came to the formula using simple brute force and then deducing the formula from the results. Then checking using extreme values for validation. The formula seems sound and thus exposes a bug in the MTW2 software (max age values make no sense).

What is realistic is in the eye of the beholder. I don't believe in no deaths until 40. Those were the middle ages and many people didn't make it till 30. I do agree that this leads to many people dying relatively young, but this is why I personally set my max age as high as 110 to 120 to offset this. The vast majority of characters croak before they hit 90, so a rare 104 year old is not that big of a deal to me.

To each his own.. that's why modding is such a great thing. I'm glad to see my work is still paying off and people enjoy the game more.

[caralampio]

I know no death before 40 isn't realistic, but when making a game one has to compromise. Only reality itself is totally realistic. I have to make a balance between scenario A- no deaths before 40 (or 50- I like that number more), or scenario B- death can occur at any age in adulthood from 18, but an inordinately large number of people will die young (which is also unrealistic and not very desirable from a player's point of view).

[Ashantai]

I agree, not realistic, but I made it for ages 30+ simply for game balance. Since you lose when you lose all your family, you must give them time to have kids. This isn't like real life where a general or something would take over, you could have 49 provinces, and yet once you lose your family, you crash.

Thanks for your replies and insight!