How to edit/create group formations

In this tutorial I will show how to edit the pre-defined group formations, and then explain how to add new ones to a culture.

For my example I will be editing the Missile Front Triple Line formation. With my preferred army makeup of 4 missile, 12 melee, and 4 cavalry units, using any triple line formation will result in the melee line consisting of 11 units, with one lone unit left at the rear, making it a lame quadruple line. This is because that fourth line is supposed to be reserved for command category units and any units which haven't already been assigned a line (of which there should be none, but presumably this is there in for future-proofing in case any new categories are added), but as the priority assigned is incorrect it takes a unit from whichever category has the most units to place there.

Step 1
http://i.imgur.com/iFcX6TZ.png
Browse to \assembly_kit\raw_data\EmpireDesignData, and open GroupFormations.xml.

Step 2
http://i.imgur.com/WZLJka9.png
Find the formation you wish to edit. This one has the internal name triple_line_missile. You can see that it's fairly simple to understand. The formations are made up of blocks, and their relative positions to one another define how the lines are made up and arranged, and these blocks are made up of entities which define what units are in those blocks. I will return to this in a later post.

Step 3
http://i.imgur.com/Ec7615O.png
For this simple fix, all I want to do is change the priority of the final entity from 0.1 to 0.05.

Step 4
http://i.imgur.com/wFh9fGS.png
Save and exit the file, then run BOB. Select GroupFormations.pack and start the process. At this stage it is pointless to click anything else.

Step 5
http://i.imgur.com/FofDMKf.png
This will create a GroupFormations.bin file in the \assembly_kit\raw_data\EmpireDesignData directory.

Step 6
http://i.imgur.com/drJpMa8.png
Move or copy this file to \assembly_kit\working_data.

Step 7
http://i.imgur.com/dKxsWiU.png
You can now run BOB again. This time you are able to select GroupFormations.bin, and doing so will add it to the mod file.

Step 8
That's it! You can now run the mod and your changes will be reflected in-game. But note that any further changes to GroupFormations.xml will require GroupFormations.bin to be re-made.

To add a new formation, you should follow the same steps as above, except at the third step instead of editing an existing formation, copy a GroupFormation section and give it a new name. This name then needs to be added to the formations table in DAVE, and then to the formations_to_subcultures table to define which factions are able to use it.

The GroupFormationBlock sections are fairly self-explanatory. You can see by looking at existing ones how their spacing is set depending on what should be in them, and their positions are defined as relative to existing blocks on the X and Y axes. The one part that isn't so clear is the Priority field. A value of 1.0 obviously means all units of that category must go in that block. I believe a value of 0.05 means a unit will only go there when there is no other place for it to go. It appears that values in-between those two are taken as weighting, so how many units go in that block depend on how many units of that category there are in total. This is why in my example a melee units was being taken out of the melee line, because with twelve of them it decided that one could be spared.

Also, I understand that there is some sort of issue with increasing the size of navies through mods, and formations don't work with them properly. The naval formations also include MaximumEntityThreshold fields, which the land formations don't. Presumably that has something to do with it.

Hi, i Hope you are still online ahah After 10 year. It's something changed in this procedure? The game crash starting a Battle even of i changed only a relative position (for example, a Y=10 --to 15). I tested also a mod created with the unchanged group formation, to see of i loaeed a different format, and It doesn't crash. Only if i touch the originale .xml file.