Faction-specific effects that impact battles

[lucky_dutch]

The campaign mechanics in 3K are absolutely amazing but the battles lack a bit of variety and this really hurts replayability for me.

This is partly down to lack of unit variety but also because every faction plays exactly the same in combat aside from the inclusion of their faction-specific units.

It would be great if someone could add some faction-specific effects that slightly altered the battle tactics for each faction. All factions have access to the same units but modifiers could really alter how those units perform and are used.

I lack the creativity and knowledge of the source material to pull it off but it would be awesome if when playing against Cao Cao, you knew his cavalry was particularly strong or fast and you'd need to prepare for that but perhaps he's weaker in some other area to compensate. It would give the factions more identity on the battle map.

[ABullishBear]

That is definitly doable, and I really dont think it's too hard for you to pull off either, though you might need to experiment quite a bit with scopes: e.g. Faction to character own,.
You wont crash the game by using a wrong scope, however it will not show up as you intended and thus you know to try another one, which also sounds like it might be relevant to what you are doing:
E.g. faction to character own all characters.

For impacting the units partaking in battle you'll want to look at a few:
To specifically target the commanders, use scopes that end with "to character"
to target the entire force(I'm not sure but I believe this impacts generals as well) use scopes ending with "to force" or "to military force"
To target per retinue use ones that end with "to retinue" or to military force retinue own.



Apart from that the only other thing you will need to know is what effects do, and what values are normal for those effects.

E.g. effects ending with mod usually take a whole number, can be negative and if you wanted to boost say armour by 50% you would type 50.
to reduce it by 50: -50

some exceptions to this rule include character attribute mod gor resolve etc, those seem to be additive rather than multiplicative and now I sure hope that is an avtual word lol.


What I did personally is split effects up into about 10 tables, each only holding relevant effects, so it is easy to look them up, however both pack file manager and dave allow you to gilter, accomplishing basicly the same thing.

Look at effect bundles to effects tables to see examples of effects heing used so you have a rough idea of what values are appropriate.
Some effects might only appear once or not at all, you'll have to experiment to figure out how those play out.

If you read this and would like an example packfile where your idea is put into practice I'd be happy to give you a head start that way.