Starting out modding the Attila Engine

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Salvete Omnes,

I guess I'll introduce myself real quick: I've been on TWC for five years and am part of the original Invasio Barbarorum team for RTW: Barbarian Invasion. I have a ton of experience modding BI, I can virtually do whatever I want with that engine.

However, Attila is completely different and I have no clue where to start (I'm literally thinking "Why the hell can't I just open this with notepad and start messing with it?!" xD). I started a campaign as WRE in the vanilla and it was so bad I found it unplayable, so basically my first impulse was to actually give the Romans an army and move the Suebes outside of the Empire, as well as nerf some of the factions by deleting their armies or something.

But I have no clue how to do any of this. As such, can anyone recommend me a tutorial or something on say... how to just move an army from one spot to a different one in Attila? Or how to add/remove units to an existing army? Or how about changing the start date? Or renaming a character?

These were all things that were ridiculously easy to do in RTW. All of them basically involved changing a few characters or a line of text. With Attila I have no idea where to even find the necessary lines of code, there's no Desc_strat!

And yes I DL'd the mod tools.

Thanks,
MMFA

[Augustusng]

Yeah, no more notepad. Changing those things is a bit more complicated - I think all the things you described are done in the startpos file. Modding the startpos can get pretty tedious, especially since you'll have to redo those changes for each patch CA releases.

There are a few startpos modding tutorials out there. This one's for Empire, but mostly the same process applies for every TW since then. Magnar's videos are also good.