relic anciliaries - insta pious king

[Yaropolk]

I looked through the anciliary file and noticed that all relics are transferable (holy grail, true cross, etc) and all give +piety and 1 or 2 other bonuses. Not only that, you can earn them pretty consistently - just conquer a certain city with a high piety (6 or more) general. 50 percent chance to get, 75 if on crusade. Almost every city in the middle east yields a relic, also constantinople, milan, paris, hamburg, and bordeaux. If you dont get it first time, let the city go rebel and try again. When you have a few of these, let your prince have them, build a church or 2 and join a crusade. Bam, max piety

[Askthepizzaguy]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I looked through the anciliary file and noticed that all relics are transferable (holy grail, true cross, etc) and all give +piety and 1 or 2 other bonuses. Not only that, you can earn them pretty consistently - just conquer a certain city with a high piety (6 or more) general. 50 percent chance to get, 75 if on crusade. Almost every city in the middle east yields a relic, also constantinople, milan, paris, hamburg, and bordeaux. If you dont get it first time, let the city go rebel and try again. When you have a few of these, let your prince have them, build a church or 2 and join a crusade. Bam, max piety

A useful bit of information. Thank you.

I miss having transferrable retinue. Nowadays I dont even bother looking at the retinue, because I cant do anything about it. It was an important and fun piece of RTW.

M2 would be a lot better with transferrable retinue. Has anyone modded the files so that we can transfer? It should be a fairly simple matter.

[FactionHeir]

You can open the ancillary file with Word, search/replace all transferable 0 to transferable 1.

[Alpedar]

I did it for myself, but only for some. Some of them are by nature tied to specific character. Eg. custom armor. And negative ones should be unmovable, becose if I could move them, i could use some old/uselss general, give him all negative anciliaries and send him die. And "named" anciliaries should be unmovable, becose of their limited lifespan (they should not be never dieing companion for king transfered to heir before king dies)

[FactionHeir]

I did it for myself, but only for some. Some of them are by nature tied to specific character. Eg. custom armor. And negative ones should be unmovable, becose if I could move them, i could use some old/uselss general, give him all negative anciliaries and send him die. And "named" anciliaries should be unmovable, becose of their limited lifespan (they should not be never dieing companion for king transfered to heir before king dies)

Very true. That was one of the quirks of RTW where you would transfer pretty much every ancillary to the next general and easily get rid of the negative ones to make your perfect general. There are some which should be transferrable (i.e. it would make sense), but overall having most of them non-transferrable adds another layer of complexity to the game and prevents you from easily making a perfect character.

[Yaropolk]

You order Notorious Berserker to follow your prissy prince around. Notorious Berserker makes your prince into a prince-hide cape.

[Von Nanega]

You order Notorious Berserker to follow your prissy prince around. Notorious Berserker makes your prince into a prince-hide cape.

Makes sense. I sent my Prince on a crusade with 8 peasants to Jerusalem. No mercs. Hope that pansy lives to be a warrior. If not, oh well.

[Sentinel]

Quote by FactionHeir

Very true. That was one of the quirks of RTW where you would transfer pretty much every ancillary to the next general and easily get rid of the negative ones to make your perfect general. There are some which should be transferrable (i.e. it would make sense), but overall having most of them non-transferrable adds another layer of complexity to the game and prevents you from easily making a perfect character.

I agree that having them non-transferable adds another layer of complexity to the game, but it is an unnecessary complexity. If you want to modify a characters abilities then this can be done via his traits.
The whole point of giving ancillaries in RTW was to enable you to customise your generals to add a roll playing element to the game. Having the majority of the ancillaries non-transferable does not add anything to the playability of the game. If they wanted to stop you making super generals (by moving ancillaries from dying generals) they could have given the ancillaries an age and let them die too.

[FactionHeir]

There is no function to remove an ancillary off a character, probably something they forgot to code during RTW times and could not be implemented in M2TW as that is based almost completely on RTW's engine.

I do agree that all ancillaries being transferrable would add a "roll playing" (as you say) element to the game. Its not necessarily conducive for "role playing" however. Nonetheless, anyone can mod their game files to make them as transferrable or sticky as they wish.

[Yaropolk]

Looking at the files, I also see that many of the named Ancilaries such as Peter the Hermit, Gerard De Ridefort and others join up with high likelihood (50-100%) if you are the right nation and the right turn when a general joins a crusade.
These ancilliaries are unique (only 1 can exist in the world) and nontransferable. For this reason when joining a crusade, make sure you join with your Faction Heir and best generals first to give them the first shot at the ancilliaries.
It's also worth it to race to call the first crusade so you can be the first nation to join up.

Taking Gerard De Ridefort as an example

Ancillary gerard_de_ridefort
Type Military
Transferable 0
Image knight_chivalrous.tga
Unique
ExcludedAncillaries roger_de_moulins
Description gerard_de_ridefort_desc
EffectsDescription gerard_de_ridefort_effects_desc
Effect Command 1
Effect Authority 1
Effect TroopMorale 1
Effect Attack 2

Trigger gerard_de_ridefort
WhenToTest GeneralJoinCrusade
Condition IsCrusade
and CharacterReligion catholic
and not FactionType hre
and not FactionType spain
and not FactionType portugal
and I_TurnNumber >= 25
and I_TurnNumber <= 90

AcquireAncillary gerard_de_ridefort chance 100


This means the first catholic general of any country except spain, hre and portugal to join a crusade after turn 25 will get him as an ancillary.
Gerard was the grand master of the Templar knights, so the Santiago/Teutonic order countries are excluded.

[Yaropolk]

Since I didnt realize it when I joined my first crusade, all my nameds ended up on whoever. I cheated - made all the unique anciliaries transferable, moved them to my prince, and then made them nontransferable again.

[ReiseReise]

The negative ones being non-transferable make sense, for example the Pagan Magician. The reason he is there is because in game terms that general CHOOSES to have him. You do not get to role-play your characters 100%, they are somewhat autonomous. YOU may not like it, but it is a reflection of that generals character and the situations YOU put him in (being in high-pagan region)