Trying to unlock my factions the right way

[BharatRakshak]

Okay, my computer's not letting me edit the file that unlocks the factions. So I'm doing it the legit way. Do I have to beat a campaign with one of the first five factions, or can I do it with say Scotland? I like their position even better than England's, and I unlocked Scotland by beating them as England real quick. So can I do a short campaign as Scotland and unlock the factions, or must I use the original 5 factions?

[PBI]

I believe winning a short campaign as any faction is sufficient to unlock all playable factions, but surely you aren't that far from doing it as England anyway if you've already knocked out Scotland?

[BharatRakshak]

Yea, but I had to let Caen go to do that. I've also unlocked the Moors and Portuguese playing the Spanish, but I had started it as a Long campaign, and it is really much different dynamics on long campaign. I have almost the entire Western third/half of the map, but involved big time in a war with the Danes and Milan in the middle of Germany.....and I didn't read all the stuff about giving the Pope money to keep him happy when I did that, so I got excommunicated and actually crusaded on by 4 factions.

I think I'll do a short campaign with the Moors. I'm dying to play the Danes or Byzantines or Russians.

[PBI]

If you want to play the Danes, it's relatively easy to knock them out and thus unlock them if you play as England or the HRE since they start with only one settlement; just send most of your forces to attack them from turn one, and take their only settlement.

I tend to do this in most campaigns where I start near them, just because it's an easy way to knock out a potentially dangerous neighbour early on. If you time it right you can reach their city while most of their forces are out marching towards Stockholm so they will only have a few units defending.

Though it might be an idea to persevere with your England campaign, losing Caen shouldn't matter too much so long as your control all of the British Isles, it's a very good place to build up from as it is rich and well defended. You should hopefully find that you soon have so much money you can send huge stacks to attack anyone you want to and win the short campaign quite quickly.

Don't worry too much about being excommunicated, if you get a diplomat to Rome you can always buy your way back into the Pope's favour. Alternatively, if you're really desperate to get reconciled straight away, you can get your faction leader killed in battle (excommunication applies to your faction leader personally, not the faction as a whole.)

If your having trouble getting modding to work, make sure you've run the unpacker that comes on the disk and followed the instructions in the readme file that comes with it.

Oh, and welcome to the Org.:beam:

[BharatRakshak]

Thanks for the tips, btw what is the unpacker? Everytime I try to rewrite on these files with the playable and locked factions, its saying I don't have the right to edit this file. Is this what the unpacker is for?

[Monsieur Alphonse]

If you want to edit files: right click on them and remover the read only property. The unpacker unpacks the data files stored in the data packs. You only need to do that if you want to mod the game.

[ReiseReise]

If you want to edit files: right click on them and remover the read only property.
Sounds simple right? I had trouble with it and the read only kept coming back. After some googling I finally found a way to get it unchecked using the cmd console. attrib was the command I believe.

[ataribaby]

Thanks for the tips, btw what is the unpacker? Everytime I try to rewrite on these files with the playable and locked factions, its saying I don't have the right to edit this file. Is this what the unpacker is for?
I assume you've got Vista Bharat? The User Access Control (UAC) can be a royal pain when you just want to make a few changes to files in the Program Files directory.

The easiest way I've found is:

1. Copy the descr_strat.txt file to the Desktop; make the changes to the copy and save to the Desktop.

2. Rename the original to something like descr_strat.txt.original (UAC should allow a rename after a couple of permission prompts).

3. Move the altered file into your imperial_campaign folder.

4. Bob's yer uncle.