Judean Mercs and Messing up your campaign

[professorspatula]

I was just going to make a post about me finding strange mercenaries popping up in my game in odd places, as well as Judean Zealots being available to hire and if anyone had found strange things happening to their mercenary hire lists in campaigns. Then I discovered why my campaign had suddenly gone 'odd'.

I added a new unit to the game for custom battles after my campaign had started. Adding a new unit has confused my campaign so the mercs available to hire are wrong - the unit available to hire is now the one above the actual one that should be hired in the export_descr_unit.txt file, despite the actual mercenary txt file being unchanged.

So instead of Mercenary Peltasts for hire, I'm getting Judean Zealots. Instead of Eastern Infantry I'm getting Spanish Mercenaries, and instead of Greek Hoplites I'm getting Cretan archers etc. This has lead to me getting very odd mercenary armies all over the place. Which is amusing but not really what I want.

So the point of this post is: Don't add any new units to your game mid-way through a campaign even if they're not used in the campaign game. It will mess up the mercenaries - or perhaps more correctly, any you add, add them to the bottom of the units file.

Sorry if this is already common knowledge.

[Quillan]

Interesting. I hadn't added a unit to the file, but I tried adding the names Asterix , Obelix, Getafix and Justforkix to the Gallic names file in the middle of my Gaul campaign, and it screwed everything up. The game would load just find, but quicksaving caused a crash to desktop. Restoring the original file and deleting the quicksave file put it back in working condition.

[Jagger]

Not absolutely certain but I think you can add units mid campaign. Just add them at the bottom of your export unit file. You wouldn't interrupt the unit order. I think that would work.

At least I hope so. I just added two units to my campaign tonight. I haven't seen any problems yet.

[Sin Qua Non]

When it comes to adding things, expecially names, there can be multiple files that the game will refer to. Like a descr_ file, a lookup file, and the original data .txt file. I added a bunch of names, and had to do so on 3 different files. And if you make one typo or variation on any of the files.. hoo boy.

[Paul Peru]

I messed around a bit with a unit_descr_thingy, got a few CTDs at one point, but sorted it out.
Now I get the maximum amount of advice all the time in my campaign.