Can the wall towers/gatehouses be modded?

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Continued from Getting rid of machine gun Siege Towers?

I want to get rid of the magic autofiring town towers and gatehouses, ie remove their firing ability. Can this be done? The engine file has apparently nothing to do with this and the walls file seems irrelevant too.

Thanks in advance. :bow:
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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:bump:
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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:gah:
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[edyzmedieval]

I think the towers yes....

descr_walls.txt

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Thanks eddyz, I already checked that one. I'm afraid it doesn't allow much, if anything, except a couple reload_ticks_ parametres.

Thanks, at least for replying. I was starting to feel transparent. ~:mecry:
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[edyzmedieval]

Maybe you should try to make 0 at the reload_ticks.... ~:)

No problem, always here to help as far as my knowledge goes....~:cheers:

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Will try later today/tonight. :medievalcheers:
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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Negative. As I assumed, 0 reload made them fire nonstop instead. If it ain't hardcoded, there must be a way to stop them from firing.

I'm pretty sure this will CTD but I'll try -1 reload rate this time. :ballchain:
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=55743&highlight=towers

This might be the answer.

It seems this board has an unwritten rule for punishing those who don't search enough with absolute silence.
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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Negative again. -1 doesn't seem to differ from 1.
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[Shigawire]

Ticks you say? in the world of 3d animation, 1000 ticks equal 1 second.

I don't see how a negative or positive would make a difference.

Perhaps it controls the latency of each reload. Try a larger number.
f.ex. 10000 ticks = 10 seconds between each reload..

[Mouzafphaerre]

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So even 1,000,000 ticks wouldn't practically kill them. Are yu sure there's no way of preventing them from firing at all?
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[Shigawire]

I have no clue at all. All I know is the meaning of the word "tick" in this 3d-animated microcosm.

Why would you want the siege towers not to fire at all? Providing cover fire was first role of the siege tower in its use in Sicilia, in places such as Motya for example. Covering fire was also the first role of the "catapult" invention. Not as mural artillery, but as a supporting base of fire for the others.

Katapeltai roughly translates to shield-penetrator if one looks at the etymology. The first katapeltai was the arrow-firing "gastraphete" (belly-bow), then came the torsion devices.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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I'm trying to remove the firing ability of wall towers. (I'm hopefully done with siege towers if Simetrical's method worked.) In either case, you need someone to fire in reality. In RTW they fire on their own, magically and intelligently (switching sides once you capture them). Worst of all, the AI behaves as if they don't exist and suicides its units (or yours, if reinforcements bug hits) either in assault or defense.
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[Red Harvest]

I haven't responded to this as I haven't tried to mod the wall towers. I thought if I remained silent, someone who actually knew something about it (meaning "not me") would respond. All I know is to increase the ticks.

In sieges though, it didn't always require a true army to garrison the walls...at least in lower level settlements. Inhabitants also did their part hurling objects from the walls when soldiers were unavailable.

You are of course right that the AI ignores the wall defenses once it has determined that it can enter the walls. However, since I am usually on offense, the wall defenses are more of a threat to me than the AI. If anything, I wish wooden walled cities had better defenses--at least some towers covering the gate itself.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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With the last bit of hope I'll try commenting out the 'watchtower' entries in the walls file...
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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With the last bit of hope I'll try commenting out the 'watchtower' entries in the walls file...
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CTD ~:mecry:
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[Yale]

Setting the reload ticks to -10 will make them fire maybe once every few minutes. It made my game somewhat glitchy , and doesn't work for the gatehouse towers though.

[Red Harvest]

I came up for an idea as to how to minimize the wall tower/gatehouse effect. It is rather simple but will require quite a few entry changes: I've not tested it. You would have to do the work from descr_projectiles_new.txt then change all units and siege engines missile names over to something else so that they work. The idea would be to cut the standard projectile effective range to a very low value by giving it a low velocity. They can shoot to their hearts content that way, but not hit anything unless it is extremely close. Another way to do it would be to alther the max/min angles so that they can't hit anything.

From another thread:
The structures make use of existing projectiles at least in descr_engines.txt, so most likely the same technique is used for the hardcoding...so if you move all units to copies of renamed projectiles in descr_projectile_new.txt, then cut the velocity down to a very low level on the default projectiles, cut out flaming options, eliminate body piercing etc. you can manually tune some of the projectile characteristics from these hardcoded points.

When I modified projectile speeds and eliminated fire arrows, I did it mostly by creating my own copies of each projectile, then assigning the projectiles to each unit. I did that to avoid weakening the defensive characteristics of walls/towers and engines.

Trick is: you have to know all the places each projectile is used so that you can update those that you want to leave the same by giving them the new copied name, while you tweak the original (that the wall/tower will be calling for.)

[wlesmana]

Tested and solved.
I only tested in 1.2 but I can't see why it shouldn't work in later version since it's very simple.

Here's what I did:
Edit desc_projectiles_new.txt (or whatever is used by your version)
Copy and paste the arrow entry and renamed that "arrow2".
Changed firey arrows to link to arrow2 instead of the original arrow.
Made the original arrow entry to have a max and min angle of 100.
Change all the entries in EDU.txt of "arrow" into "arrow2".


I haven't changed ballista projectile but I'm sure it's the same thing. Remember to change the desc_engine file to make your ballistas use the new entry. Otherwise your ballista unit won't fire.

Now only the boiling oil still remained to be modded out.

[Red Harvest]

Thanks for the confirmation. That projectiles file is one of the more moddable parts of the game, once you figure out what it is doing.

[wlesmana]

ADDENDUM: you only need to mod out the tower_ballista and your ballista would remain the same.