MTW: I've Got Too Many Lord Sturlassons-Changing Generals' Names

This post is about MTW and how to add more names for your faction's generals. I also want to know if you can turn off the death of generals. Since I'm new I can't post this to the MTW forum. I've had MTW for a while, but rarely get the chance to play, so it's still new to me. I've never actually finished a campaign.

I'm playing the Danes and was getting frustrated by having generals with the same names and having them die off and change names with no perceptible impact on stats or vices/virtues. It just made it more difficult to keep track of who belonged where. Is there a way to turn off the death of generals without impacting the death of kings and heirs? I'd like to have the Duke of Prussia remain ol' Lord Bluetooth until he starts stealing or drinking and I get rid of him.

As for having generals with all the same last name, at one point I think I had three Lord Sturlassons and three Lord Haraldssons. I couldn't keep them straight! I figured out how to add more names that the program can use when generating new units. This may be old hat to many of you, but some of you may find it useful.

First you want to open a file called DEFAULT_HEROES, which is found in the names folder in the campmap folder. The full address is:

C:\Program Files\Total War\Medieval - Total War\campmap\names\DEFAULT_HEROES.txt

This is a text file so just open it and scroll down until you see your faction's list of surnames and forenames. Go to the bottom of each section and start adding away, be sure to use quotes to keep the formatting consistent. For the Danes I stole some names from the VIKING_HEREOS file in the same folder - like "the Stout, "Eight-Fingers." or my personal favorite "Silky Beard." (Not a very intimidating name for a Viking, but apparently he was a king of Dublin at one time). To keep the feel authentic, I got more Vikings names off Wikipedia and used a lot of place names, like "of Orkney" or "of Faroe."

Then I opened the NAMES.txt file which is in the Eng folder in the Loc folder:

C:\Program Files\Total War\Medieval - Total War\Loc\Eng\NAMES.txt.

Scroll down until you see your faction's surnames and forenames and copy & paste over the new names you just added to the Default_Hereos file in the same order. You need to do a little formatting so each new entry is in the same format as the original entries, first in brackets then in braces:

["Silky Beard"] {"Silky Beard"}

Note that you can end up with some amusing ironies, like one general of mine "Ulf the Womanizer" who ended up with the "Pervert" vice! If you get a general whose name reads "!!! Silky Beard !!! Could not translate!!!", you probably missed a quote or bracket somewhere for that entry, so just redo that one name.

Hope this helps and hope someone can help me to stop my generals from changing names.

Welcome to the Org and thanks for the information ~:wave: .

I do think however that a lot of Danish generals are ex-royals, and they will always have the same family name. For example, a lot of Byzantine generals will be Comnenuses. This applies to all factions, but with some of them it is less visible because they get less children and/or more heroes. It is not possible to turn of the death of non-royal generals, except by deinstalling the VI-expansion. On the other, VI did introduce a command line (-green_generals) that ensures that the succes of a dead general will have slightly lower stats (provided the general died of natural causes of course).