Spawning armies

[Xurr]

Granted the AI control of a newly spawned army will be haphazard at best, however you can help it along a bit. You could script in Hannibal's movement by teleporting that army to specific places over a period of turns. This would simulate his progression into Italy and can actually give you a feel of Hannibal being sly and unstoppable, since you simply cant just block the path.

[TruePraetorian]

Just so everyone knows you don't need to edit the EBBS script. There is a placeholder script called genericscript.txt. It serves no real purpose and you can manually activate it.

[K-Dogs]

There's the issue of food as well, I've never kept an army out of territory too long, but you'd need to account somehow for the fact that the spawned general is gonna be spending a lot of time out of supply range, so the bottomed out morale and tiny movement points mean the army would probably get crushed by Romani spamstacks.
If it's possible to make the general exempt from all of these things (morale bonuses, the teleportation thing you were talking about), then I guess there's some working space.

Also scripting events for the faction will mess up certain areas of the whole game badly unless lots of other things are scripted or hardcoded as well. For instance, sending a rogue Hannibal into Italy implies that the two factions are already at war. If they aren't, it might mean that either one could get crushed way too quickly from fighting too many fronts at once, when if they were at peace, the factions would progress more naturally.

I suppose it wouldn't bee too hard to arrange it so that the character only appears after certain conditions are met (most noteably war), but from that an innumerable amount of further problems come up.

To be honest, scripting characters like this removes the "what if" factor from the game; in order for everything to work smoothly you'll have to make set actions for every possibility, otherwise you'll end up with Hannibal in Northern Gaul or something ridiculous like that. at a guess it's too late to be able to edit the EB files to make it happen, you should have a go at EBII instead :)

[Ambakaro]

Is the AI even affected by the morale penalties (the 'starving' line of traits) associated with supplies?

[Xurr]

I suppose it wouldn't bee too hard to arrange it so that the character only appears after certain conditions are met (most noteably war), but from that an innumerable amount of further problems come up.

To be honest, scripting characters like this removes the "what if" factor from the game; in order for everything to work smoothly you'll have to make set actions for every possibility, otherwise you'll end up with Hannibal in Northern Gaul or something ridiculous like that. at a guess it's too late to be able to edit the EB files to make it happen, you should have a go at EBII instead :)

Actually editing the eb script isn't that bad. You can simply use and existing event to spawn the army. For example you can use the vanilla marian reform trigger and place some code that looks like this. Granted the units and x,y coordinates would need to be different but it wouldn't be all that hard.

spawn_army
faction slave
character Hannibal, named character, command 10, influence 10, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 30, , x 34, y 133
unit iberian cavalry light curisii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian cavalry light curisii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher celtiberian, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher celtiberian, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher celtiberian, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher celtiberian, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry light caetratii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry light caetratii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry light caetratii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry light caetratii, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry loricatii caetratii, exp 3 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry loricatii caetratii, exp 3 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry loricatii caetratii, exp 3 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry loricatii caetratii, exp 3 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry dunaminaca, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry dunaminaca, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry dunaminaca, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian infantry dunaminaca, exp 2 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher cavalry equites caetratii, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit iberian skirmisher cavalry equites caetratii, exp 1 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
end
console_command give_trait Hannibal AIGeneral 2