I'm posting my response to fenir here.

Thanks fenir for answering my questions. I would really be interested in getting a copy of your guide to the .txt files if you can do it. If you need any help with testing some mods let me know. My interest is mostly in simply modifying the faction behavior (in so far as that is possible) to make the game more interesting and realistically challenging.


Thanks for the suggestion about renaming the early.txt file to create a mod file. I think this will help keep track of changes I'm making, so that if anything blows up I'll know what to reverse

Faction behavior. . . . This of course is all hard coded, so we can't effect a change on this. But we can change the starting behaviour. . . . all these are predefined setting which instruct the AI on how to manage the faction I suspect.

Yes pope is again a predefined setting only affecting the pope. I suspect it is all located in hard coded tables within MTW. Something we cannot, at this stage, get at :P

That's just what I was afraid of. What we really need is to be able to adjust the ingame faction behavior to make it more (realistically) challenging and perhaps more historically accurate as well. I don't suppose that the developers will ever take any of these files out of the hard coding?

Obviously, the reason the developers didn't do so is that most of the game buying public probably thinks this game is more than hard and complex enough already. I read an interview with a game developer (different company) who said the biggest testing flaw for developers is that they UNDERESTIMATE how difficult the game may seem to the average gamer. What I think many of us on this forum would like from the sp experience is a more realistic challenge. This is really what I'm interested in and I suspect many of you are too. I'm thinking of increasing the provincial rebellion figures in the manner suggested by Giskard (but by 1 not three to just see how it goes). Have you tried this? You shouldn't just be able to raise a large army of elites and walk across the map.

I think Giskard's idea of changing the French to Orthodox in order to make it more difficult to hold on to provinces once conquered is interesting, but I can't get past the historical anomaly

Just thinking about it, I could actually release guides on each actual txt? That is to say I could write up a guide and description of what each txt has in it and then what each does.
Post it here in parts like Wellington did, and then when finished compile it into a word document.
I will give this some more thought.

I personally would love to see this That's what I'm really looking for.

Bribing the Pope, I don't think it's possible yet, though someone may have just changed the pope to a default faction setting, that would allow it.

Creating the Pope as a custom FN_MINOR and assigning Rome and the Papal States to that Papish faction should make him bribable, you would just have to make all the relevant entries in the .txt files, but then the Pope would play like any minor faction which causes problems in its own right (ahistorical). I wonder what effect giving the Pope Still, I might try it.