Some modest results with spawn_army

[Dromikaites]

Beautiful job, Drom!

We too have played with the spawn_army command, but with no considerable results. If the syntax of the command could be cracked it'd make us all very happy modders.

Jerome, any interest in throwing us a bone here? Please? Pretty please?

The fact it does parsing and that recognisez "undocumented" tokens like army makes me think it is there and operational. It also accepts arguments being passed to it by the script files (at least the faction name, the character name, the traits). So it means it has to accept other arguments, as long as they are in the right format.

The worst case scenario is it has been transformed in "do nothing" by some other piece of code. In which case it would accept the right arguments, report no error and...do nothing. Like the "bribery" trait (I'm sure you guys at EB have already discovered it's useless even if given to diplomats).

However, if I know enough about programmers' behavior, "spawn_army" is a very useful function for making bandits pop up so I doubt they wrote 2 distinct pieces of code, one this we are trying to activate and another one that spawns the rebels. It would be possible but not likely.

I've also noticed something else some months ago but at that time I wasn't interested in modding. Yet now I realized it might also point in the direction of a functioning "spawn_army" command.

The thing I've discovered then was that a rejected candiate to the hand of one of the daughters was sometimes showing up full of rage, at the head of a stack of rebels. That has happened too often to be just a coincidence that the names were randomly generated twice: once for the suitor and once for the rebel named character.

To me it looks like there might be a function that generates a list of suitors. If one guy is rejected, his name becomes eligible for "spawn_army". As we can see from the descr_rebel_factions.txt, those armies are ready-made, just waiting for a general to lead 'em. Not all the rebel armies are led by a named character in-game (family member), even though they field general's bodyguard units. So the function which spawns bandits probably takes the standard rebel army and places it under the named character.

Another thing about the rebel armies: they are listed in reverse order (general bodyguards last in the list) compared to the descr_strat.txt. This makes me think that maybe the order of the params coding the units is also important.