Quote Originally Posted by Magraev
I'd like some guidelines to implement the diplo-mod (or a link to download from...). It sounds very promising!

What file needs to be modded? Can it be modded with notepad?
What are the suggested entries (0.75 and 0.2?)?
How can we tell from the diplo screen if an alliance is trusted or not (english word plz)?
Is there more than one threshold ?-0.2-0.75-?
Can a trusted ally still betray you - at all?

I wonder if the game becomes too passive if you implement these changes, but I suspect not. On harder difficulties you'd have to pay a lot of florins to ensure the alliance holds.
Ha. Too passive. That's a laugh. Nooooo... the game remains plenty aggressive. I'm currently playing with the changes suggested here in an English campaign, and at war with the remnants of France, Milan, and Portugal which is mostly blockading and dropping small landing parties on mainland Britain. I started none of those wars. Of course France and Milan had good reason to try to take me down, as I was building up forces to swing through West and South France, mashing both of them between myself and my HRE allies to their East.

Getting more to your questions, the modification is quite easy to accomplish yourself. You'll need to mod descr_campaign_ai_db.xml and yes, you can accomplish it with a simple text editor like notepad. If you're not experienced at all with modding this game, it's unlikely you've unpacked the game files or configured a bat file to run the game from said unpacked files. If that is the case you can stop reading right now and go read up on the unpacker instead, as you'll need to unpack the game files and set the game up to look for modded files in order to do this mod.

Having unpacked the files and found the one in question (in the data folder), you'll need to find the section of the code that looks like this:

Code:
	<!--
	///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
	// GLOBAL AI PARAMS (currently disabled, i.e. range = [-1.0, 1.0]) //
	///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
	-->

	<trusted_ally_fs_threshold float="0.75"/>
	<trusted_ally_target_fs_threshold float="0.75"/>
	<trusted_ally_gs_threshold float="0.2"/>
It's pretty close to the top of the file. Make sure you have the stuff about GLOBAL AI PARAMS above the variables, as the variables are mentioned first in the file in a comment that describes their use... and modding that would be worthless, lol. The three variables in the unmodded file will be set to "9.0" each IIRC.

The game code suggests the first two be set to 0.80 and the last to 0.2, but consensus is that it's nicer to set the first two to 0.75 so you can actually tell when the alliance will be trusted, as 0.75 is the threshold for "Very Good" relations, while 0.2 global standing is a minimum rating of "Reliable." If that's what you want to use too, then all you need do is make that part of the file identical to the code above by setting the first two variables to 0.75 and the last to 0.2. Save the changes, and then run your batch file with the io_first switch in it, and you're good to go. You'll know an alliance is trusted when your relations with the faction are at least Very Good, and your global standing is at least Reliable.