Idea for a trait addition: VnV Overview

[Jabberdau]

When I played RTW and was going to select from 5 - 6 different family members to select one for governor, it always was a tedious process to note down on paper what bonuses to trade, squalor and law each member had as these "traits" was not included with command, influence and loyalty.

Question:
Is it possible to add a trait that occurs on all family members that summaries the trade, law and squalor bonuses/negatives for MTW2?
If a family member has 2 traits fx, one that gives +20% to trade and a ancillary that gives -10% this trait would then change accordingly to provide the number "+10% Trade" when hovering the mouse over the "VnV overview" trait.

I don´t have MTW2 yet, so I am just watching from the sideline for now, don´t know anything about modding.

[alpaca]

Moved to modding questions.

As to the question: That would be too much fuss for such a relatively small feature.

[Aegis]

Possibly, with a lot of work.

You'd have to make a trait and an anti-trait for each bonus (positive command and negative command, for example), then adjust those with triggers.
To include ancillaries, you'd have to remove all abilities from the ancillaries themselves, then create trait triggers to add points in the skills tied to a particular bonus if a character has the ancillary.

However, I don't know if it'll work. There might be a limit to the number of levels you can have of each trait (you'd need 10 for the command traits), if ancillaries can be part of conditions in trait triggers, and you'd really have to know what you're doing to avoid bugs. For example, what would happen if you move an ancillary from one character to another? You'd need triggers to handle that as well, which might require even more traits.

I'd like to test it some time, but quite frankly, it's a lot of work to spend on a test that may not even work.

[Foz]

This is a feature that is infinitely easier to implement when designing a game than it is once the game is finished. Theoretically, it could be done, at least as far as tracking traits is concerned. I'll sum up what would be required:

- Traits and antitraits for each thing you want to track. That'd be SqualorBonus, LawBonus, TaxBonus, and things of that nature... probably opposed by a -Penalty series of traits. This would be a lot easier if we could actually mess with character attributes and create/display the right ones, but I haven't seen that anywhere and it would make sense if it's in the hardcode.

- New triggers that modify the new traits any time a trait that affects the particular governor stats is modified. This would be done by making at least one new trigger for each old one that could affect governor-type bonuses, and increasing your new trait or decreasing it every time a corresponding trait leveled up or down. The trouble is, I don't think it's possible to do this in the traits file. There's no event I know of that happens when a trait gains or loses points, or hits a new level, so WhenToTest conditions can't be used for this purpose. Furthermore there's no way to tell with mathematical testing (>, <, or =) whether a trait has changed unless you already know what value it was, and no way to store its value in a variable at our disposal... so AFAIK there is no way to construct a trigger that would fire under the conditions we need it to do so.

There are some possible alternatives though. One would be a quick tweak, the other a little more in depth modification that also has side effects.

The easy one would be to give the "hidden" attribute to any traits that you do not really care to see on a character sheet ever. Characters would still get them, but you just wouldn't see the description. If you don't care about anything that doesn't directly relate to governing, you can clean it up to a point where only the governing traits stay shown on your guys' traits screens, which I'm guessing would largely accomplish what you want to. This allows a great deal of customization, and possibly is worth not seeing all the trait details in order to have governor info available at-a-glance. At the least most people don't really need to see piety traits and probably some others I can't think of at the moment, so hiding some for the sake of brevity is quite possibly a good idea.

The harder (and weirder) option would be to convert some of the built-in character attributes to something other than what they are intended to be. You could modify less critical stats like loyalty and piety. Let's suppose we wanted to make those instead show trade bonus and tax bonus now. Attributes are altered by traits via "Effect" lines in the file, like:

Effect Piety 1

These then sum up to determine the total shown for a given attribute. So if we want Piety to show tax bonus instead, we should do the following:

1. Search the whole file, removing any Effect Piety lines from it. This keeps any Piety-related traits from influencing the stat. This may leave levels with no Effect whatsoever, which I'm not sure is legal...
2. Any Level of a trait that gives a bonus/deduction to tax now gets an added Effect Piety in the correct amount. Tax would be in percentages, so we'd have to improvise and say 10% equals 1 point on the Piety scale... meaning a trait Level that gives:

Effect TaxCollection -10

Would have added to it the following on a new line: Effect Piety -1

The upshot is that you can assign any of the already-displayed attributes to your own purpose and remove its old one in order to display exactly what you want. However, there are kinks in this plan. The primary one is that the hardcode of the game will be using Piety and Loyalty as if they are still those things. One potential workaround would be to leave the Piety- and Loyalty- starters' Effects lines intact, and then base your new attribute on that point of the starter being neutral on the scale. IIRC it is 5 for both the attributes in question. Then you'd have 6-10 as positive values, 5 for neutral, and 1-4 for detrimental values. In this particular case the modification has the hilarious side effect of making your bad taxmen more susceptible to being inquidated, while shielding good taxmen a bit. Everyone knows the good tax collectors are always the most pious!

Similar quirkiness would exist for any other situation, depending of course on what the original attribute was used for in-game in the first place. I'd personally find it absolutely hilarious if command skill was entirely based on something like personal security. It's always those paranoid dictator types that make the best commanders...

In the end though, I wouldn't really recommend doing this myself, as it does mess with the game mechanics in a very odd way. I'd probably just hide any traits that I felt were pointlessly cluttering up the character sheet... but since I thought of it, I had to share it in case you're that fanatical about having those governor traits quickly at hand

[alpaca]

Actually the way to do it would be creating a new trait that is set anew every turn and holds the attribute value using the Attribute condition. But it's still a lot of work and it triggers each turn which means somewhat of a slow-down.

[Foz]

Ahh, had not considered doing that. Nice one.

The triggers are of no concern, as the game doesn't spend any significant amount of time whatsoever dealing with them. I wrote a workaround for the dysfunctional antitrait mechanic, and it involves 17,000 new triggers, several hundred going off every time an event of any sort happens, including begin and end turn... and the game didn't flinch at all. So whatever does take time in the game, it sure isn't the trigger checking.

As for how to accomplish this per your suggestion Alpaca... any idea if we're allowed to do this?:

Condition Trait TradeBonus > Attribute Trading

-1 TradeBonus

You'd repeat that same trigger a few times to make sure any difference is accounted for, then more triggers for TradeBonus < Trading that would +1 TradeBonus. It's in doubt because I don't think traits are ever directly compared to attributes in the file, but it's certainly possible it's supported even if it's never needed. It'd be really handy here, as a direct comparison allows for a relatively simple trigger setup to change it correctly. That would avoid the mess of trying to reset the trait every turn and run a bunch of triggers to set it again, which makes less sense when you read through it, and probably takes more triggers too.