Making the Rebels aggressive?

[Jambo]

Is there an easy way to make the rebel faction act aggressively, i.e. building up their forces and attacking other factions and improving their settlements? In essence it would be great to have them just like any other faction you're at war with, the only difference being you wouldn't be able to have the normal diplomatic interactions.

[Lusted]

Well the 1 big thing affecting the rebels probably is the fact that they can't recruit ANY units, allt he units they get are spawned. Just check the edb, no units can be recruited by the slave faction, and most buildings can't either.

Then you would probably need to edit the descr_campaign_ai_db file to make it so the slave faction invades other nations.

[Jasper The Builder]

I might be getting mixed up with rome here but ive known Rebel Factions to act in that way. Generally if they have a lot of land (and i mean 30 settlements plus) they do begin to talk in diplomatic terms. I remember a game once, Where i made myself allies to the Rebels and even had trade rights with them but as said, I cannot if this happened in Medieval or not, Im pretty certain it was Rome.

[Agent Smith]

Is there an easy way to make the rebel faction act aggressively, i.e. building up their forces and attacking other factions and improving their settlements? In essence it would be great to have them just like any other faction you're at war with, the only difference being you wouldn't be able to have the normal diplomatic interactions.

The main issue is that you would to make EACH rebel province a separate faction. Just making the "slave" faction able to build and recruit would mean that they would be pooling all of the resources from all of the rebel controlled territory into one bank account and have one central military control.

I think they'd even have almost enough provinces to win a standard campaign right off the bat

[Jambo]

I guess the fact they get units through spawned rebellions means that it doesn't really matter that they can't build their own. Plus, that looks a mammoth task to mod. Maybe looking at the descr_campaign_ai_db file to make them actively invade is the best option.

[HoreTore]

Well, I've had a huge rebel stack turn around and siege me at Antwerp.

As they have done this, there must be something in the files controlling when they should be attacking and not. So, it should be possible to tweak that so that they are more aggressive.

Post-patch rebels are in general a lot stronger, btw. In the start of my turkish campaign, the rebels had 1 full rebel stack outside jerusalem, 1 full outside damascus, as well as almost full garrisons. This stalled expansion there for both me and egypt for about 30 turns... I wasn't able to take jerusalem until I had finished off the Byzantines...

[Slug For A Butt]

Lucky guy, I've only ever had the Rebels sit and ambush me really. Never noticed them being aggressive. They have always just sat there and let me level my assassins up on them.

[Agent Smith]

Well, I've had a huge rebel stack turn around and siege me at Antwerp.

As they have done this, there must be something in the files controlling when they should be attacking and not. So, it should be possible to tweak that so that they are more aggressive.

Post-patch rebels are in general a lot stronger, btw. In the start of my turkish campaign, the rebels had 1 full rebel stack outside jerusalem, 1 full outside damascus, as well as almost full garrisons. This stalled expansion there for both me and egypt for about 30 turns... I wasn't able to take jerusalem until I had finished off the Byzantines...

You know, I've had similar experiences, but not quite sieging me.

I've noticed that, when huge stacks of troops from other factions go rebel, they WILL move and help the local rebel town/castle if it is under siege. I've had times when I thought I was in the clear and overwhelmed the enemy, and then a full stack of English Knights and other English units that I had seen not too long ago flying the red banner come from behind the fog of war decked out in their new grays and attack my sieging army.

[FactionHeir]

Two things you need to do to make slaves a challenge:

1. In the descr_campaign_ai_db.xml copy all decision entries from <faction_ai_label name="default"> (except the cases concerning slaves) into the section where it reads

	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
	// SLAVE FACTION AI PARAMS.  THEY DON'T REALLY DO ANYTHING //
	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

2. Edit the export_descr_buildings.txt so that slaves can build buildings (i.e. add slave into most of the buildings) and train troops (add slave into the units you want them to be able to build)