Guide: The complete traits/ancillaries guide

**Red Spot** · 11-16-2007, 13:44

couldnt find anything about this while skimming the tutorial..

I'm getting the impression that campaign-difficulty also impacts the traits/ancillaries your characters get, I've been testing things on VH and all AI governors have (almost)8 ancillaries after ~10 turns while my governors may be lucky to get 2 at average, a lucky one gets 3 ....

not that I'm complaining, I like the added difficulty but was rather surprised by the results, didnt expect it ..

G

**Squid** · 11-16-2007, 17:18

I'd be highly suprised if it did, simply because all acquisition percentages are specified by the file and not the engine, so you'd have to do extra calculations every time a trigger was running to make it work that way; however, it would be good to know if that was the case.

If someone does some more testing, say by using only 5 or 10 triggers and see many ancillaries a group of both AI characters and non-AI characters get after X turns it might shed some light. The number of turns and the number of characters would have to be sufficiently large (or the test run sufficiently often) to make the results statistically significant.

**Red Spot** · 11-16-2007, 18:41

well with 18 Roman factions with identical starting empires (one bigger than the other though), each with some unborn childern coming at age after 8 turns, seeing that after ~12 turns pretty much each AI general has some ancillaries while mine hardly have, specially not the ones outside a settlement, I'd have to say I've been pretty darn unlucky compared to 17 AI factions for 4 test-runs .... ;)

not sure what or how, but I'm pretty temped to say there is something else that has an impact on when the local faction gets ancillaries (havent really tested traits, concentrated more on ancillaries as I quickly noticed the diff. between mine and the AI's generals)

G

**Squid** · 11-16-2007, 19:47

It may just be the AI behaviour makes it more likely to do things which allow it to acquire ancillaries. A lot of ancillaries (if you're using the vanilla, or mostly the vanilla set) require a character to not move for a turn in order to acquire an ancillary. I've noticed the AI tends to leave its characters in settlements a lot more than the average human player which may at least partially explain the difference.

Also, were you always testing as the same faction, as the buildings present at the start along with above would probably also have a large effect on which and how many ancillaries are acquired.

**Red Spot** · 11-18-2007, 12:42

Squid, seems that you are correct (or I'm incorrect ... or both ..:D)

I've had like 2 more testruns with similair results as above where the AI seemed to get at least more ancillaries, the game after that 3 turns in game and my factionleader and heir where both swamped by new ancillaries, next game same thing and now I noticed the Senate being relativly forgotten, so it seems that the game is very random or not random at all

Anyway thats what you get from thinking that 10% means that your character gets the traits after 10turns, it just means someone will have gotten it most likelly and that someone could just as well get it a 2nd time after and other 10 times the trigger has been used

ps; I found that triggers do have a maximum they can do, I've had 40+ "affects" in my comingofage trigger and ~40 in marriage/adoption and got nothing but errorless CTD's at loading the game (the game itself)
now I've got 5*8 for marriage/adoption and 6*8 for comingofage and everything is fine
So I dont know the exact maximum, I do know there is a maximum and its above 8 and below 40 affects ..

G

**Squid** · 01-30-2008, 00:53

Update to the ancillaries section:

If you have a mixed trigger (i.e. both affects and acquireancillary are present), then the affects lines must come before the acquireancillary lines or the traits are not assigned even with chance of 100. BUT if you have a mixed trigger, then you don't get a message saying the ancillary was acquired.