Modding a New Culture on an existing faction.

[Robespierre]

The tech tree limits of Barbarians in BI limit the scope of play. Suppose, to make the game a bit more interesting, i wanted to take BI Lombards, and fiddle with their tech tree to make it comparable to the frankish or Sassanid one. this would make a load of new buildings available. it is easy enough to hack about and do most of this.
but what if i want to do it neatly? where can i find the info?

and then to spice it up a bit more, i wanted to move the starting province to Kotais? any ideas how?

then about religion. to make churches and Xianity available must require more than just modding the buildings files: there are ancillaries and family members too. how about any links here?

finally, what about really simple skinning? the most simple thing surely should be just changing the colour of a unit so say lombard graal knightsa don't look too gloopy? is it just a line of code or does this involve tools and painting?

i reckon the Caucasian church militant lombards could be great fun mind...

[Squid]

1. To change the building tree for a faction from one culture to match that of another culture you will need to not only make changes to EDB (export_descr_building.txt), these changed will mainly be just adding factions to the list of factions able to build buildings, but you will also need to make sure that descriptions of the new buildings exist in export_building, and that building pictures exist for the culture of the new faction getting the building. A good resource for changed to EDB is Guide: The Complete EDB Guide.

2. To switch starting provinces you need to swap the two provinces in descr_stat.txt.

3. To make changes to traits and ancillaries will probably be a matter of checking the trait/ancillary definitions and triggers and keep the relevent ones for excluding the faction/culture you're trying to add. A good resource for how the trait/ancillary files work is Guide: The Complete traits/ancillaries guide.

4. To change the colour of a texture requires Photoshop, Gimp or any other photo editing program that can work with DDS files using the nVidia plugin.

Note: All the changes you will have to make should be done in the BI subfolder.