Good luck on your map making journey! A few answers:

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- On my first test of my first map, the enemies inexplicably went after things OTHER than my party. They behaved properly, though, on subsequent tests. How can I ensure they'll attack me?

I am guessing those "other things" were objects on the map? The AI profile you give the army in map settings can have some effect, and I am pretty sure there is a map condition that changes how highly they prioritize bridges that the player builds. For the objects you populate the map with, I get around this by making the objects all belong to the enemy army. When you edit an object, you'll notice you can tab among the different armies, but it defaults to Army 99. Set it to belong to the enemy army, whichever number that is, and they should ignore them.

I generally find the AI works "normally" the most when the player is within range of a move and attack, so that can inform your map design if you wish. If you want them to wait until the player is within range before doing anything, you can do things like give them the Passive tag. If you want the AI to charging after the player and the AI is still not attacking you enough, try an AI setting like Aggressive in the map settings.

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- Haven't gone super far back in the "character edit" menu in the campaign editor, but is it easy to change characters' stats if I feel they're too squishy or overpowered?

Yep! I've done this on the fly before. I have tested maps and thought that maybe that player unit should have more energy or that enemy unit had too much health. Just go back to those units in the character editor, go back to the page where you set up the stats and adjust them, and it will update on any battle maps they are part of. To make sure the changes are applied though, I would both click the Proceed button in the lower right to move to the next page, then hit Save Character in the upper right. Then you should be good to Exit that unit's page.

Be careful when changing things like the name of the unit though. The unit under the old name will remain, and any instances of that unit with any of the other older stats will stay where they were placed. The editor will also let you create a new unit with the same name as an existing unit; when you do this, it will overwrite the old unit, even for existing instances of that old unit on any maps. This can actually be handy when you want to change something fundamental, though, like create a "unique" version of a unit to replace a "generic".

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- How do I set the characters' in-battle colors to be consistent through each fight?

In Map Settings, you can adjust what color each of your armies will use. There are 6 colors: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, White, and Black. If, say, you always want the player army to be Green, toggle the player-controlled army to Green in the map settings for each of your maps. You may already know this, but you can also change the army color of portraits in cutscenes and dialogues; when using AddPortrait, put in the color you want for the army color.

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- What do you do to make hills and cliffs when crafting a map from scratch without the help of the generator? I'll probably keep using it for this first campaign i'm doing. However, I'd like to know for the future.

You may notice on the toolbar at the top of the map editor some Elevation Up/Down buttons. If you want to make a hill, you can select the Up button and then just click or click and drag across the terrain to raise the terrain by one level. I think elevation ranges from -1 to 6, but I may be wrong.

If you want to create the impression of standing on top of a tall cliff where falling off is certain death, you can look at the terrain painter. One of the options is something like Chasm/Blank; just a black box. Anything that can't fly will be killed if they fall into that.



I'll be keeping an eye out for further questions, though I may not be able to check much over the next few days.

Great answers! Tacitus has covered most of this, but I'll add a couple of things you may not know:

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- On my first test of my first map, the enemies inexplicably went after things OTHER than my party. They behaved properly, though, on subsequent tests. How can I ensure they'll attack me?

Most of the time when this happens, it's because the AI detects that enemies are blocked in and tries to get them to cut a path through the scenery. Changing the enemy's AI profile probably won't fix this, but opening up other paths on the map usually will, as will assigning objects to the enemy army (as Tacitus said). You can also accomplish this via tags without making the objects enemies. Placing TreatAsArmy on a unit will make the AI behave as though that unit belongs to a specific army: set it to 1 (or whatever the enemy's army number is) and they will never attack it. The downside to these last two approaches, however, is that enemy healers may treat the objects as targets for shielding. Perhaps the best approach is placing an IgnoreArmy,99 tag on enemy units--this will cause them to ignore targets belonging to army 99 entirely.

Originally posted by Wannabe Skater:

- Haven't gone super far back in the "character edit" menu in the campaign editor, but is it easy to change characters' stats if I feel they're too squishy or overpowered?

Yup! In addition to what Tacitus said about the character editor, if you need to make changes dynamically mid-campaign, I recommend trying the SetStat script action: it's quite versatile and powerful.

Thanks, guys! Are scripts hard to work with?

If you have never done any kind of scripting or coding on a computer before, they might look a little intimidating at first. But what you need to do is documented pretty well.

In the Dialogue Editor you have both scripts and dialogues. Within scripts and dialogues, you can add "Actions". You can click that "Guide" button in the upper right of most screens to see a list of all of the potential actions. Both in the guide and when you are adding in the name into a dialogue or script, the game will tell you what it does and what kind of information the game needs to run it correctly, usually a series of text and/or numbers separated by commas.

Dialogues will also have "Triggers", which tells the game when that dialogue should start. The Guide also has a list of those Triggers. "Dialogue" can be a misleading term though, because you can also use Dialogues to fire off a few Actions when the conditions are met without displaying any kind of conversation, which can be pretty handy (use the "EndConvImmediately" action at the end of your list of actions). Scripts can be triggered a couple different ways. The "Run" action in a dialogue or another script will start a script. You can also trigger a script off "using" an object. There may be other ways I am not thinking of/haven't discovered yet.

If you want to understand dialogues and scripts more, I recommend checking out a mission you played recently in the editor and take a look at their Dialogue Editor. Start connecting the dots on how they handled doing X or Y, and it should start making more sense.

Yup, Tacitus is right. I do an introduction to scripting and the dialogue system in this video starting at 15:45--that should help get you familiar with how it's all structured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkCwM_varWM