Rant: why is campaign modding so freaking complicated in this game? Trying to do the simplest of startpos edits (make Hosokawa & Toyotomi playable by giving them each 1 province from Hatakeyama & Miyoshi) with Tweak/Bob but now I'm beginning to understand why no one has ever released such a mod before.

I'm sorry but Tweak/Bob/Dave all suck when PFM does 90% of the same stuff and there is no way to make the simplest of edits to a campaign - even the most trivial of stuff that takes <30 seconds to change in PFM like starting treasury or armies takes multiple minutes because the game has to startup and then fails to work anyways ("failed to create esf !"). An actual campaign editor (as in you see the campaign map and are able to interact with it eg create/edit armies, change ownership, crop the map for theatric campaigns, etc.) could've quite easily made this game one the greatest military strategy games of all time, instead you basically need a CS degree to try to modify the campaigns.

Also its nice how steam doesn't tell you why it won't upload mods, just gives an endless spinning circle for one simple gd 1500kb file... are mods made with the official assembly kit the only files that can be uploaded and not DB edits via PFM? I have a tiny-ass mod that makes great clan leaders unable to be killed in battle (as well as numerous other personal mods I'm on the fence about releasing) but can't even get it to post to steam.

Addendum: how tf you gonna release an official mod toolset and over a decade later it still needs an unofficial patch to actually work???

Originally posted by Mauler34:

Anyone have a good resource/tutorial for editing the startpos to insert a new clan?

I don't want to swap-out/replace a minor clan, I want to give land from clans that already have multiple provinces to the hidden clans that are already in the game (Hosokawa, Toyotomi, etc) and also import a clan from another mod (already have it working in custom battle, just need to add it to the startpos without causing CTDs)

I've tried using the one on TWCenter but the screenshots/"spoilers" don't appear so its a tad hard to follow

Well twcenter is your best bet (under the tool, resources, tutorial section). I use PFM in all instances for Startpos editing as well as DB editings

To give regions that is owned by a faction which is not their home region/capital (multiple lands), you need to go to Startpos and find the faction ID of that region and faction ID you want, then you go back to the main tree to Region Manager, click on arrays (you won't get any DB description so it will vary for everyone on which number) to find the region required (you can go look at the Shogun 2 interactive map online to see which number associates with what region ---> if its not a save game startpos) and replace that faction ID with you want (after verifying the faction ID of the original owner of the region), save the PFM under a new name on desktop and then go from there....

If you never modded ETW/NTW/Shogun 2/Attlia extensively, this is all going to be confusing so the best way is to read all those tutorials and comments in the TWcenter section and do trial and error... took me over 10 years to know the major parts of modding TW games (games mentioned above)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply - sadly I've given up on trying to mod the hidden clans into the game for now; tried it with PFM but there are just too many unknown variables for inserting a new clan instead of replacing one, copying & pasting has just led to CTDs on startup unfortunately. Will probably give it another shot at some point but I'm too burnt out on it rn lol.

BoB/Tweak I can't even get to process a vanilla startpos without any changes, even after the unofficial update - thought it might be errors in the modded tables (I'm only editing like 5 of them, all startpos-related since the factions are already in the game) but its not if it won't even process an unmodded startpos... feels like I've tried everything: reinstalling, admin mode for steam/s2tw/bob, unrelated super-easy edits like starting treasury that don't process right... no idea why it won't process a vanilla startpos for me, tutorials make it seem super straight-forward, wish it would tell you why its failing but the only error message it gives is:

=== Campaign / Process start pos (jap_shogun) ===
Failed to save startpos.esf in d:/program files/steam/steamapps/common/total war shogun 2/modding/working_data/campaigns/jap_shogun/!

=====================================
Duration: 16 sec(s)

i can give a try if you like. the error you are getting is from too long location of the directory. place the modding tools in C or whatever.