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Dynamic Faction Strength & Starting Armies
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1 Jul, 2023 @ 7:37pm
23 Jul @ 2:43pm
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Dynamic Faction Strength & Starting Armies

Description


Update 6.2 Notes
- As of game update 6.2, it's recommended the vanilla Minor Faction Potential campaign setting be ON (checked) when using this mod.

Summary
This mod can slightly alter starting armies and lets you group AI factions to adjust their strength (Faction Potential) with a fine degree of control. The mod also removes the auto-resolve bonuses AI factions have against each other. More details below. Don't forget to hover over the ? next to the MCT options if you're unsure of what they do.

Features
Starting Armies
Starting armies can be modified in a few ways to make faction starts a bit different each time. These settings must be configured in MCT before you start a new campaign, and only apply to AI factions by default.
Additional Units
Starting armies have a chance to have some of their non-character units duplicated. The chance of a unit being duplicated depends on the unit Tier. Both duplication chance and rate are configurable with MCT.
Ambushes
Starting armies have a (configurable) chance to start in an Ambush stance.
Army Delays
Starting armies have a chance to have some of their movement points reduced. Both the chance and reduction amount are configurable with MCT.

Faction Potential
Faction Potential is a hidden number CA uses to determine how many bonuses an AI faction gets. This has a major impact on the effectiveness of AI factions. The higher a faction's Faction Potential, the "stronger" the faction is. Factions with a higher Faction Potential tend to beat faction's with a lower Faction Potential, but unit quality and quantity matter too!
Faction Potential Groups
This mod groups factions into Faction Potential Groups (Faction Groups), letting you configure the Faction Potential, and faction bonuses, of every faction within the group. You must start a campaign to see these settings, they cannot be seen from the Main Menu.

You get 3 predefined Faction Groups to make setup easy; All Factions, All Playable Factions, and All Non-Playable Factions. You can change the Faction Potential and faction bonuses of these groups, but you cannot change the factions assigned to them.

You also get 10 generic Faction Groups that are 100% configurable, letting you add factions, change their Faction Potential, and configure their faction bonuses. These groups and their settings are saved to your game directory, and are automatically loaded with each new campaign to make things easy. Some faction names have suffixes that help you tell them apart; (N) = Non-playable and (Q) = Quest Factions CA uses for quest/mission battles.

The Do Stuff button will reset the currently selected group to its default settings. The text on this button cannot be changed in the current version of MCT. The text it should have is to the left of it.
Faction Group Faction Potential
Grouped factions will have their Faction Potential set to the number you specify, up to 400. That number is then modified (+/-) based on Campaign Difficulty (if enabled), and then modified again (+/-) based on a random number selected from a range you define. These two modifiers let you add some variability to each campaign, to keep things fresh.
Faction Group Faction Bonuses
All the vanilla bonuses AI factions get were previously be listed for you to tweak, however they no longer seem to work as of game update 6.2 so they have since been removed.

Active Faction Potential Groups
You can set which of the 13 Faction Groups is active in your current campaign. Turn them on or off at any time. You can even set which groups are active at the Main Menu to start future campaigns with those groups active by default.

Active groups will overwrite each other in the order they are displayed in the menu. For example; if you have both the All Factions group and Group 1 active, and Group 1 only contains Lizardmen factions, the settings in the All Factions group will not apply to the Lizardmen factions in Group 1, as Group 1 will overwrite those settings.

Compatibility
This should be compatible with Mixer and other mods that add new factions or cultures. The All Playable Factions and All Non-Playable Factions groups will automatically update accordingly.

Feedback
Let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or run into any bugs. And yes, I know the MCT layout isn't ideal, but it's a limitation of the current version of MCT.

Credits
Mvp - Helped in improving the functionality of this mod post game update 6.2. Much thanks.
161 Comments
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Acephelos  [author] 23 Jul @ 2:49pm 
@Mvp - Many thanks for your feedback and assistance with this. I've updated the mod. With all the changes made today, it seems to be working again. The Faction Potential Bonuses MCT settings had to be removed for the time being, however.
Mvp 23 Jul @ 2:03pm 
@Acephelos It's on campaign_variables table, and search for any faction_potential listings there. As far as I know and through my extensive testing, the only 2 tables that contribute to FP are that and faction_potential_categories. Faction_potential_difficulty_overrides maybe for very few minor factions in IE just for the confederation.
Acephelos  [author] 23 Jul @ 1:57pm 
@Mvp - Where are you getting the 150 VH bonus from? I'm not seeing that anywhere in the game database.
Mvp 23 Jul @ 1:50pm 
@Acephelos I think the tests you ran pretty much came out similar to what I've tested. Test ran without the mod between vanilla values and 400 makes sense since vanilla VH difficulty for Festus should be already near 400 (150 VH bonus + ~200( 175 base + avg 30)) So I'm guessing the negligible XP differences are because of that.

Same for the modded test, they all usually came out around half the XP by turn 2 for me. Since there is no difference in XP between different potential values, I pretty much came to a conclusion that they were simply not working.

I've tested again with both campaign settings on but there's not much difference for me. I'll try to update post if I get to test more, thanks so much for replying.
Acephelos  [author] 23 Jul @ 8:47am 
Looking at CA's code I've noticed that, if you do not use the vanilla Minor Faction Potential setting introduced in update 6.2, this mod will not work properly, as CA will overwrite Faction Potential periodically throughout the campaign. In other words, the vanilla Minor Faction Potential setting must be ON for this mod to work properly. Aforementioned issue discussed with Mvp excluded.
Acephelos  [author] 23 Jul @ 8:15am 
@Mvp - The last test was with this mod disabled, and this next test was with it enabled:

Festus' Level on Turn 2:
- 2.95 at 255
- 2.95 at 400
- 2.95 at 0

Festus' Level on Turn 3:
- 4.25 at 255
- 4.25 at 400
- 4.25 at 0

So there's something odd going on in both vanilla and with this mod enabled, but the "odd" is different for each.
Acephelos  [author] 23 Jul @ 5:46am 
@Mvp - I think the FP script system is still working fine, but there's some other element at play. At vanilla FP on Very Hard and at 400 FP on Very Hard there was some variance between campaigns, but below is what I found on a single campaign:

- At vanilla FP Festus got to level 6.5 by turn 2, taking a settlement and presumably fighting an army beforehand. For a total of 2 battles. There's no way to tell what Festus' FP was at this point.
- At 400 FP Festus got to level 6.8 by turn 2, taking a settlement and presumably fighting an army beforehand. For a total of 2 battles.
- At 0 FP Festus lost his first battle and his army was wiped out.

Tested using the following commands in Lua console, within the same campaign:

local faction = cm:get_faction("wh3_dlc20_chs_festus")
cm:faction_set_total_potential_override_value(faction, true, 400)
Mvp 22 Jul @ 9:08pm 
I've played a lot of campaigns with FP changes and back in the day it would always work like a charm and always had big impact. I'm not sure exactly when this issue started happening but it feels like CA has done something to FP modification through script. The Unnatural Selection mod seems to be suffering from the same issue so I don't think this is related to your mod - I'm just posting so that you're aware of this issue :P
Mvp 22 Jul @ 9:00pm 
@Acephelos I've finally had a chance to play and test thoroughly and I'm afraid the mod is not functioning properly, if working at all (at least in the faction potential department).

I've ran 2 simple tests to showcase clearly here, one with directly modifying values in database tables and another by doing the same through MCT settings of this mod.

Settings I used are 1. Max potential @ 400 with -75% upkeep (everything else remains the same). 2. All Minor faction potentials set to 0. 3. All campaign difficulty FP bonuses are set to 0. 4. Only Festus gets 400, rest of the playable factions are untouched.

https://imgur.com/a/potential-tests-AtsJBpM

As you can see, from the first battle alone there is a big XP difference as well as upkeep value of Trolls. By turn 30, the faction / army strength between the two are night and day.
Acephelos  [author] 22 Jul @ 12:59pm 
@cybergroover - This mod could be considered to supersede the mods you listed, since it does/can do what they do, and more. The same is true for the vanilla Minor Faction Potential setting. However this mod does not supersede the AI Strength & Threat Assessment setting.

I usually keep both of those vanilla settings enabled for my campaigns.