Any cheat, tweak, or savegame editor way to increase minor faction strength

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I'm familiar with the normal mechanics of minor faction strength in POP - if you destroy a minor faction army/warband, it decreases its strength, while new spawns increase strength. All the advice is basically, don't fight the minor faction, and ask for lots of rumors about them, and eventually they'll come back.

What I am wondering is if there is any way, with cheats or a tweak or a savegame editor or anything, to give this process a boost. I know you can cheat to spawn armies, but I've read this has no effect on the actual faction strength (so won't increase spawn rate) and causes other problems.

I tend to play long, slow games, and by lategame, if a minor faction becomes obliterated and only spawns an army every once in a while, chances are the army will get wiped out before the faction strength recovers much, decreasing its strength again.

In one game, the Mystmountain tribes and Jatu are both at "fading", but there are 4 Mystmountain armies and 3 Jatu + Zulkar on the map. There isn't much more for them to spawn, so how are they supposed to gain strength? Meanwhile the Heretics and Snake Cult are "Obliterated" and "Destroyed" respectively, although Eyegrim with 11k soldiers, and the Dread Legion, are both on the map and have been for a long time.

My Kingdom has Ravenstern, Rane, and Poinsbrook and the surrounding castles, and I have positive relations with the Jatu and Mystmountain Tribes, which is how they've clawed their way to "fading" status, but again, how can they get any higher than that when basically all their armies are spawned? And I can't do anything for the Heretics and Snake Cult, even if I never fight them the other major factions will.
 
I'm familiar with the normal mechanics of minor faction strength in POP - if you destroy a minor faction army/warband, it decreases its strength, while new spawns increase strength. All the advice is basically, don't fight the minor faction, and ask for lots of rumors about them, and eventually they'll come back.

What I am wondering is if there is any way, with cheats or a tweak or a savegame editor or anything, to give this process a boost. I know you can cheat to spawn armies, but I've read this has no effect on the actual faction strength (so won't increase spawn rate) and causes other problems.

I tend to play long, slow games, and by lategame, if a minor faction becomes obliterated and only spawns an army every once in a while, chances are the army will get wiped out before the faction strength recovers much, decreasing its strength again.

In one game, the Mystmountain tribes and Jatu are both at "fading", but there are 4 Mystmountain armies and 3 Jatu + Zulkar on the map. There isn't much more for them to spawn, so how are they supposed to gain strength? Meanwhile the Heretics and Snake Cult are "Obliterated" and "Destroyed" respectively, although Eyegrim with 11k soldiers, and the Dread Legion, are both on the map and have been for a long time.

My Kingdom has Ravenstern, Rane, and Poinsbrook and the surrounding castles, and I have positive relations with the Jatu and Mystmountain Tribes, which is how they've clawed their way to "fading" status, but again, how can they get any higher than that when basically all their armies are spawned? And I can't do anything for the Heretics and Snake Cult, even if I never fight them the other major factions will.
Hi, RealHornblower. The only thing I can think of doing about your question is to give yourself a heapload of money and you can then give it to the leaders of the minor factions, that way they can recruit more soldiers, equip them better and maybe even take a castle.
 
Kind of updating with my investigation so far - the main problem, from what I've read where the mechanics of the spawns are explained, is that:
1. If a warband/army spawns and is defeated by the AI, faction str remains net neutral, decreasing by the same amount the spawn added
2. If a warband/army spawns and is defeated by the player, faction str declines slightly, decreasing by more than the spawn added

In the short term, there can be this great ebb and flow of faction strength, but over the long-term, as long as the player does a non-zero amount of fighting, the actual value of "faction strength" will decline, even if there are a large number of spawns on the map.

Early game, if the Mystmountain Tribes have 4 armies, they'll be considered "overwhelming". In my current playthrough, after around 1,500 days, with 4 armies and lots of warbands, they were "fading". I used the cheat menu to spawn in more armies, and with 7 armies they were at "healthy".

Eventually, you reach this point where the normal advice of "ask for rumors, don't attack them" doesn't help, because with the maximum number of armies on the map they are still quite weak, and if you ever fight them at all, they drop down to "destroyed" or "obliterated." The only way to solve this problem long-term would be to decrease the penalty for defeating an army/warband.

For example, if a warband added 5 str when spawned and you changed it so
1. An AI party defeating it subtracted 4 (instead of 5 like current)
2. The player defeating it still subtracted 6 (slightly more than the str added for spawning)
Then there would be a small gradual increase to the faction strength over time, which the player could still counteract. My issue is I cannot find out how to edit those values (I am just using these for examples, I don't know the actual strength values). If anyone know what script or trigger or whatever it is, we can try to identify it and get it added to the tweaks page, I can't be the only one still playing Pendor haha.
 
Alright this is what I got, for anyone viewing this in future:

I've figured something out for a workaround. If you go to a save game editor, and go to party templates, there is a value for parties of that type created, destroyed, and destroyed by the player. Reduce the number of parties destroyed by the player for things like Mystmountain Raiders and Army, and the faction strength shoots right back up.


Might mess with achievements if you're trying to get the "defeat 15 invaders" or whatever, IDK. But this is a lifesaver for long games for me.
 
Just curious about what the ultimate goal is behind boosting faction strength. Is it for roleplaying or simply to facilitate more frequent encounters with them?

I too enjoy the long-game in this mod. I don't actually play to win. In fact I've been playing this mod since early beta and not once had the inclination to complete a campaign.

What I've been doing for a long time now to facilitate that style of gameplay is to increase min/max potentials in the templates themselves which is incredibly easy with Morghs editor. It obviously won't affect prevalence/frequency of spawns, but it does give them the resilience to maintain healthy numbers in respect to external conflict.

Though in my experience, come the point of several years transpiring (2000-3000 days) the frequency and potency of minor faction spawns is pretty adequate. At least the Jatu in my game frequently spawn in 10 or more armies a week. Often multiple invasion force armies. The collective strength between all factions requiring constant attention and maintenance.

Nothing overly concerning until you reach a point where all major factions but one have self-destructed leaving you with a preoccupation that involves repelling the collective might of 30+ enemy lords. In that situation I find myself actually wanting respite from the relentless flow of minor factions.

I guess it all depends to what extent you have exploited the scope of progression the mod allows for. Personally I like to keep my CKO limited to the capacity of normal KO troops so as not to introduce chronic gameplay imbalances. In that context the default scaling of the realm in terms of frequency balances out pretty well.

There have been times where I've thirsted for more masochistic levels of interaction with unique spawns but ultimately wasn't willing to risk corrupting my save through editing. Apparently something the game already struggles with outside of that.

Sorry that I haven't got a more elegant solution to what you have already come up with. Just throwing my few cents in there. I totally respect a players freedom to play the game/mod however they want. Just wanted to offer my observations for whatever that's worth.
 
Just curious about what the ultimate goal is behind boosting faction strength. Is it for roleplaying or simply to facilitate more frequent encounters with them?

I too enjoy the long-game in this mod. I don't actually play to win. In fact I've been playing this mod since early beta and not once had the inclination to complete a campaign.

What I've been doing for a long time now to facilitate that style of gameplay is to increase min/max potentials in the templates themselves which is incredibly easy with Morghs editor. It obviously won't affect prevalence/frequency of spawns, but it does give them the resilience to maintain healthy numbers in respect to external conflict.

Though in my experience, come the point of several years transpiring (2000-3000 days) the frequency and potency of minor faction spawns is pretty adequate. At least the Jatu in my game frequently spawn in 10 or more armies a week. Often multiple invasion force armies. The collective strength between all factions requiring constant attention and maintenance.

Nothing overly concerning until you reach a point where all major factions but one have self-destructed leaving you with a preoccupation that involves repelling the collective might of 30+ enemy lords. In that situation I find myself actually wanting respite from the relentless flow of minor factions.

I guess it all depends to what extent you have exploited the scope of progression the mod allows for. Personally I like to keep my CKO limited to the capacity of normal KO troops so as not to introduce chronic gameplay imbalances. In that context the default scaling of the realm in terms of frequency balances out pretty well.

There have been times where I've thirsted for more masochistic levels of interaction with unique spawns but ultimately wasn't willing to risk corrupting my save through editing. Apparently something the game already struggles with outside of that.

Sorry that I haven't got a more elegant solution to what you have already come up with. Just throwing my few cents in there. I totally respect a players freedom to play the game/mod however they want. Just wanted to offer my observations for whatever that's worth.
Not a real specific goal, but I love doing quests like the "Bounty Hunt" in this game, where you destroy a lot of a specific couple factions. So if I play for a mercenary for like 1,000 days, doing bandit hunt and bounty hunt quests, I'll end up destroying a lot of armies and warbands of the minor factions.

It's certainly still possible to have lots of them on the map, like I said in the playthrough that kind of prompted this investigation from me I was around day 1,500 and there were 4 Mystmountain armies on the map still, but their faction strength was "fading."

Kind of a silly thing to be worried about cause by the time I'm establishing my own kingdom I'm usually about to start a new game anyway, but I guess it felt a bit anti-climactic to have the minor factions be practically at death's door for hundreds of days before I even became King. I'd like them to still be strong so my own kingdom is the force driving them from Pendor I guess.

I thought about editing the templates with Morghs to make each warband kind of like a mini-army, but I thought that might lead to a massive downward spiral for the kingdoms if their caravans and even lords were just getting absolutely destroyed by all these mini-armies, so I haven't tried that yet. Think what I'm doing now is going to work pretty well.
 
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