Bandit Party Editing

[SergeantEpson]

I used to use Tweak MB to edit the bandit parties in vanilla, but in Floris I can't actually change the NUMBER of spawned parties. I love the bandit 'Lords' addition but when you have this (after destroying 5 parties):
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198011744989/screenshot/470862851573090324

Normal countering AI (Lords + Manhunters) Can't deal with it. I feel as if I have to 'police' the bandits so they don't unbalance the game by destroying Lords/Caravans etc. Is there a way of manually editing the text files to reduce bandit total party numbers?

 

[Caba`drin]

Easier to shrink the size of parties: see my old response here about using Morgh's Editor to adjust the party template sizes.

I'll see if I can't track down an easy party number tweak.

 

[Caba`drin]

0. Make a backup of scripts.txt
1. Open up scripts.txt and find "spawn_bandits"
2. On the line that follows, find instances of

2147483678 2 1224979098644774912 16

or

2147483678 2 1224979098644774912 18

There should be about 20 of them.
3. Change the 16s and 18s to smaller numbers of your choosing. New bandit parties get spawned if the number of parties of their type falls below this number.
4. Save, play.





And remember there's also Duh's tweak that will lessen the number of parties that can follow a bandit hero/leader from 8 parties to 4:

Also an untested tweak decreasing the amount of bandit parties following a bandit hero:

Halfed the amount from 8 to 4 - again this isnt tested, this should work with expanded and a patched(see above) gameplay version.

http://www.2shared.com/document/u0tYez0q/simple_triggers.html

And the manual .TXT tweak version of Duh's bit above (if maybe you've done some TweakMBing that you don't want un-done):
0. Backup simple_triggers.txt
1. Open simple_triggers.txt and search for the line that begins with:

3.000000  46 4 0

2. Further down that line, find

2147483678 2 1224979098644774919 8

3. Change that 8 to a 4 (or to whatever number you want to be the maximum number of parties following the bandit heroes)
4. Save, play.

 

[SergeantEpson]

Thank you very much .

I'm slowly starting to understand Morgh's editor and stuff like it. But what exact tool is it you use to edit scripts.txt? I can find ways to reduce the maximum no of bandits in parties, but not the maximum party sizes.

Unless (as I believe) the Floris are actually AI computers and 2147483678 2 1224979098644774912 16 makes perfect sense to you .

 

[Caba`drin]

To edit scripts, just use Notepad or the like and search for that exact block of numbers, falling under the words "spawn_bandits".
There's no GUI tool to edit the script.txt file. Actually, there's no GUI .txt editor tool (other than TweakMB) for any of the files that have actual scripting going on--the ones that Morgh's Editor deals with are all simple 'definitions' and don't include much if any actual 'programming'/scripting. Essentially what I posted is doing a TweakMB edit by hand.

As for understanding the numbers...they have a 1-to-1 correspondence with the actually human-readable module system code:
(lt, ":num_parties", 16),
turns into
2147483678 2 1224979098644774912 16

where
2147483678 is the operation "lt", which is actually neg|ge  (not greater than or equal to)
2 says that there are 2 numbers that follow it that go with the operation
1224979098644774912 is a local variable, in this case ":num_parties"
16 is 16.

 

[Lorca]

Lucky I found this thread. I"ve just noticed how big and powerful the bandits can get in Floris. Yesterday, there were about 6 groups one had 1167, 110, 105, 93, 55, 64. Insane. I will try the tweaks recommended here. Thanks.

 

[Kinsume]

Personally I love the Bandit lords and how powerful they could become. Frankly I think it'd be great if the lords could even plunder villages or capture a town/castle and make it into a type of bandit faction that was enemies with everyone (to prevent them from actually rooting into the world too heavily). For lack of a better example, I know Native Expansion has their Dark Knights invasion thing that happens mid-late game in a playthough where AI Lords spawn on the map and proceed to wreck havoc with looting and capturing towns/villages. So the technically making it so that a bandit  lord can pull that off as well seems pretty do-able.

 

[Lorca]

Personally I love the Bandit lords and how powerful they could become. Frankly I think it'd be great if the lords could even plunder villages or capture a town/castle and make it into a type of bandit faction that was enemies with everyone (to prevent them from actually rooting into the world too heavily). For lack of a better example, I know Native Expansion has their Dark Knights invasion thing that happens mid-late game in a playthough where AI Lords spawn on the map and proceed to wreck havoc with looting and capturing towns/villages. So the technically making it so that a bandit  lord can pull that off as well seems pretty do-able.

Yes, it will be nice to see a bandit go from rags to riches. You will think with those crazy numbers they should have created a kingdom by now.

 

[dragonchris]

It is an interesting idea and I think it would add something a little more random than the general faction wars. Would be nice to see such a feature added.

 

[Windyplains]

So the technically making it so that a bandit  lord can pull that off as well seems pretty do-able.

It is not as simple as you might think.  The basic difference here is designating them to be a major faction (like any of the playable factions) vs. a minor one.  Yes, it could be done, but that means you'd now have a 7th faction in play that the scripting in the game wasn't really designed for (regarding bandits specifically).  This would also make it so that all bandits were seemingly of the same exact faction which would be silly.  So to fix that you'd need to create numerous bandit factions to be spread around the map.

All of that said it could be done such that an inactive faction (not the general bandits) activated and was populated with a specific bandit lord's army.  This army would behave like a faction then, but this means also that AI lords would probably decide to jump to their cause or not if they are unhappy with their current liege.  So there are potential consequences here folks may not want and are definitely breaking-from-native in design.

 

[Kinsume]

So the technically making it so that a bandit  lord can pull that off as well seems pretty do-able.

It is not as simple as you might think.  The basic difference here is designating them to be a major faction (like any of the playable factions) vs. a minor one.  Yes, it could be done, but that means you'd now have a 7th faction in play that the scripting in the game wasn't really designed for (regarding bandits specifically).  This would also make it so that all bandits were seemingly of the same exact faction which would be silly.  So to fix that you'd need to create numerous bandit factions to be spread around the map.

All of that said it could be done such that an inactive faction (not the general bandits) activated and was populated with a specific bandit lord's army.  This army would behave like a faction then, but this means also that AI lords would probably decide to jump to their cause or not if they are unhappy with their current liege.  So there are potential consequences here folks may not want and are definitely breaking-from-native in design.

Since bandits are linked in this mod, meaning if you attack one all near them help defend, its like they are one faction already in terms of gameplay. As for setting up multiple factions, it could be done that way sure, if you're interested in looking at a mod that has set up quite a few other factions and got it working properly check out 1257 AD. I used to play it quite some time ago, they were doing a realism mod for around the year 1257 over in europe. As such they broke it up into hundreds, possibly thousands, of towns/villages on one huge map and I can't remember how many factions but there were alot.

 

[Lorca]

Boy, I tell you, I will certainly tweak the bandits now. I just ran into a 3500+2111 party. The bandits are a whole nation in transit.

 

[Kinsume]

How many troops does your army have? Frankly I'd love to see that bandit party. I'd gather every lord and companion lord under me and go after it. Why? because +2k prisoners means that once we kill them we basically replenish on troops instantly xD

 

[oh_no]

I don't think there's any limit to the bandits party size and no limit to their prisoners.  I've yet to see a single bandit party get that big though, I tend to keep mine in check.  It turns out that 195 Tier 5-7 units can make short work of most bandit armies, at least after tweaking the bandits a bit.

 

[Kinsume]

I don't think there's any limit to the bandits party size and no limit to their prisoners.  I've yet to see a single bandit party get that big though, I tend to keep mine in check.  It turns out that 195 Tier 5-7 units can make short work of most bandit armies, at least after tweaking the bandits a bit.

Personally I don't use the Extended troops, I'm more of a Reworked troops person and I agree I never see them get that high. Being primarily a nord player I tend to engage sea raiders, tundra bandits and mountain bandits quite regularly for the experience and loot to sell. Later on when someone starts their own kingdom I guess I could see why killing banits would be put on the back burner, as they probably can't spare the troops. However that is just poor micro managing, all the more reason I believe bandits should be able to loot villages and take castles/towns to force both the Player and AI to deal with them.

 

[oh_no]

I really would like to see bandits leaders at least raiding some villages; it would only make sense considering that they can "inhabit" them.  Still, I do feel like bandits are a little too powerful, they shouldn't be able to easily out match a king almost all of the time.

 

[Kinsume]

Well yeah they definately need to take a small nerf, maybe 75% of the troops they currently have or so, and only 4-5 parties capable of following them.

 

[oh_no]

As far as battle goes, I found a good balance in softening up the bandits armour and giving them a small number of higher tier units.  This doesn't solve the map problem though, they still run amok.

 

[Lorca]

How many troops does your army have? Frankly I'd love to see that bandit party. I'd gather every lord and companion lord under me and go after it. Why? because +2k prisoners means that once we kill them we basically replenish on troops instantly xD

I had about 255 vs the bandit 3500+2111. Also, there were more parties of bandits nearby, though, not as big. I'm playing as a freelancer and my Lord's AI didn't have a chance.

 

[Lorca]

I'm looking at Morgh's editor and in the "Member" section I see a number(for example, 683) and the type of bandits. Is the number the size of the party? What I'm trying to do is not really decrease the number of parties following the hero bandit but to decrease the size of units in a party. Lately, I've been getting a bandit party of 2200 and 3500. Need to lower it.