Custom Heroes?

[DizzyCrash]

So I made a bunch of custom leaders to emulate my d&D setting. And I'd like all the heroes to be various characters in our setting. Is this possible to achieve? I don't know much about this game yet. But I'd love it if all the heroes in a game.are various characters and bosses from our decades of games.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Unfortunately there's no way of doing this directly that I know of.

You can select the custom leaders for AI players when starting a custom map, but they'll still be leaders and not heroes. There's a mod that will randomly select from your custom leaders only, but again only for leaders and not heroes.

To get what you want I think you'd need to make a hero modpack. I do not know how to do that, I've never tried modding. But it should be relatively easy as modding goes. There's tons of hero modpacks on the vault.

try googling to see if stuff like this will help you: (This has links but I can't tell you if they're any good.) https://www.reddit.com/r/AOW3/comments/3letws/mod_tutorials/

[justus_cap]

Someone did a Middle Earth Scenario and did an amazing job making many of the characters from Lord of the Rings. It's fun, check it out. Maybe that would answer some questions as to the flexibility for your needs?

Editing to add exact name from the workshop. Middle Earth 4. Many players contributed to it hence the multiple iterations. Lots of love from the community to create this one.

[tvance52]

Yes. As Iguana mentioned, that's something you can do using the editor tools included with the game.

It's been years since I've done it, I can't really remember all the details creating one.

I would probably list it as "lower middle difficulty". You don't need to know anything about programming or coding to do it. But some aspects are not that intuitive and you'll want to follow a guide. And it can be tedious.

What you really want to do is use a template and then modify that based on a guide.

And you're in luck!!! --- Triumph has a modding guide that includes how to create heroes. And they also have a template that looks like it's still available for download.

See here: https://aow.triumph.net/forums/topic/getting-started-with-modding/

What you want:

• Modding Guide - available in the link.
  
  Custom hero section begins on the bottom of page 81.
  
  
• Localization file - available in link.
  
  Name for the hero. This is an XML file, use MicroSoft Excel or Open Office Spreadsheets (Open Office is free if you don't have MS Excel).
  
  NOTE: as the guide mentions, running Excel and the game or editor will freeze the game or editor.
  
  
• Hero Template - available in link
  
  A pre-built custom hero that you can use for a template and adjust to create yours. Saves a bit of time and you can see how one is built, in this case male goblin and female goblin heroes.
  
  If you're really interested, there's templates for custom units as well.

The hero is added to the hero pool. They will spawn just like all other heroes: at random. Enemies can hire your hero.

If you only want them on your side you an solve this by:

1) Hero is same race as your faction. For example, if your hero is Tigran make sure you're the only Tigran faction on the map.

2) Set heroes to match race. You need Tigran heroes to spawn for you faction first. This settings makes sure every single Tigran hero has to spawn for you before any other racial hero can spawn.

3) Use the console command to spawn your hero. I believe "ruyter" spawns heroes, I think? You can look it up.

You can either: a) save/reload to get the hero order you want, or b) just burn through heroes. You can only hire one hero per turn unless you save the game after hiring a hero then reload and repeat, in which case you can spawn/hire heroes up to the map limit.

If you're really, really ambitious, you can create a map with the custom hero as a starting hero for your faction. Or you can set them for another faction.

It's one of the easiest edits you can make to a map, which is either very simple or very complex. Very simple if you take an existing Workshop map and just add the hero by opening the map in the Editor. Done in less than a minute when once you know where to look. If creating your own map then you are getting into hours of work since the Editor cannot use a random map generator to create a template.

[tvance52]

If you have some questions post them. As I said it's been years since I've created custom heroes, maybe 2015/2016.

But I do know some of the basics of the Level Editor, Package Manager, and such. I may be able to answer some simple questions or point you in the right direction on something.

I probably can't give detailed or complicated answers without relearning a lot of stuff.

[DizzyCrash]

Originally posted by tvance52:

Yes. As Iguana mentioned, that's something you can do using the editor tools included with the game.

It's been years since I've done it, I can't really remember all the details creating one.

I would probably list it as "lower middle difficulty". You don't need to know anything about programming or coding to do it. But some aspects are not that intuitive and you'll want to follow a guide. And it can be tedious.

What you really want to do is use a template and then modify that based on a guide.

And you're in luck!!! --- Triumph has a modding guide that includes how to create heroes. And they also have a template that looks like it's still available for download.

See here: https://aow.triumph.net/forums/topic/getting-started-with-modding/

What you want:

• Modding Guide - available in the link.
  
  Custom hero section begins on the bottom of page 81.
  
  
• Localization file - available in link.
  
  Name for the hero. This is an XML file, use MicroSoft Excel or Open Office Spreadsheets (Open Office is free if you don't have MS Excel).
  
  NOTE: as the guide mentions, running Excel and the game or editor will freeze the game or editor.
  
  
• Hero Template - available in link
  
  A pre-built custom hero that you can use for a template and adjust to create yours. Saves a bit of time and you can see how one is built, in this case male goblin and female goblin heroes.
  
  If you're really interested, there's templates for custom units as well.

The hero is added to the hero pool. They will spawn just like all other heroes: at random. Enemies can hire your hero.

If you only want them on your side you an solve this by:

1) Hero is same race as your faction. For example, if your hero is Tigran make sure you're the only Tigran faction on the map.

2) Set heroes to match race. You need Tigran heroes to spawn for you faction first. This settings makes sure every single Tigran hero has to spawn for you before any other racial hero can spawn.

3) Use the console command to spawn your hero. I believe "ruyter" spawns heroes, I think? You can look it up.

You can either: a) save/reload to get the hero order you want, or b) just burn through heroes. You can only hire one hero per turn unless you save the game after hiring a hero then reload and repeat, in which case you can spawn/hire heroes up to the map limit.

If you're really, really ambitious, you can create a map with the custom hero as a starting hero for your faction. Or you can set them for another faction.

It's one of the easiest edits you can make to a map, which is either very simple or very complex. Very simple if you take an existing Workshop map and just add the hero by opening the map in the Editor. Done in less than a minute when once you know where to look. If creating your own map then you are getting into hours of work since the Editor cannot use a random map generator to create a template.

I have a question.. Will my custom Heroes replace the pre-made heroes? Or is there no way to make my heroes the only ones thst get chosen?

[tvance52]

Creating a custom hero adds them to the existing pool. You're not replacing a hero, you're adding one.

To continue the above example, if there are 12 (I don't remember exact number) base Tigran heroes, creating a new custom Tigran hero would mean there are now 13 Tigran heroes in the pool of available hero spawns. Add in any heroes from other mods on top of this.

Heroes are RNG as designed in the game engine. The only way to be 100% sure you get a specific hero is to make it the only hero available. That would be deleting all others from the game, either via the editor tools or maybe the game files if they're loose/individual files (I haven't looked). That's a terrible idea, obviously.

You have two options if you want to get a specific hero:

1) Use the steps I mentioned above to use the console commands to force-spawn a hero. Save/reload until you get the hero you want.

Note: Hero spawns will always be the same within a turn, the draw/roll/seed is generated and set when you start the turn, I believe. You can only reroll that seed, or the order in which heroes spawn, by ending a turn and starting a new turn.

For example, if you save the game on turn 2 and then save/reload and spawn heroes on turn 2 again, it will always spawn them in the exact same order. You can only change this by going to turn 3. So if you don't get the hero spawn order you want in turn 3 using the console command, you load your turn 2 save and then end turn and go to turn 3 again to reroll that seed for hero spawns.

2) Mod the map. This would require playing a map you personally mod, as mentioned above, and setting the hero in question to start on the map on Turn 1 as part of the player's faction.

There's literally no other method that I know of that would work. Hero spawns are RNG and would require recoding the game engine, or some scripting maybe, to make it not be random. I do not remember seeing anything in the level editor that would allow for predetermined heroes without writing scripts, which really gets heavily into modding and/or coding.

I'm only aware of a handful of mods in the entire Workshop that even really attempt that level of work. Problem is, the game is old enough that I think a lot of the really serious, professional modders have moved on years ago. The Triumph forums are closed and locked since the sale to Paradox. The Paradox forum has 5 posts in the past 3 months, and the modding forum has 1 post this entire year.

The modding forum here is probably the best place to answer questions, if you want to go down this route.

But I'm not an expert, I hope someone more knowledgeable than I am will correct me. Just want to lay out some options for you, I don't know your level of interest and technical skills so I'm trying to be fairly broad in response.