How to add Dismounted Gothic Knights, Armoured Sergeants and Dismounted Broken Lances?

[Drinjanin]

The title says it all. I need babysitting, starting from extracting files, and writing down the command lines into the game's description files in order to get Dismounted Gothic Knights for The Holy Roman Empire, Armoured Sergeants for England and Dismounted Broken Lances for Venice in grand campaign.

Does this change affect campaign already in progress? I'm already at 197th turn with Venice. Would changing those text files affect my campaign, or would I have to start it all over again in order to recruit DBL?

Are there any more units which I haven't mentioned that were not included in the base Grand Campaign due to this silly "balancing" choice?

DISCLAIMER: Google search results find topics 10 years old, where people posted links which no longer work, some explanations are lazy written and of no use at all, some websites have changed their domains, etc.

[Socrates1984]

The place to look for answers would be Total War Center, which is unfortunately offline for now. There is a complete tutorial there on how to tranfer units from one faction too another. So, be sure to check every now and then if the site is back online, because that would make this discussion purposeless.

Anyway making the required changes to get these units as HRE, England and Venice respectively is not save-game compatible, so you will have to restart the campaign. IIRC that is.

Now, the simplest method is to just have the units is to:
Edit export_descr_units (EDU) with Notepad++ (not the default text editor), find these three units, locate in each one's entry the line "ownership" and add the respective faction to it (for all eras). This file is located in the data folder.

This way you can have the units in custom battles only. If you want to be able to train them, which you obviously want, you have to:
Edit export_descr_buildings (EDB) as above, find the building which produces those three units and add there the respective faction. An example:
recruit_pool "Dismounted Gothic Knights" 1 0.5 1 1 requires factions { england, france, etc..., england, } . Be sure to include all commas and spaces.
This file is located in the data folder too.

Be warned that in both cases you have to be extremely cautious with the syntax, since it could cause crashes otherwise. Also, and this is even more important, before editing any files be sure to make a backup copy in case you mess something up.

Now, bear in mind that your new units will not have the new faction's textures, i.e. your faction's colors. To change that you need to the edit battle_models.modeldb in the unit_models folder. But this is a tutorial on its own, so we will that for later.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to ask. Have you unpacked the game? Otherwise you will never find the aforementioned files.
And something else: These three units already exist, right? It's just that they are for other factions only, right?

[Gamer Supreme]

Dismounted Gothic Knights should belong to the HRE by default, have you gotten the highest barracks/Castle as the HRE?

[Drinjanin]

Originally posted by Socrates1984:

Anyway making the required changes to get these units as HRE, England and Venice respectively is not save-game compatible, so you will have to restart the campaign. IIRC that is.

I fear this is the case, because even if you change unit scale, saved Grand Campaign game remains intact.

Originally posted by Socrates1984:

Also, and this is even more important, before editing any files be sure to make a backup copy in case you mess something up.

Damn sure I will. XD

Originally posted by Socrates1984:

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to ask. Have you unpacked the game? Otherwise you will never find the aforementioned files.
And something else: These three units already exist, right? It's just that they are for other factions only, right?

Dude, have you ever played custom battle? :-) Those units are there, it's just Creative Assembly's weird balance choice to omit those three units for the mentioned factions.
No, I haven't unpacked anything.

[Glitshy]

Originally posted by Lowly Noob:

Dismounted Gothic Knights should belong to the HRE by default, have you gotten the highest barracks/Castle as the HRE?

Nope, there are only mounted gothic knights in the campaign.

Originally posted by Socrates1984:

Anyway making the required changes to get these units as HRE, England and Venice respectively is not save-game compatible, so you will have to restart the campaign. IIRC that is.

I indeed added the dismounted gothic knights for myself aswell, no need to restart.

[Drinjanin]

Originally posted by Lowly Noob:

Dismounted Gothic Knights should belong to the HRE by default, have you gotten the highest barracks/Castle as the HRE?

I have started The Holy Roman Empire campaign once again, after so many years (it was my first faction like 10 years ago when I've played this game), and it always bugged me that they have excluded such unit from the campaign game. I'm going to start again if I manage to do things right after editing game's files.

They belong to The Holy Roman Empire, but only in custom battles and multiplayer. There are no Dismounted Gothic Knights in the grand campaign, only Gothic Knights horsemen.

[Socrates1984]

Originally posted by mirko7ma:

Originally posted by Socrates1984:

Dude, have you ever played custom battle? :-) Those units are there, it's just Creative Assembly's weird balance choice to omit those three units for the mentioned factions.
No, I haven't unpacked anything.

In fact, I haven't played the vanilla game for ages now, that's the reason I asked the question. CA has some weird balancing methods, it seems...

Originally posted by Glitshy:

Originally posted by Lowly Noob:

I indeed added the dismounted gothic knights for myself aswell, no need to restart.

Ok, my bad. I thought a restart is required. It seems didn't remember correctly after all...

[Drinjanin]

So, once more: :-) How to unpack those files, so I can commence?

[Glitshy]

Originally posted by mirko7ma:

So, once more: :-) How to unpack those files, so I can commence?

Go to your medieval II total war folder (in steam/steamapps/common), open the "tools" folder, "unpacker", execute "unpack_all.bat". If it says you are missing some .dll , try copying the .dll from the medieval II folder to the unpacker folder. All files (importantly the .txt file for the building) should now be in the "data" folder.
Also, IIRC, you have to edit the medieval2.preference.cfg (with something like notepad). Just add following to the very top. I think it's required so the game uses the extracted ones.


[io]
file_first = true

[Gamer Supreme]

Huh, my mistake.

Doesn't really matter since Dismounted Gothic Knights are bugged :\

[Drinjanin]

Originally posted by Lowly Noob:

Huh, my mistake.

Doesn't really matter since Dismounted Gothic Knights are bugged :\

It's not a bug, but another weird Creative Assembly "balancing" choice. If you play any expansion, you'll notice that units with claymores debutcher Dismounted Feudal Knights, just like Zweihanders and Dismounted Gothic Knights used to in standard edition version 1.00.

Ok, guys, I'll try this out tomorrow, then I'll come back here to report how things went.

[Drinjanin]

Originally posted by Glitshy:

Originally posted by mirko7ma:

So, once more: :-) How to unpack those files, so I can commence?

Go to your medieval II total war folder (in steam/steamapps/common), open the "tools" folder, "unpacker", execute "unpack_all.bat". If it says you are missing some .dll , try copying the .dll from the medieval II folder to the unpacker folder. All files (importantly the .txt file for the building) should now be in the "data" folder.
Also, IIRC, you have to edit the medieval2.preference.cfg (with something like notepad). Just add following to the very top. I think it's required so the game uses the extracted ones.


[io]
file_first = true

After I extract that file do I need to delete the packed file? Do I extract it in the same folder where the pack is held, or do I need to make a folder and extract files in there?

[Gigantus]

The standard unpacking goes into the correct folders - it does however take out a chunk of your hard drive. Never mind that you have to delete the geography files.

Unpacking files: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=550619

The above way unpacks outside the game folder and the folder (C:\Unpack) can be deleted in total once you have transferred the files you wish to modify.

[Drinjanin]

Originally posted by Gigantus:

The standard unpacking goes into the correct folders - it does however take out a chunk of your hard drive. Never mind that you have to delete the geography files.

Unpacking files: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=550619

The above way unpacks outside the game folder and the folder (C:\Unpack) can be deleted in total once you have transferred the files you wish to modify.

Thanks. This line made me give up. "To run the unpacker requires a minimum of patch 1.02 to be installed. For the purpose of this tutorial I will assume that you have at least this version."
I use 1.0, and I can't stand later versions of the game. I guess I'll never feel the joy of having those units in the campaign mode.

[Gigantus]

The tutorial is disk based and 1.02 was the first version that included the unpacker executable. Simply check if you have a M2TW\tool\unpacker directory in your installation

[Drinjanin]

These are all files that I have: https://s24.postimg.org/iknkpnpr9/1212.jpg
I don't have "tool" sub-folder anywhere, nor un-packer, however, I do have data packs inside "packs" folder.