Extra Playable Factions

A guide to editing the game files and making extra factions playable.

Introduction

It will probably not have escaped your notice that there are certain factions within the game which are not playable i.e. do not appear on the list of available factions at the start of a campaign. However, there is an easy way to enable some of these factions, which should in turn spice up gameplay.

Because of how MTW is designed, playable and non-playable factions are built in exactly the same way and essentially are only allowed/forbidden according to one line of text. Nonetheless, the Rebels and Papacy cannot be modded in this simple fashion (because they have additional special rules).

As a disclaimer, I do urge you to make backups of any files that you edit. That being said, these are very simple edits that won't (shouldn't) screw up your game.

Please add comments about how the process has gone for you, whether extra clarity is needed and whether you get any crashes. Please also rate the guide too.

Getting Started

There are two ways that we can approach this. We can either edit the existing files for the Early, High and Late Periods, or we create some additional periods e.g. High2 that contain our edited work, but preserve the vanilla campaigns.

Let me clarify. I accomplish two things in this guide. Firstly, I show you how to make unplayable factions that exist within the vanilla campaign playable e.g. you can play as the People of Novgorod in the Early Period. This changes nothing about the game.

However, you might wish to add a completely new faction to the game. We have to give them a starting province (usually one which belonged to someone else) and this changes the strategic situation. If I suddenly added a Scotland faction in Scotland, then situation for the English changes dramatically! This creates an entirely different campaign, which we might call High2.

You could be playing on the other side of the world, but the existence of a new faction will change things in central Europe. Maybe that's for the better, maybe not. The point I am trying to make is that this campaign is not the vanilla High Period campaign viewed from a previously unknown angle, but a slightly different campaign with a new faction. And it may not necessarily be balanced!

So, if you want to preserve the vanilla campaigns, we can essentially add new campaigns to the menu so that you have the choice. If you don't care and just want to mess with mods, then feel free to ignore this part.

Creating A New Campaign

Go to your MTW game directory and go to the 'campmap' folder and 'startpos' subfolder e.g. D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Total War Medieval 1 Gold\campmap\startpos

Make a copy of the file 'HIGH.txt' in this folder and name it HIGH2.txt. Now go into HIGH2.txt. The first lines should be these:


Change it to:


Obviously, the new name (High2) is your choice; I am just making an example here. Save this file and boot MTW. When you try to start a new campaign, you should have a new option for selecting your time period:


You'll notice that I have a campaign called 'High2' (and one called 'Test' that I also made). If you're wondering where the other vanilla campaigns are, you can scroll down to them. The more observant among you may have noticed that my edited 'High2' campaign contains an extra faction in Burgundy - more on that later!

To recap, all we have done is added a new campaign entry. We can use this as a sort of blank slate for modding without affecting the original campaigns. You may be itching to completely revamp the entire campaign, but for now, we'll content ourselves with adding some new factions.

Using Existing Factions

If you scroll through the text files in the 'startpos' folder for each period, you'll see that the information is not that complicated. These files essentially declare a great deal of information. All the machinery happens elsewhere, but these files are the settings for the campaign.

Now, if you declare an entirely new faction, nothing will happen. There's a lot more that you have to do. You have to set their religion, their faction colours and shield, their office titles etc..All of this adds up to a lot of legwork and missing even a little bit can cause your mod attempt to fail.

Now, we will visit this possibility in the final section wtih a very detailed guide. But to start with, we are going to skip a lot of the legwork. To do this, we are going to use existing factions in the game (which have already been assigned colours and titles and so forth) to explain the basics of campaign editing.

In particular, we are going to make use of the People of Novgorod (PoN), Burgundians, Swiss and Golden Horde. The PoN exist as a faction in the Early Period, but cannot be played. The Burgundians and Swiss are factions that do not exist at the start of any period, but may emerge during the course of the game, in exactly the same fashion as factions re-emerge:



The Golden Horde work a little differently and are scripted to arrive in 1231.

Now, the PoN exist quite happily in the Early Period. There is literally one line of code in the text file that tells the game whether the faction is open to the player or not. All the other information like which provinces they own and their starting troops in already taken care of. So all we have to do is tell the game that they are in fact playable and we can play them. We'll cover this in the Early section.

Now, the Burgundians, Swiss and Golden Horde function a little differently. We'll use the High Period as an example.

They can all (potentialy) exist in the High Period, even if they are not there from the start. So, the text file for the High Period contains information about them (so that the game knows what to do). Thus, almost all of our work is done.

In effect, these factions wait off of the board and only appear when they are called/scripted. They have no starting province or leader. However, we can change the ownership of provinces and place new factions leaders in this text file. Since all of the other legwork is done, the game accepts the change.

However, if we tried to declare a new faction like The Portuguese, then the mod wouldn't work. The game does not know what to do with the faction because a lot of other information is missing. In order to start a completely new faction, we have to go to more troulbe - see the final section of this guide.

With all this in mind, I'll take you through some examples in the different periods. You'll quickly see how it all fits together.

The Early Period

If you start a campaign in the Early Period, you are presented with the faction selection screen:


This list contains almost all of the available factions, but there is one conspicuously missing - The People of Novgorod. Now, you could play a High Period campaign as the Russians, but it's not really the same. So, can we make the PoN playable?

Go to your game files: D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Total War Medieval 1 Gold

Enter the folder 'campmap' and the subfolder 'startpos'. You should be at D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Total War Medieval 1 Gold\campmap\startpos

You'll be greeted with a series of .txt files:


These correspond to the periods of the game and campaign tutorial. If you made an additional campaign like 'EARLY2' as I explained in the above section, then it will be here. I recommend at this point that you make a copy of any of these files that you intend to edit as backups in case your game crashes. Store them elsewhere.

Now, since we plan to edit the Early Period, open up EARLY.txt (or EARLY2 if you made it). You'll be greeted with a very dense text file containing a lot of information. However, I feel that it's pretty self-explanatory, and if you have any inclination to mod the game then it does a helpful job of explaining what needs to go where.

You'll want to hit Ctrl + F and type 'active'. This will take you about halfway down to a section that looks like this:


Any faction listed as FT_MAJOR is playable. Any faction listed as FT_MINOR exists, but is not playable. We see that 'FN_NOVGOROD' is listed as unplayable. However, if we make a simple change to FT_MAJOR, then the faction becomes playable:


Save this edited version and then reboot the game. Now try starting another campaign in the Early Period:


Voila! We have an extra playable faction!

Now, you cannot play Glorious Achievements, because if you try to click the chalice icon while playing as the PoN, the game crashes:


Also, if you play Glorious Achievements with any other faction, do not click on the Novgorod shield on the scoreboard because this will also crash the game.


Both of these things are basically the same error and probably fixable with a little more editing. For the time being, it's easier to just avoid them.

In case you're wondering, the game crashes if you try to play the Papacy. The Rebels are also not listed in this section, and are handled differently too. Also, you'll notice that the faction list is separated into groups. This is an artefact of the Viking Invasion expansion pack (that is bundled automatically with MTW Gold). In the base game, only the top 11 factions were playable; Viking Invasion added the Aragonese, Hungarians and Sicilians. Hence, these are separated into different groups, but it's completely meaningless.

The High Period

Editing the High and Late Periods works in exactly the same way. In the case of the High Period, there is a little more to do:


In this case, you'll see multiple factions listed in the unplayable section that are also listed elsewhere. However, these lines begin with '//' which actually comments these lines out. Thus these lines are ignored by the game.

Three of these factions were added by Viking Invasion as we discussed above, so they do not need to be worried about. LIkewise, the Papacy cannot be played without crashing the game. The PoN were renamed to the Russians, who qualify as a completely separate playable faction, so their entry here is an artefact.

The situation is actually complicated with the Swiss, Burgundians and Golden Horde since they may emerge over the course of the High Period (in fact the GH are scripted at a specific date). However, they are not present at the beginning of the period, making them effectively unplayable.

If you do try to play as them, you'll be greeted with a campaign map on which you can do nothing, You can cycle through turns for a while. but the game will crash by about 1222.

If you're desperate to play as the Swiss, Burgundians or GH, then we can add them in manually. This will alter the campaign map, but not by much. Essentially, in both cases, we give a province to these factions from the start of the High Period.

As a caveat, the GH will then no longer emerge in 1231, since they will be present from the start. This obviously prevents them from getting large numbers of reinforcements and may reduce their threat somewhat.

We'll do an example with adding the Burgundians. First, set them to a major faction as we have done before and make sure to remove the '//' comment lines.


What about the Swiss? They are not even mentioned on this list. However, they are declared as a faction. You can add a similar entry with FN_SWISS. Otherwise, proceed in a similar fashion.

Now scoll down to the 'Region Owners' section. A short way down, there is an entry for the province of Burgundy that declares the land for the HRE. Change the owner from 'FN_GERMAN_HRE' to 'FN_BURGUNDIAN'

This gives the province of Burgundy to the Burgundians. All of the buildings/units/agents in Burgundy default to the province's owner automatically.


Now scroll down to the 'Place Faction Leaders' section. In the first part, it declares the starting leader (his name, stats etc.). You'll see that a leader is already declared for the Burgundians, so we don't need to do anything. In the next bit, it tells us where these leaders start. Helpfully, there is an entry for Burgundy already made, it just needs you to remove the '//' comments.


If you wish, you can also choose to add an heir. You need to declare the faction, the gender (0 for a girl, 1 for a boy) and their age.

You can also adjust the starting buildings/units/agents in Burgundy to balance the campaign as you see fit. Note that you add these items to the province and the province owner gets them by default.

If you have done all of this correctly, you should see a difference in the High Period campaign screen:


For the Swiss, you will also need to manually add an entry for their starting treasury and an entry for where to place their leader.

As always, you can't play Glorious Achievements. Otherwise, they function as a normal faction. Because they are already known to the game, lots of the legwork on tech trees and file entries is already done, so you can add them quickly like this.

For the GH, the process is analogous. You'll want to spawn them in Khazar. Note that their leader is initially placed in a province called ID_GOLDEN_KHANATE, which is not the same as Khazar and has something to do with the scripting for their spawn. You need to change this to ID_KHAZAR.

The Late Period

By now, I imagine that you're beginning to understand how to edit these files. For the Late Period, we can do similar stuff.

Go to the usual place for active factions, and we have several options. You can quickly add in the Golden Horde and the Swiss by changing them from minor to major factions. No further work is required.

Both the Burgundians and Sicilians (who have disappeared by this point) can be added, though you will need to make a couple more entries. You'll need to manually add them to the active factions menu. You'll also need to set their starting treasury. Then give them a province to start in.

Finally, add a leader for the Sicilians (you'll need to remove the '//') and place them appropriately.

Troubleshooting

My game crashes on startup

This is not an issue with editing these files. If you've messed with something else, then it might cause the crash. The files we've edited are literally just prompts for the game about where factions are and how many troops they start with etc..

Verify the integrity of your game files via Steam.

I can't see the period listed when I try to start a new campaign

Something has gone wrong in this case. This tends to happen if you make edits that the game can't understand. In this case, you can go back and try to look for the error or load your backups and try again.

My game crashes during the campaign

MTW has been having a lot of crashes with the Steam version. However, if you're sure that it's game edits, then firstly let me know what you did in the comments so that I know certain edits are unstable and try to find a workaround. Then, you'll probably want to load your backups.

I didn't make backups

Delete any files that you edited and use Steam's 'Verify integrity of game cache' feature.

The faction I wanted doesn't appear

The easiest way to get them to appear is to literally edit the active factions section. Even if you do nothing else, they should appear on the list. Check that the lines which you edited are not commented out (have '//' next to them).

Adding Completely New Factions

Up to now, we have dealt with factions that the game recognises, even if they aren't in time periods that it expects. It is possible to add entirely new factions, but more involved.

However, there is a guide that I found on totalwar.org that explains it beautifully. I have tested it and it works with the Steam version.

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?30621-Adding-New-Faction-in-VI-guide

All credit goes to the guide and guide owner. Be advised that the process is much more involved than we have described here, but the guide is excellent.

The guide mentions a handy program which can be found on this page: http://foruhttp://forums.totalwar.org/vb/local_links.php?catid=168ms.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?30621-Adding-New-Faction-in-VI-guide

This is simply a tool to collimate text files which you will find very useful. It's about halfway down and entitled Gnome_UnitBuildProj_Editorv2.0.zip. Just click the little download symbol next to the name.

When you get it, unzip it and place the folder somewhere useful. Run the .exe inside and when a white screen pops up, click 'Load File' in the bottom right to open the file you want.

I'll leave the guide to clarify the entire process. You can also find plenty of mods online for extra factions or new campaigns, though making them yourself is much more rewarding. At this point, you can make new factions and adjust the ownership of provinces to make any sort of campaign you choose.

[dickey1331]

Thank you

[ocker101]

i want to play it but it will not start up

[SlimCharles]

good work! i'm very interested, but to be honest am pretty weary about trying. the reason for that is because i did the same for MTW2, and once tried to play as the Papal States which i saw others do, but then the game crashed. so i went back to the file, and changed the contents back to how they originally were. following that the game would return to main menu everytime i tried to start or load a campaign (so basically i haven't been able to ever play again since). this is excluding the expansions by the way, which still work. but im not super computer saavy, so wasn't aware that i should make files copies (also not one author of the multiple guides i read ever mentioned to, so thank you for actually mentioning it.)

[Perdiccas]

Well, that's not what this guide is about. However, the standard fix is to change campaign map resolution to 1024x768 (and possibly run the game in compatibility for Windows 8)

[nobodylikesme11]

I love this game, i have not edited it at all. Ive tried to do the viking invasion twice, half way through, the game reaches a point when it crashes every time i try to play. I then tried playing the russians in the middle period and again. the round where the golden horde emerges, game crashes every single time i try to play... so basically if there is not a fix this game is useless to me.. windows 10 user