How to keep custom race portraits unique

[Mindgamer]

I have created a bunch of custom races with a mod and would like to play with them. Unfortunately the galaxy keeps getting a bunch of random races that get the same portraits as the races from my mod. Are there any flags I can set or other tricks I can employ to make my races unique looking in the game?

Thanks you

 

[Kult der Krähe]

Within your custom species_classes file, did you use these following lines?

randomized = no

or

non_randomized_portraits = { your custom portraits }

 

[Mindgamer]

Thanks for the suggestions

In my custom species file, I tried using randomized=no, but that caused the custom races with the related portraits not to spawn for the AI at all, even though the races had spawn_enabled=always. So I had to set the portraits to randomized=yes. All the portraits are also listed under "non_randomized_portraits". I think this is working and I have not seen randomly generated empires with my custom species portraits

However the problem of duplicate portraits remains for the vanilla species I have used to make my own races. I cannot set them to randomized=no as that flag is CLASS wide and I only need to exempt some portraits. I also tried creating an extra file in my mod where I only overwrite the CLASS/non_randomized_portraits sections of the vanilla classes but that seems to work differently from what I expect also. The entire classes are overwritten, not just the non_randomized_portraits section and as a result all the portraits from all the CLASSES are lost.

I guess my one option is to make a complete copy of the vanilla 01_base_species_classes.txt file and overwrite the non_randomized_portraits section there, but it seems such a brute solution and maintenance hassle. Is there no way to be more precise with what I overwrite?

 

[Mindgamer]

I actually tried the full copy of the vanilla file and it seems to work for the most part. One of the portraits got reused for a primitive race 3 games in a row. The same portrait. None of the others. I double checked and it is listed as non_randomized_portrait. Weird.

 

[ViolentBeetle]

Is this the only portrait in its class?

If so, it picks class first and probably finds out it has no choice. Try making class non-randomized, not sure how.

 

[Mindgamer]

It is one of the default Molluscoid races - mol7. Most of the other portraits are still available for randomized picks so it should not be picked due to lack of options. I thought for a while that maybe the portrait is attached to some trigger mechanism, but I am not sure how to check that.. A plain search across files for "mol7" did not yield anything useful.