Modding brigade attachments and changing upgrade paths

[unmerged(182689)]

I'm making a mod for my own use. I'd like to be able to add escort fighters to CAS and prevent light armored divisions from upgrading to regular armored divisions.

I added the "allowed_brigades = escort" line to the CAS unit file. I can see escort fighters as an available attachment in the production screen, but I can't select them in the production screen presumably because I haven't changed any values anywhere to set a value for the number of brigade attachments for the CAS unit. Where is that value?

As for tanks, I've modded the light tanks to be functionally different from medium tanks. I was thinking of maybe changing their upgrade time modifier to something longer than the duration of a game and setting their cost to nothing so it wouldn't happen and wouldn't matter, but I figured I'd check here for help first. I wasn't able to find anything on this on the HoI2 wiki.

I have HoI2 and the DD expansion from Steam, in case that matters for anything. I'm playing DD and modding those files, rather than the vanilla HoI2 files.

 

[unmerged(182689)]

I kinda figured that with this game closing in on five years old somebody would know how to do this. Or at least tell me it's stashed away in the exe someplace and it's hard to mess with.

Did the grognards of the HoI2 modding community move on to HoI3?

 

[|AXiN|]

You won't be able to biuld CAS with your escorts attached, but if you build the CAS and escorts seperately you'll be able to attach them. If you add brigade availability to a unit which in the unmodified game has none, you will not be able to attach brigades in the production screen - it's an interface issue.

My advice if you want to make light tanks seperate from mediums is to change the light tanks so that instead of using model 0-2, they use models 3-6 or similar - this way they will not be subject to the automatic light->medium upgrade, which only occurs at model 2.

 

[unmerged(182689)]

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed. So, the CAS thing is taken care of, and the upgrades are triggered based on model number. Does it affect anything else if I change the model number in the unit file? Do I need to change the tech files to match the different model numbers?

 

[|AXiN|]

Assuming that you're playing an otherwise unmodified game, you'll need to change the Armour techs, to reference the correct model numbers, the unit icons, to cover the models used now, and the existing inc files to change any existing L ARM to the correct new model number - given the relative scarcity of armour, you're probably only going to have to look at USA, GER, ENG, FRA, ITA, SOV, and possibly JAP, HUN and a couple of others - it's probably easiest to concentrate on a single scenario at a time and go through each file sequentially.

 

[unmerged(182689)]

Excellent. Thanks.