Empires Modding

Modding Guide

Getting Started

Empires saves user files in your Documents\My Games\FieldOfGloryEmpires folder, which will be referred to as your 'user' folder. In addition to saved games, logs, and options files, this is where user created mods are located. Editing files directly in the game install folder (ex C:\Program Files (x86)\Slitherine\Field of Glory Empires) is NOT recommended, doing so may prevent multiplayer games from working correctly and interfere with game updates.

Before you begin modding, you may wish to open the USER.TXT file in your user folder and the following line to enable additional debugging tools:

DEBUGMODE 1

Create a Scenario

Empires currently only support mods by the creation of a new, modified scenario. The quickest way to create a new scenario and get started modding is to copy an existing scenario. For example, to start with the grand campaign, browse to the Scenarios folder in your game install folder (ex. C:\Program Files (x86)\Slitherine\Field of Glory Empires\Scenarios). Copy the d310BCGrandCampaign folder into the SCENARIOS folder of your user folder (ex Documents\My Games\FieldOfGloryEmpires\SCENARIOS). Rename the pasted folder to something new (it is recommended the new folder name not contain spaces). You should also make sure this new folder and its contents are not Read-Only. Inside this folder, you should see a number of files:

MYSCENARIO
│   SCENARIO.BSF
│   TEXT1.TXT
│   TEXT1_FRE.TXT
│   TEXT1_GER.TXT
│   TEXT1_SPA.TXT
│   SCENARIO.TXT
├───DATA
│   │   SETUP.csv
│   │   SETUP_FACTIONS.csv
│   │   REGIONS.csv
│   │   SETUP_GROUPS.csv
│   └───SCRIPTS
│           Events_Plugin.BSF

A good place to start would be to open TEXT1.TXT in a text editor. Here you can give your mod a unique name, description, and starting message. See Modding#Custom_Text for details on modifying string files in the Archon engine. TEXT1_FRE.TXT, TEXT1_GER.TXT, and TEXT1_SPA.TXT contain the translations of the strings in TEXT1.TXT. If you do not plan to translate your mod into other languages, you should just remove these three files and the strings entered in TEXT1.TXT will be used for all languages.

SCENARIO.BSF is another place you can make some quick edits to you scenario. Refer to Scripting for a description of the Archon scripting language. The InitScenario function near the beginning of this file sets up a number of parameters for your scenario, try changing gTurnInfos.dateFirstTurn to adjust the starting date for your mod.

If you start the game and select Scenarios, your modified scenario should now appear near the bottom of the list and be selectable for play.

Changing the Scenario Setup

Three files of particular interest when changing the setup of the scenario are found in the DATA folder - SETUP.csv, SETUP_FACTIONS.csv, and REGIONS.csv. These files are semi-colon separated CSVs and can be opened and edited in most spreadsheet software (ex Excel, OpenOffice), be sure to save them in the same format.

SETUP_FACTIONS.CSV

This file defines which factions are available in your scenario.

Coming soon

REGIONS.CSV

This file specifies the basic properties of each region on the map.

• Alias: This is used as a reference to this region elsewhere. It is not recommended that you change this column, as it is used to associate this region with an area in the map used by this scenario.
• Name: This is a reference to the name used for this region. To edit the name, do not change the reference itself, but create a new entry with this id in the TEXT1.TXT file you edited above.
• Terrain: This is the terrain type of this region. For a list of valid terrain types, see DATA\TERRAINS.CSV, although some terrain types are not valid to assign directly to a region. Note that the reference must begin with $. This is generally the case when referring to an Alias from another CSV.
• Res[0], Res[1], Res[2], Res[3]: These are the natural resources present in the region. For a list of possible resources, see DATA\RESOURCES.CSV.
• Disabled: This controls which regions defined in the map are included in the scenario.
• Faction: This is the faction which initially owns this region (see SETUP_FACTIONS.CSV)
• CitizensID[0], CitizensAmount[0]: CitizensID[0] is the ethnicity of a the citizens to add, see DATA\ETHNICS.CSV for a list of possible ethnicities. CitizensAmount[0] is the number of citizens of the given ethnicity to add. Citizens will initially be distributed among the four possible jobs. To add citizens of multiple ethnicities, use CitizensID[1-3] and CitizensAmount[1-3].
• SlavesID[0], SlavesAmount[0]: add slaves to the region, similar to citizens above, although they will only be initially assigned to Agriculture or Infrastructure.
• City_Name: This is a reference to the name of the city in this region. As with the region name, you can override the name by adding a new entry to your TEXT1.TXT file.

SETUP.CSV

This file defines the initial placement of structures and groups (armies and navies) in your scenario.

Coming soon

Adding Units

Coming soon?

Adding Structures

Coming soon?

Adding Events

Coming soon?

Advanced Modding

Many files not specifically covered elsewhere can still be overridden in a modified scenario. Generally, if a file is found anywhere in the Data folder of the game installation, you can place a modified version of that file in the same relative location of the DATA folder of your modified scenario and your scenario will use that instead.

The Editor

Coming soon??