How do UKF doctrines work in the Editor?

Hey everybody,

so I ran into a rather odd issue I had never noticed before. Usually, when looking at doctrinal abilities, they are all listed in the army/(Faction)/army_bag/abilities extension. This adds the abilities to a faction. They are then triggered by upgrades, that your choice of docrtine applies.

A usual commander-given ability would have this upgrade listed in requirements.

Most of the British abilities however, do not. For some reason, they neither need to be added to a faction's army_bag/abilities, nor do they need a passive upgrade to appear.

Does anybody know how this works? I am trying to add additional abiliies to British commanders, and the only way to achieve this, afaik, is by setting up the new abilities with the same upgrade requirements as existing ones. Without a passive upgrade, this is impossible.

Any help is appreciated.

Hey everybody,

so I ran into a rather odd issue I had never noticed before. Usually, when looking at doctrinal abilities, they are all listed in the army/(Faction)/army_bag/abilities extension. This adds the abilities to a faction. They are then triggered by upgrades, that your choice of docrtine applies.

A usual commander-given ability would have this upgrade listed in requirements.

Most of the British abilities however, do not. For some reason, they neither need to be added to a faction's army_bag/abilities, nor do they need a passive upgrade to appear.

Does anybody know how this works? I am trying to add additional abiliies to British commanders, and the only way to achieve this, afaik, is by setting up the new abilities with the same upgrade requirements as existing ones. Without a passive upgrade, this is impossible.

Any help is appreciated.

Hello Dar,

indeed the UKF faction is different in this regard. I think there are two possibilities:

One, that the tools are just not updated correctly.

Two, they indeed work differently. But I don't think that Relic would make a new system for their last faction.

When I encountered this problem I had to use a win condition pack to add/replace the vanilla abilities. I would also try asking SneakEye because if I remember correctly in the "All Units" mod he replaced some UKF abilities using only the attribute editor.

Regards,
Ragnar

The army_bag/abilities war originally empty for the Brits. (I assume there is a second invisible list for the Brits) The community updates changed some commanders and those abilities are the only ones in the current list.

If you want to add additional global abilities, then you can just add them to that list. If you want to remove an original ability, then you can clone that ability and add a requirement: 'not' 'required_race' 'british', an easy workaround

Thanks for the response, guys. I have indeed created my own workaround by now.

If anyone wants to add abilities to certain commanders that do not have any upgrades assigned to commander_abilities, simply use one of the original abilities, change it to an always_on activation, hide it from UI, and have it add a custom upgrade. This upgrade can now serve as a trigger to a copy of the original ability or whatever new ability you want to add.

Hope that was not too confusing.

Thanks for the response, guys. I have indeed created my own workaround by now.

If anyone wants to add abilities to certain commanders that do not have any upgrades assigned to commander_abilities, simply use one of the original abilities, change it to an always_on activation, hide it from UI, and have it add a custom upgrade. This upgrade can now serve as a trigger to a copy of the original ability or whatever new ability you want to add.

Hope that was not too confusing.

I know this is a very late reply but yes, the Brits are very tricky to mod and it does seem that their commander abilities are added through an invisible/locked section of the AE.

I used to do something similar to your method for my doctrinal Tulip rockets, which was to have it as an ability that you had to then click in order for it to activate. This worked but was slightly annoying as it's not an ideal method (you're not supposed to have to click passive upgrades to activate them) and the AI couldn't use them.

However, there is another workaround for the Brits - at least for certain commanders. Several Brit abilities do in fact have a passive upgrade, such as Flamethrowers (needed for the squad upgrade to appear), Vehicle Crew Repairs, Hold the Line and Advanced Cover Combat. There are no doubt several others I have forgotten.

Using these passive upgrades it is possible to make a reasonable number of changes to the Brits' commander abilities, and especially in terms of using two upgrades (one true, one false) as requirements, and so using this method I've been able to achieve all of the Brit commander changes I wanted. It's tedious and means they're the most annoying faction to mod commander abilities for, but in general you should be able to make numerous changes this way. It's perfectly legitimate and means you don't have to piss around with creating lockout upgrades or any other imperfect workarounds.