Playing mainline campaigns as Aragwaithi faction

[WhereIsBaodur]

Hi! First of all I apologise if it turns out this is the wrong section of the forum for my question.
What I'd like to know is if there is a way to change the faction you are playing in one of the core campaigns, let's say Eastern Invasion. I really like the Aragwaithi faction and I'd like to try them in a campaign (I've already played all of them, so I'm not worried about spoiling the story, or that the game will most likely be unbalanced). I've tried tinkering a bit, but I'm new to all this.
Many thanks in advance

[beetlenaut]

Campaigns don't use factions exactly. Each side is just given a list of units that they can recruit. (Often, the author does choose units that belong to one faction, but they don't have to.) It's easy enough to change this list. In the .cfg file for the first scenario of Eastern Invasion, for example, there is a line in the first [side] block that says recruit=Spearman,Cavalryman,Mage,Heavy Infantryman. You can add change that line to change the available units. The changes will automatically apply for the following scenarios too. Some campaigns will take some more digging because there are different recruit lists for different leaders, or the list is held in a separate utilities file, but I think Eastern Invasion is pretty straightforward.

Making the Aragwaithi visible to the campaign may be a bit harder, because it will depend on where you got the faction from. You will need to look in the folder for your add-on that includes the Aragwaithi units. The units will have files in a "units" folder and sprites in a folder called "images-->units" somewhere in the add-on. Those files will need to be copied into the same-named folders in the Eastern Invasion campaign.

You said you've already done some tinkering, so I didn't include a lot of details. It may not have been enough, but see how far you can get, and ask again if you get stuck.

[WhereIsBaodur]

Thanks for the reply. That's exactly what I've tried to do, after looking in the directory of the campaign. But I have some problem in managing what's necessary to make it work, like macros and stuff, expecially because I don't know how the game works, and so what, where and how to copy.
The best I managed to achieve was to make it start, I could recruit aragwaithi units (and only them, bold, I know), I had changed gweddry and dacyn to flagbearer and witch, but I couldn't give commands to them, no units of mine would move. Then I messed it up further and now the campaign crashes cause it can't find some macro. I should probably reinstall the game, but I wanted to know exactly what I've got to do this time.
By the way, I got the Aragwaithi both from IftU and AtS, and from era of chaos faction. Thank you

[beetlenaut]

I wanted to know exactly what I've got to do this time.

I'm not going to try to create a specific list of exactly which files to copy and lines to change. That might be quite a list, and it sounds like you already had it mostly working at one point anyway. It would probably be easier to fix what you have unless you deleted a lot of stuff. Changing the leaders should only have involved changing the type= line. I can change their type and still give them commands, so I don't know what else you did. I'd probably have to see the .cfg file you modified. We can almost certainly help with the macro too, but we'd have to know what macro it is.

[skeptical_troll]

Those files will need to be copied into the same-named folders in the Eastern Invasion campaign.

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to edit the _main.cfg file of a mainline campaign to include addons' folders?

[ForestDragon]

Those files will need to be copied into the same-named folders in the Eastern Invasion campaign.

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to edit the _main.cfg file of a mainline campaign to include addons' folders?

yes, just copy-paste links from one addons's _main.cfg to another, that's how i made TGA units show up in some other addons i played

[WhereIsBaodur]

I'm on it again. I copied the units files as you said, and I have changed those lines in the scenario. But now I have to somehow import the utils. At the moment the game dosn't recognise the abilities

PS I looked inside Era of Chaos add-on's main.cfg, and it says "If you want to use this faction in an add-on, add {~add-ons/Era_of_Chaos/campaign.cfg} in your campaign define." What does it mean? Might it be of some use?

[WhereIsBaodur]

I got stuck. specifically, atm it's saying macro/file 'STR_SPEAR' is missing. Guess I didn't import some macros, what did I miss?

[WhereIsBaodur]

Update: I made it work (or so it seems) when I understood how to include addons' folders in the _main.cfg

[binary_path]
path=data/add-ons/Era_of_Chaos
[/binary_path]
{add-ons/Era_of_Chaos/mainline_strings.cfg}
{add-ons/Era_of_Chaos/utils}
[+units]
{add-ons/Era_of_Chaos/units}
[/units]


That seemed to fix whatever macros I was missing (and this way there's not even need to copy the units in the campaign directory).
I had some troubles because in my pc the add-ons folder is not inside the wesnoth folder, so I had to make a copy.
And I edited human-aragwaithi.cfg, cause in the last line the tilde in {~add-ons/Era_of_Chaos/units/human-aragwaithi} was messing things up. I removed it and everything works. I'll try it soon

[WhereIsBaodur]

If someone is interested in doing the same, it's probably better if you get the files from after the storm than era of chaos. I got them from the latter, and I noticed that in the coding female lancers and silver shields are missing some of their animation, so I'm having to replace the last lines of the files. Aside from that, the campaign works fine, and it's even playable on medium difficulty (you have to be careful with the skeletons though)

[WhereIsBaodur]

I've finished Eastern Invasion using only aragwaithi units and it's been really fun. I hadn't got great memories of it, and it's one of the reasons I chose it. I mainly remembered the silly plot and those two crazy scenarios (capture and evacuation). This time around I actually appreciated how well it's done (scenarios' lenght and sizes) minus those two. But with aragwaithi firepower evacuation was - relatively - easy. The last scenarios, having 3 sorceress (one was dacyn) and gweddry (ancient banner) silver shield, slayer and greatbow with the amulets, were really funny. I could have fought in that duel forever. Thanks for the help, I really wanted to do it. Hope this faction will see some love