Complex Characters - Patreon Release

                           (Vlandian lord getting pissed off at Sturgian lord on the battlefield)

Hey folks!

I hope you're all doing alright!

Well, sorry for being silent for a few weeks, but I'm guessing you all read the previous post(s) already so that shouldn't come as a shock to you. Scroll down to the about section if you just care about the mod and see the download link :)

During this period, I actually tried to check out a few old projects I had in mind to see if I could revive them or not. One of them was Battle Speeches, a mod where you, as commander, give battle speeches before the battle, just like in Total War. This was one of my first mods which I had to take down to avoid copyright issues because I was literally using Total War's battle speeches for that. After releasing that mod, I had a team of Voice Artists to replace the lines manually (this was like 3 years go), but we never had the chance to actualize the mod because of their schedule, real-life issues, and whatnot. So, given that we are in the peak of AI nowadays and Elevenlabs announced their voice-generation model a few months back, where you could generate real life-like voices with just a prompt without requiring copyingy the source voices, I thought perhaps I could revive that mod. Unfortunately, all the conditional cases we created for that mod, such as Faction vs Faction lines, environment like woodlands, hills etc. lines, and overpower/underpower type of variation lines were all super-duper long, and this means I had to pay for Elevenlabs just to get more credits (since all variations need to be run for each faction). Which is actually fine, thanks to you all, that was pretty much possible, so I was planning to pick the 100K characters plan from Elevenlabs, but then I noticed a big issue. Elevenlabs' voice generation doesn't support accents. Meaning that all the voices, Battanian, Aserai, Vlandian, Imperial, sound like Yorkshire lords or US Civil War commanders. Hence, I decided not to go through with this idea. Perhaps soon I can try to revisit that but it's a no-go for now.

So, I decided to revisit another idea I had in mind instead. The "Nemesis" type of system. Actually, I was planning to go with the name Nemesis for this but since that name is taken by some other mod a while ago, I decided to go with the name Complex Characters, even though I'm well aware that it doesn't fully reflect the capabilities of the mod.

About the Mod

Ever felt like NPC Lords and Ladies in this game are a bit... robotic? Like you execute one of their loved ones, next encounter they are all like "Mhm so what is it?" as if nothing happened. Or even legitimate kills, where you kill their family members in battle, and they don't even bother mentioning that as if they are cool with that? Or you bust your ass off to win a battle and no one gives a damn about that? So this mod aims to solve that problem.

This mod brings new lines to dialogues and also adds ambition mechanic for the NPCs. Let's focus on dialogues first.

This mod introduces 467 new lines (yeah you read it right!) to Lord/Lady dialogues. All of these dialogues are totally situation-related. For example, from now on, if you executed anyone, all of their family members will remember this and will comment on that next time they see you. Their line will depend on parameters like if you are engaged in battlefield, if they started the conversation (i.e. they are attacking you), relation of the family member (son, daughter, grandchildren, wife, etc.) and relationship status during the moment of your execution (i.e. if you betrayed and killed someone who knew and liked you, etc.)

Here is an example between me and Raganvad / or Asta:

 (Picture shows Simir, the son of Raganvad, after meeting his end with my axe)

As you can guess, all these cases require a huge amount of lines to be considered and properly created. I won't go over all of them but I believe I covered all the potential cases for maximum immersion.

These are the situations NPCs will pay attention and comment on:

• If you executed any of their family member.

• If any of your family member executed any of their family member

• If any of their family member has been killed in battle by you or against someone you know (like your clan members)

• If NPC ever fought against you before in battlefield. If yes, they will remember the outcome, they will remember when it was, where it was close to (approximately) and they will even remember if you were overpowered or not.

• If NPC has been taken as prisoner by you or someone you know before. Or if they ever defeated and took prisoner someone you knew or you before.

• If anyone NPC knows ever fought against you or not, they will remember the outcome, location, time and unit situation. This is larger than just family members though, they will know and hear about battles of their faction members too. If they are in immediate state of battle with you, they will also make comments based on their traits.

• If you ever lost a major battle. Major battle in this context is any battle that has more unit count than 250. If battle was against their own faction, their line will reflect that but if they heard other factions, they will also talk about it broadly. Like Battanian General will hear about your defeat against Aserai and might choose to mock you

• If you ever lost battle to bandits/looters before, NPCs might choose to make fun of you by remembering that if they have nothing else to say.

All the lines also come with very intricate parameters and variations that will make them sound more natural. The system is set up in a way that you won't be able to hear the same sentences again from the same NPCs, because there is no point in saying the same thing over and over again. But it is likely to hear the same sentence from different NPCs because variations work based on a random value at runtime. All the bullet points I listed above also come with a small possibility of NPCs commenting about the situation even if it's not directly related to their family. But it comes with a small chance, so that you don't get roasted by every single NPC when you lose a battle; instead, only a small subset of them will care about that.

NPC Ambitions

This is a small extra feature I wanted to add to make NPCs feel less robotic. NPC Lords now can gain or born with certain ambitions which will reflected their actions on Campaign Map.

Ambition types are:

• Vendetta: If the player or any NPC executes someone, their loved ones are likely to gain this ambition. NPCs with this ambition will try to chase and fight the executor on the campaign map. They will do this as their number one priority, meaning that if the player is at war with Sturgia and executed someone from a family, one or more family members can start riding their party (or even armies!) just to chase and kill the player. To make this more fair for the player, I'm not having NPCs target the player's location directly but rather using the same system you would use in the game to find someone—the Encyclopedia "last seen at" feature. The AI also uses this and tries to pinpoint your location, and once you are in their visual cone, they target and attack you. This can only happen if you are already at war, of course. But they will never forget the ambition until they get their hands on you at least once.

• Rival: If any NPC is beaten by someone (NPC or player) five times in a row, this will cause them to think of that person as a Rival or Feared. The Rival ambition will grant NPC parties the drive to target the player when they see them nearby. This means that even if you are overpowered or they have another objective, they won't care and will face you as a rival.

• Fear: Similar to Rival, this will get triggered based on battle wins in a row. In both cases, there is a 50% chance to be assigned either. Meaning that some NPCs might have the Rival ambition while others have the Fear ambition. Those with the Fear of ambition will do the opposite of Rival. They will run away like hell. Even if they are extremely overpowered, they will do everything not to face their feared rival.

• Throne: This ambition is a bit slow and tricky one. The NPC lord with this ambition will desire to become a ruler and prioritizes actions that increase their power and influence.

• Wealth: The lord with this ambition will prioritize accumulating wealth and minimizes expenses, such as maintaining smaller armies or buying supplies. They will also try to snatch cheap items from settlements they visit to sell afterwards - if they can.

• Fame: The lord with this ambition will seek fame. In time of peace, they will travel between tournament settlements to gain renown. They won't do that in battle/war times though, they will instead try to chase glory of battle in such times.

These ambitions are not assigned to every lord or lady, but rather they get assigned to them with a very low chance after the system checks it each week.

I also added a small cheat so that you can see all the existing "ambitions" of the NPCs in a list and their reasons.

 I tested this mod for multiple game-years and tried multiple actions. I didn't notice any issues with performance or crashes. So I'm hoping that it will all fine for you too. Also want to note that mod doesn't use anything related to Harmony etc, so it should be pretty lightweight to play with.

I also translated each line to Russian, Turkish, and German. They are all AI translations, so they might not be great but believe me, it was a pain in the ass to translate all those lines because it's surpassing the limit for every non-commercial AI LLM out there. So I wrote my own AI Translator system for that alone. I hope it's not too horrible.

I believe that's it! You can download the mod from here (should be attached, I believe; if not, let me know).

At some point in the future, I will release this to the public too (could be next week, can be next year god knows) Although as usual, I want to give my patrons an advantage. That's something I can do for you folks at least.

Let me know what you think about the mod!