Uh, hello!



Not sure if this should be in the modding forum or not, but I decided to post here since it seems relevant? Sort of?



Anyways.



So, I've made my custom faction in-game using the Drakken affinity, right? But I hate their architecture, so I change their affinity mapping to that of the Ardent Mages in the XML file.



Which is great, because now I get Drakken affinity and units but with the architecture I like. Except there's a catch, which is that by changing the affinity mapping to the Ardent Mages, I also get the Ardent Mage leader screen, portrait, and hologram (in the diplomacy screen).



And while that's really not super important, it actually bothers me a lot.



Essentially I'm asking if it is possible to keep the affinity, units, and leader screen of X faction while using the city graphics of Y faction. I'm part way there, but I'm starting to suspect I might have to jerry-rig some sort of pseudo-mod together in an attempt to get what I'm after, as I can't seem to find a simple solution.



=<

Quite possibly!



You'd have to pull apart the affinity tag, more or less. Make a new affinity called "RageDragons" or something similar, and then set it to use all of the drakken diplomacy model, portraits, etc, and change the way it displays cities. I don't know much of anything about affinities, but I do know that the part which makes cities look like what they look like is in mapping/mapping.xml



I think that it's under WorldDistrict or PointOfInterestImprovement. If you search deep in the 'fallback' sections, you should find references to Broken Lord things. That's good. EL uses the broken lord mapping set as it's fallback when it can't figure out what to use as a 3D model for a particular object in the game, and means that you should be able to interrupt that fallback chain somewhere along the way and redirect it from Drakken to RageWizards. This will likely take some coding skill.