Faction Editor

[Hawkeye_td]

If this belongs in the Creation forum, sorry, but no one looks there anyways. Can anyone explain to me what the "robust" option does in the Faction Editor? Thanks in advance.

[mark13]

Robust means that the negative effects for a particular SE setting are halved. For instance, any faction with "robust, planned" would receive only -1 efficiency whilst running planned.

[Sindai]

Advice: DO NOT USE THE FACTION EDITOR. It is horribly buggy and can even corrupt a faction file that you simply load and re-save without making ANY changes.

Better option: Read the documentation in the alphax.txt file of all the variables in the faction txt files, then learn how to edit the txt files by hand. It's far more reliable and very easy to learn (took me under an hour to teach myself.) Plus the documentation for all the tags in alphax.txt is WAY better than what little explanation the editor gives you.

EDIT: BTW, mark13 is incorrect in his explanation, actually.

While he IS correct in that Robust halves the penalty for a given thing, it is not an individual SE choice (like Funamentalism, or Demo). What is really does is halves all the penalties for a given SE rating.

ie: "ROBUST, EFFIC," means that that faction will receive a mere -1 penalty to Efficiency from Police State or Planned, and -2 if using both at once.
[This message has been edited by Sindai (edited December 30, 2000).]

[Wiglaf]

Yeah, it's so buggy the mac version just leaves it out. Most of the stuff in there is, as previously posted, in the alpha(x).txt file anyway.

[Zonk]

Try ACedit. I have used it and it has worked pretty well for me. I dont know if I should post a link (or if I have it, for that matter.) You should be able to find it easy enough.

[mark13]

My apologies for my erroneous explanation. Sindai is indeed correct. I haven't used the text editor in a while - it shows

I also second Sindai's advice - there really is no substitute for changing the .txt files first-hand. You don't want to change your well-loved custom factions, and put them in the hands of some dreadful and horrendously buggy piece of software.