Visually speaking, the window people see ingame is defined in terms of up to 7 Indents and any number of Tiers. This table is the alpha and the omega of skill trees - and needs some explanation before I start. The rest of the table is generally irrelevant.

For legendary lord/hero background skills, it doesn't REALLY matter if it's the only one, vanilla usually uses weight 5 for those though.

If you're adding a new generic background skill, like Knowledgeable and Tactician, Weight 1 will generally do the trick, but if you want your skill to show up more often you can go all the way up to 9999 for near guaranteed spawn. Don't turn this on for 'normal' skills, only if you want it as a lord/hero's default effects.īackground Weighting is (surprise!) only used for background skills. Is Background Skill is very important - the starting 'traits' lords and heroes start off with are all actually just background skills, and have nothing to do with actual Traits, which are something else entirely. Unlocked at Rank doesn't actually matter, another table actually defines the unlock level. Localized Name and Description are irrelevant, you'll fill them out properly in loc later. If you're making a new lord trait, look for 'innate' in the vanilla 'key' section, or 'trait' in the image path section. Compare to vanilla to decide which to use, in general if the skill buffs in battle stats then the name will have 'battle_' in it, campaign focused stuff will be 'campaign_', self-buffs usually have 'character_' in the name, etc. Image Path is crucially important, this is what will show up ingame. Key is the same as it always is - unique and important - whatever you call it, you'll be copy pasting this a lot later so make sure to save it. This is the first and perhaps most important table since huge chunks of it are fundamental to how it functions at all. It's not THAT complicated once you wrap your head around it, I promise, but can be a little obtuse starting off. Skills can be attached to either effects (stats, abilities, etc) or ancillaries (items, mounts, banners, etc).Ĭharacter Skill Nodes can be organized in a variety of ways, such as which row they are in, which other nodes are required and how many of them, organized in sets, made mutually exclusive, and other things.Įssentially, the process of adding a custom skill to a lord involves making the skill, telling the game what the skill DOES, adding the skill to the lord's node set, and then telling the game where the skill should be in the set and what requirements or special mechanics it has, if any. First, let's discuss the basics of how skills actually workĮvery lord and hero has a character skill node set, which lets you connect skill nodes to the character.Ĭharacter Skills are defined as their own 'thing', then attached to nodes which are the fancy buttons you see ingame.

Warhammer total war 2 skill tree