All right, I’ve been playing around a bit with modding, and have gotten far enough to have some questions that I think haven’t been asked here yet:
In the Social Events, the Quality column is affected by some Effects. I don’t exactly know where a list of Effects is, but I wonder if this is partially what the nv_ strings do in the strings file?
Guessing that #1 is correct, then I is it possible to influence Social Events Quality by adding strings associated with high attribute values? For instance, adding confident,0.5 to the Quality list might strongly bump up an event’s success after the _random roll?
I’m not sure what all the config values do. I’d like to tweak some of them, but it seems like some have counter-intuitive names.
It’s been a very long time since I modded the game but, from memory:
Basically when you code things to happen you use phrases like “nv_humanrights_law” but you don’t want the player to see that, so the game looks up that value in the Strings.ini file and returns the phrase “Human Rights Law”, which it then shows to the player. Adding values to the Strings.ini file doesn’t do anything other than change what text you see. but…
As far as I recall there is a list of effects that are hard-coded and can’t be changed (_random, _choosecinema, etc), but in the Quality column you can add any assets (purchasable items), attributes (character stats) and interests, and those are all editable files. That means you can add confident,0.5 to increase the quality, or create a new asset and add that to the Quality column. You can add negatives to possibly decrease the quality (like playing sports in the snow) or any number of positive attributes/assets/interests to increase the quality.
The config.txt file has a ton of stuff in it so you’d need to be specific if you wanted to know what something did. If you backup your files you can play with values and just see what happens.