how to merge factions

[rot]

Just some technical info for whenif it's done, nevermind this for now-







Advancement in a faction requires that the following criteria be met:
- Faction reputation* (0-125)
- Two attributes (30-35), generally trivial
- One primary skill (0-90) and two secondary skills (0-35). Due to the limited number of favoured skills per faction this can be silly and will have to be removed at least for Great Houses.

All those values for each rank can be edited in the CS in Character->Faction.

*FacRep, contrary to what MSFD states, doesn't modify the faction NPCs' reaction towards the player - at least not Disposition. Disposition increase comes with rank only. (FacRep does add to global Reputation checks for faction members, according to UESP)
Warning with lowering faction reputation: it can become negative, which may prevent you from joining the faction (rank 0) - negative values cannot be given in the CS to prevent that. If lowering FacRep is done without guarantees that it'll remain >0 (eg low-rank quests or for a faction the player doesn't belong to yet), the "join the %faction" topics will need an overwriting entry to join or a way to regain FacRep.


So, how to merge a faction with vanilla without screwing things up: keep the vanilla factions, convert ML faction affiliations to vanilla, don't edit vanilla quest rewards. If the questlines are to be made longer - eg require the player to complete more, Mainland quests to attain the same rank - increase the total FacRep requirement for each rank, proportional to how much additional FacRep Mainland quests offer. This allows enough leeway to give more priority to Mainland quests over Vvardenfell ones if necessary (can easily have ML quests give more FacRep than vanilla quests typically do, and raise the required values for ranks accordingly) - and special conditions for specific ranks can always hijack the "advancement" topic. Worst case scenario: use another "FacRep" global variable instead for the merged faction.


Reasons to wait for an OpenMW conversion:
- would make converting existing data for TR duplicate factions less of a chore
- (savegame compatibility) scripts can't use 'GetPCFacRep' in vanilla (crashes). The function would allow better adaptation to savegames
- not much point in merging without a global view of TR's quests