THIS IS HEAVILY WORK IN PROGRESS, IT WILL BE FINISHED WITHIN A FEW DAYS. im going to sleep... This thread is designed to help people make their own custom load-outs for vehicles, so you can just click the drop down and select whatever you want. Before we begin: You will need to download a program called "Notepad++" to make sense of most files. This program is designed for programmers and coders, normal notepad does not always take new lines into account, and just garbles them all up into 3-4 lines of garbage. Notepad: Notepad ++: As you can see, notepad ++ makes everything ALOT easier to read and understand. Download for notepad ++ (It's Free!) Here Finding the load-out files: Every vehicle in empires has a file dedicated to its load-outs, every load-out for one vehicle is stored in a single text file. This is where you will find the load-out scripts, their proper name is "presets" Steam\SteamApps\common\Empires\empires\scripts\presets Creating your first loadout: Now for this example we will be editing the Imperial IFV and giving it a new loadout. Now, this may seem really confusing but when broken down it makes a lot of sense. We will go from top to bottom. "Compo + 3 Phase" - This is the name that will show on the drop-down in game, make it something distinctive and easy to know whats in the load-out. "weapon_slot_0_0" - This is the first weapon slot, it usually goes by the order you assign the weapon to groups and which button you press to fire it. in my case _0_0 is the machine gun _1_0 is the cannon and _2_0 is the missile launcher, bit of an odd order but that is how it is. I believe this order can change depending on the order you put the weapons onto the vehicle. The numbers "0" "12" and "27" Correspond to the weapons place in the vehicle_weapons.txt (0 being the first, 100 being the last as an example) Do not worry about the weapon numbers, i will create a table on here showing what number is what weapon, armor, engine etc. "weapon_mode_0_0" - This is simply the button you use to fire it, "0" is primary fire "1" is secondary fire. As you can see i have my cannon set to primary fire and my MG and Missile set to secondary. "weapon_group_0_0_0" - These are the different groups you set for your weapons (up to six total 0-5 not 1-6). With the AFV in this example i have two weapon groups, one for Cannon + Missile and one for Cannon + MG. A "1" means it is part of that weapon group and a "0" means it is not. (each weapon has its own set of 6 groups) "armor_slot_0" - This is the type of armor that is attached to the vehicle, only one of these slots will ever exist on a vehicle at a time. The "2" represents the type of armor, in total there are 7 obtainable armors in the game, one for each research tree ( 2 for electrical ). In this case the 2 represents composite armor. (no you cannot put CV armor on other vehicles..) "armor_front" - This is simply the number of plates of armor per side of the vehicle, cannot have more than the vehicle will allow, will simply default to the maximum number if you exceed it. "engine_slot_0" - This is the Engine slot, each vehicle type has it own set of engines (There are over 36 engines in the game). In this case "9" Represents the 10th engine in vehicle_engines.txt, which is the LT/AFV's Electrical engine, 3Phase.
The hardest part about this entire thing is, after not using loadouts for so long, to remember that you have those loadouts and use them instead of overwriting a single one over and over again. The fact that you can't "lock down" a loadout so that it always stays a certain way really doesn't help it.
not saying downloading notepad++ is a bad idea, it certainly isnt, but you can just open them with wordpad and it also has correct tabs and line-breaks.
I have considered making my own loadouts but like I told destroyer when we discussed them a while ago. The likelihood of them corresponding what the commander has researched is actually pretty low. That being said for LTs and AFVs, why not. But they were never the most time consuming to re-customize. No what would be ideal is having the Commander set a default template for the team. But again, that requires time the commander usually doesn't have.
This already exists in game. All you have to do to save a vehicle loadout is click the drop down box while in customize mode and change the name. It's not very obvious that you are actually able to edit it in anyway, but yeah it's a feature. Like mr x said it's rare for this to be actually useful, but it is probably a good idea to have that default apc with all plain stuff so you don't have to fiddle around with it if you need to apc rush at the start of the game.
I personally recommend making a separate loadout for reactive/capacitive AFVs and LTs, escort and nuclear tanks, absorbant mediums, and reactive NF mediums. Fiddling with plate counts in particular takes a good chunk of time, and the builds for the maps I mentioned are pretty set in stone. And have fun remembering to switch to a different loadout when the time is right.
