As of right now, it is impossible to manipulate Ironman Savefiles. The clear benefit of using Ironman for our speedruns is that it prevents people from cheating. It is therefore encouraged to just start a new game with Ironman active.
The big downside of Ironman is that it adds random elements to the game as characters will have different stats upon creation. One way to circumvent this is by restarting the game over and over again until your random traits are favorable for the specific strategy that you are planning to do.
To go a little bit into more detail, characters will have fixed and random traits. Let's look at Petty King Murchad of Mumu, which will be the most prefered character for the King or Ireland speedrun:
Murchad will always be a Catholic Irish 39 year old character in 1066. His family will always be the same, he will always have two brothers and a son.
He will also always be a Tough Soldier and have no genetic traits or leadership.
What he does have, though, are 4 random personality traits. These can be either positive (virtues), negative (sins) or neutral (others).
For a full overview of what traits are, refer to this page: http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Traits
Our Murchad has the four random traits Envious, Honest, Diligent and Temperate - really not too bad. This character would certainly work just fine for any playthrough or run. But we want to make him the best possible candidate for our speedrun.
It is important that we can only manipulate these four personality traits. We are not allowed to remove or add any genetic traits or other traits.
=== There are two ways to manipulate a savefile. I will teach you how to manipulate the savefile via a text editor and also via a console. Both ways are viable ways to manipulate the gamefile but keep in mind that accidentially manipulating something you should do will make your savefile invalid for speedruns ===
- Savefile Manipulation via Texteditor (long and precise, less chance of screwing up):
To manipulate the savefile we have to open a new game with our character with Ironman enabled at first, set all the game rules and MAKE SURE THAT IRONMAN AND ACHIEVEMENTS ARE ACTIVE. This is to circumvent any breaking of game rules. Then deactivate Ironman manually by clicking on the fist but do not touch any other options after you do so. Open the game and - important - DO NOT - take any actions that could influence the game. Do not unpause or click anything. Go directly to the menue and save the game manually. Uncheck the option to compress the gamefiles for easier handling:
Feel free to give it a name that is easily recognizeable. But keep in mind that once you name it ingame, you cannot rename the file or it will be corrupted.
You will find the savefile in this folder.:
C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings II\save games
Open the savefile with a texteditor. Notepad will work, I personally recommend Atom or Notepad++.
The file will look something like this:
There is a lot of information in this file and manipulating things randomly will cause the file to be corrupted. Manipulating certain rules to circumvent the Ironman limitation will disqualify your run and potentially get you banned if done intentionally.
In line 6 you can find the ID of the character you selected. Copy and paste this ID and then search the document (Ctrl+F) until you find the character further down in the gamefile:
The first result that comes up after the initial ID should ideally be the only thing you need.
Note that I have highlit one line that reads "traits". This is the only line we are manipulating for our savefile.
Refer to the traits wiki page posted above to find all the relevant trait IDs. Remember that you can replace only the personality traits with other personality traits. "14" corresponds to "Tough Soldier" and will remain unchanged as our character will always be a Tough Soldier in Ironman starts. I decide to replace "Envious" with "Humble", "Honest" with "Brave" and "Temperate" with "Ambitious".
My new line would look like this now:
traits={14 86 90 80 93 }
Save the file, make a copy of it as a backup file (you will have to manually copy + paste it everytime you want to restart a run) and open the game.
Our character looks like this now:
- Manipulating a savefile via the console.
Using the console should be the faster and easier way to create your savefile. To demonstrate this, I will use the new character we just created in the example above and revert the changes we made back to his initial status.
For this method, we will need the list of traits again: http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Traits
Also helpful is an overview of console commands here: http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Console_commands
Although we will only need (and allow) three commands for this method.
Start the save file the same way as mentioned above, but when ingame, open the console (Shift + 3). We already know the ID of our character (83355) from the savefile manipulation but without opening the savefile, type
charinfo
When hovering over our character, we will see the CharID among other information.
The two commands we are using are:
remove_trait & add_trait
the way they work is by using
COMMAND traitname CharID
so we want to remove Humble, Brave and Ambitious and replace them with Temperate, Honest and Envious.
To do this, I will add the following commands into console (keep in mind that you will have to use the trait command name and not the trait ID here):
remove_trait humble 83355 remove_trait brave 83355 remove_trait ambitious 83355 add_trait temperate 83355 add_trait honest 83355 add_trait envious 83355
if done correctly, our character will be reverted back to his previous status again.
(notice that the order of traits has changed, this is not significant though)
Close the console, save the game, then close the game and create a backup save for this savefile.
Again, I can only stress that only LEGIT manipulations of savefiles are allowed.
To find out if a trait is fixed or random, open and start a new game with the same character in Ironman mode at least 5 times. If traits change, then these are random. If traits stay the same, they are fixed.
