Sometimes the best way to perfect a strategy that you wan't to use online, is to practice the strategy as the same civ you use online, against a computer enemy offline. But I've realized that this can be really annoying, because who wants to play a computer enemy offline for a long time, just so that you can first gain the cards that you have in your online deck? Obviously in order to practice for online games, you need all the cards in your online deck, for your offline games too. This may eat up tons of time and create lots of work that isn't necessary.

And what if you want to try a new civilization, but you want to practice with them offline first to become familiar with them? By having access to all of the civilization's cards offline, you are able to test out strategies that you could possibly use in the future. It also allows newcomers to find out what civilization and their respective shipments fits their style of gameplay too.

In essence, this guide will allow you to:

- Alter the level of any offline homecity (which in return, will reflect your XP level).
- Alter the XP of any offline homecity (which in return, will reflect your homecity level).
- Unlock all of the cards, allowing you to add it to your deck, if you have the sufficient HC level and the prerequisite required cards.
- Alter the 'skill points', or number of new cards you can chose.
- Alter the number of new customizations you can chose.
- Alter the name of your explorer.
- Alter the name of your home city name
- Many other little features I have yet to experiment with.

Altering these values is simply done by manipulating the .xml files of the game, also sometimes referred to as proto files. I will get into more detail about that later on.

What Will I Need?

No tools required, you just need basic commen sense, and the ability to follow directions.

Warning

I believe that the online home cities are saved on ESO' servers, but if you find that you can somehow alter your online home cities, I'd advise that you would not. This could result in a permenent ban from ESO and possibly these forums. Using this guide to cause havoc on ESO or ruin other peoples gameplay online, is grounds for being banned. In other words, only use this guide for hacking offline home cities.

ES does NOT support this small hack in anyway, and so if you mess up the values and text within the file, HeavenGames Forums, Ensemble Studios, and I are not responsible in anyway. If you should corrupt your game somehow by not following directions, re-install the game before posting questions and/or complaints. But please remember, if you follow the steps carefully and don't touch anything that you shouldn't touch, you will be fine.

Directions

1.) Start by creating a new home city, one that you desire to hack. (if you don't already have one that you desire to hack). Then return to the main 'lobby screen', where you chose if whether you want to play 'Single Player', 'Multiplayer', ect.

2.) Locate the home city file. My Computer->xxxxx's Documents->My Games->Age of Empires III->Savegame.

There may or may not be many files in this folder, so things can get confusing. You can locate your home city that you wish to alter easily. The game uses this forumla for organizing the home cities:

"sp_(INSERT NAME OF YOUR HOME CITY HERE)_homecity" (obviously without the quotation marks)

3.) Once you've located the file, right click it, and chose edit. Don't be intimidated by all the values and numbers. Here is what each shorthand computer statement means:

<civ>xxxxx</civ> The civilization that the home city belongs to.
<name>xxxxx</name> The name of the home city.
<heroname>xxxxx</heroname> The name of your explorer/hero.
<herodogname>xxxxx</herodogname> The name of your dog's name, when present.
<level>xxxxx</level> The level of your home city.
<xp>xxxxx</xp> The amount of XP your home city has.
<skillpoints>xxxxx</skillpoints> The amount of new shipments/cards you are allowed to unlock
<numprounlocksearned>xxxxx</numprounlocksearned> The amount of home city customizations you are allowed to unlock

By changing the values within the 'arrows', where the 'x''s are located in my guide, you alter the data that reflects that characterstic. For the numerical values above, 100 will easily grant you plenty of home city levels, home city customizations and home city cards to choose from. The only category that will require more is the home city XP, which personally I'd keep below 35,000,000. I'm not saying that choosing higher values won't work, it's just that I haven't tested it.

4.) Save the file by going to edit, and saving it as the file name it currently has (don't alter it). Then you can go back into Age of Empires III, and go to single player, skirmish and select the homecity. Everything will be modified accordingly to what you hacked and changed.

These are just the basics, you can further manipulate other stats in other files that do not pertain strictly to home cities, but I'd suggest that you not touch them unless you know what your doing, as obviously re-installing the entire game is certainly not fun. In the future, I may add more proto lines that can be manipulated easily and work for sure, depending on whether or not this helps people out and is worth my time and theirs.

Conclusion

I realize this is really a fool-proof guide, as it was meant to be. It's not really to help the more experienced AoE3 hackers out, but to shed some light onto the basics of how AoE3 works, and how we can alter the files to enhance our gameplay. Please feel free to post constructive criticism.

[This message has been edited by Brtnboarder495 (edited 06-01-2006 @ 04:42 PM).]