[Bristolduke]

Ethnicities:

This is the key file to make your project work. I changing this file (to what ever extent you will be able) will have ramifications to all newly created leagues. Therefore,

Step 1 back this file up to a location outside of OOTP.
Step 2 back this file up to another location outside OOTP.

If you lose the games default file the only way to retrieve it will be uninstall and reinstall OOTP.

I think there are two possibilities in the game design. I can't find in the manual anywhere, and I have never tried a non-earth scenario. Certainly other opinions are welcome here, but my guess is if you get this working you will become the OOTP fantasy world expert.

Again remember that you are not altering any existing leagues. You must build a new league to make any changes in the database folder files take affect for a league.

A couple of relatationships.

I discussed above the names and firstnames link to ethnicites file. You will not have to go back to the nations file as well. A nation can only have four ethnics entries. For example if you look at Iceland in the nations file you will see it is 80% US modern, 5% German and 15% Danish. Since you will only have an Endor nation you will be limited to four ethnic categories.

Let's look at the ethnicities file. There are two possible update methods which may work.


Option 1: The game will only allow five races:

(african,asian,caucasian,east_indian,hispanic)

The assumption here is that the headers in the file are the tags for the various races. Changing them will change the races in the game (There may still be some hard coding in the game so I would not be surprised to see some anomalies.)

Therefore

You can create five races for Endor and you rename the header in the ethnicities file (Note these are in aphabetical order as well).
You can then add the entries to for you various ethnic categories. Note since this file is used for all new league generation, the earth races will be gone. Only the Endor races will exist.

You would also change the header file in the nations text. The last five fields are the races for that country. My assumption here is that they override the race definition in the ethnicities file.


Option 2: Adding races. (this would allow earth and non-earth leagues off the same set of files so it would be the design if OOTP thought this were a requirement.)

I'm not sure this would work, but the ethnicites file has one unique characteristic. Each record ends in a comma. This could imply that you can add races (e.g. in the game the ethnicities table is a variable field table. Complicated but possible).

If this were true, you simply add races into the ethnicities header. Remember they must still be in alphabetic order. So if you add 5 you now have 10 races in the game. You must modify every record in the ethnicities file to have the same number of fields as your header and each record must end in a comma. Remember that the sequence of races has changed as well, so you need to make sure each entry still aligns with its race value. you can then add your Endor ethnicities records.


The problem with this solution is I'm not sure how the nations file will work with the new races. Those records don't end in comma and there is no indication that it is a variable field table. My best guess would be link to your Endor ethnic cultures, use zero for the race numbers in the nations file (the last 5 fields) and assume that it would use the ethnicites ratio for races.


I'll stop as this is confusing enough, I'm sure. One final thought is once you have the relationships down in you mind, you may just want to build your own nations, cities, school, names, first names and ethnicites files. If you keep the long/lat in Earth terms, you may be able to create Endor as a world not a nation.