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The modding guide says, under Appearance Order:

The order that this character appears in the game relative to other characters.
A value of "?" means that the character appears in random order.
A value of "-" means that the character is only generated by a game event – this character will never appear randomly during the game.
A value of zero (0) means that the character is present at the start of the game.

However, when I gave "?" to all my characters (to ensure randomness), the game started giving me all characters in the file (or at least most of them) at game start. This is well over 20 people, available straight away.

What am I doing wrong?

ORIGINAL: Solarius Scorch

The modding guide says, under Appearance Order:

The order that this character appears in the game relative to other characters.
A value of "?" means that the character appears in random order.
A value of "-" means that the character is only generated by a game event – this character will never appear randomly during the game.
A value of zero (0) means that the character is present at the start of the game.

However, when I gave "?" to all my characters (to ensure randomness), the game started giving me all characters in the file (or at least most of them) at game start. This is well over 20 people, available straight away.

What am I doing wrong?

I find the best way to handle characters is a combination of methodology Solarius. Try this as example:

' Intelligence Agents

1, John Doe, 6, John Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
1, Jim Doe, 6, Jim Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
1, Jane Doe, 6, Jane Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
?, Jeff Doe, 6, Jeff Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
?, Jack Doe, 6, Jack Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
?, Jill Doe, 6, John Doe.png, Human, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?

Placing a few characters with a "1" instead of "?" ensures you still have some randomization and
you also will have some different characters each game. You also can put a fews "2", "3" and "4"'s
in there. This should help reduce the larger number of characters at start. I have 520 characters
in Igard's upcoming Star Trek,The Picard Era mod and have no problems with characters or their
randomization or starting amounts. Hope this helps!

So the only way is to alter it a bit and pray to Omnissiah that it works?

I am grateful for your help ehsumrell1, I'm sure your explanation couldn't be any clearer. However, the fact that we can't control this as well as the modding guide says is... disappointing.

Very well, I'll try this approach. But modding DW is never as straightforward as nearly every other game I happened to mod, especially since it's supposed to be moddable.

I ran into the same problems : all my characters with ? as appearance order were present at the beginning of the game.

After some testings, it happens that you need to write '?' and not ?.

Edit: Actually, the modding guide specifies "?". It might have to do with the fact that I'm using Win 7 French, but my theme crashes when I use "?". However, it works fine with '?'

Double edit : After more testings, I realized the game just ignore the lines that start with '. When I use '?', this character line is just ignored.

ORIGINAL: ArchMike

I ran into the same problems : all my characters with ? as appearance order were present at the beginning of the game.

After some testings, it happens that you need to write '?' and not ?.

Edit: Actually, the modding guide specifies "?". It might have to do with the fact that I'm using Win 7 French, but my theme crashes when I use "?". However, it works fine with '?'

Double edit : After more testings, I realized the game just ignore the lines that start with '. When I use '?', this character line is just ignored.

Miraculously, it seems to work for me too. [X(]

Thank you, thank you!

After more testing...

'?' does not work : the character line is just ignored when it starts with '
"?" : game crashes
“?” : symbol copied right from the modding guide. Game crashes.

So I went back with ?

Instead of a character file with 99 characters, I put 5 character in it.

2 characters : 0
3 characters : ?

I fired several games and their appearance was indeed random. I had presumed that a random appearance would not include a starting position. I was wrong : a character can randomly be assigned an appearance order of zero (0).

When I got a game where I had only 2 characters right from the beginning, I played for 20 minutes to see if I would get a one of my random character through play. I edited my empire money account and I spammed troop recruits. Eventually, one of my customized troop general spawned.

Conclusion : ? must be used for random order. That random order includes starting appearance. Races with a large number of characters have an advantage.

Solutions :

- Change the code so that a random appearance cannot include starting position
- Use numeric appearance position (like in Shadows)

Many thanks for your work Mike, this is indeed quite insightful. While not exactly a solution, at least we can describe the problem properly now.

(And just between us, this is an awful game design, and certainly not for the first time. Really, really sloppy for a game that has been in development for so long and waaaaay higher price than any other PC game I know. Shame!)

EDIT: I wrote a bug report, it's here.