Leadership and Cohorts

[seraglio]

Apologize if this questions has already been asked, search engine bombed out on me.

So i tried to register a character as a custom cohort today and then tried to recruit him, as normal. He was my only remaining custom choice, all my others, about 20, were gone!

Snooping around the database directory, I notice recent changes to PRCCOHORTS.CDX, if that means anything. Its only 3k.

The only thing different about this cohort from the many others i've made is A: he was already level 40 when I chose to register as cohort and B: He had half fiend template.

Is there a limit to the number of custom cohorts you can have stored that I tripped? Also is there another way to add custom cohorts, for instance if I wanted a Golem or Undead cohort and wanted them to keep thier standard special abilities, creature weapons, powers, properties applied to creature skin, etc.

[xwarren]

Cohort database is deleted every time you update PRC. It ensures that you don't use any character that is no longer compatible with new version. If the database file was corrupted it is possible that adding new cohort deleted 'older' content. Sorry, but there's not much we can do about it. If you're using cohort system, please make buckups of prccohorts.* files onece in a while.

[seraglio]

Thanks for the quick reply. So I take it there is no limit like 20 custom cohorts or anything like that? If not ill chalk it up to bad luck ad start over I guess.

Also any idea on adding creatures as cohorts?

[seraglio]

Just thought id ask again since I ran into a limit....when i got to 29 custom cohorts...I was not allowed to add any more...the "register this character as a cohort" option was gone. Does anyone know or remember whther thier is a limit imposed?

Just want to make sure I'm hitting some hard coded limit in the leadership system..and not something fixable or changeable on my end.

[seraglio]

So I figured out my problem.....

First the cohorts had invalid races and classes. Basically I was creating animal companions and golems in a module, exporting the erfs and using Leto to convert them to regular localvault .bic files. After looking at the cohort script, it appears it checks for valid race/class...constructs and animals werent valid.

After fixing this I still couldnt import some cohorts. I downloaded a FoxPro database editing tool and interrogated the tables. Turns out I already had a cohort with the same name in the table...duh!

After renaming the cohort I was able to register the character as a cohort...which once again crashed the database. When I loaded a character with Leadership, instead of 30 choices, I had 13, with my newly added "Mythic Bear" being the 13th. For some reason it once again blew away 17 previously registered cohorts. I restored from a backup before I remembered to look at the database with the new FoxPro tools, but the files I overwrote were significantly larger than the backups (which had 27 cohorts),  implying the previous cohorts werent erased, but obfuscated somehow.

Anyway at this point I will chalk it up to some oddities in the .bic files I am using, since I am using a very unorthodox method of creating characters. Its weird though since I have created and successfully imported (without crashing db) several characters this way. I'll keep plugging away to see if any patterns emerge.