Hygraffo's Trigger Guide

This is a beginner’s guide to getting introduced to triggers, and a few experienced people might find it useful as a refresher course.

Please note this guide is for AoT users, as the editor is more versatile and better then AoM.

Anyway, first thing is first. What is a trigger? A trigger is a command of sorts, telling AoT what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Got that? When you open up the “Trigger” drop-down box, you get something very similar to this:



There are three main parts to this menu. They are: Number 1 is where all the triggers are going to be listed, number two is where you cycle between trigger options, conditions and effects. Number 3 is where you make changes to the options in Number 2. In other words:
1= Trigger List
2= Select what part of trigger
3= Modify the trigger part you selected

Simple enough?
Alright, now to business. To make a trigger, you must click on the “Insert button, highlighted here in red:


Once you click on that button, a trigger is created. You’ll end up with something like this:


As you can see, a trigger called “Trigger_268” was created, and as I have the “Triggers” menu selected, it shows me the options and overall summary of the trigger. It shows the name, which you can edit. It has three boxes beneath that, titled, “Active”, “Loop”, and “Run Immediately”. Beneath those three, it has a slider, called “Priority”.

The name part is self explanatory, so I won’t cover that. However, the checkboxes can be confusing for a first timer.
Active= The trigger is active from the moment you load the scenario. This means that once the condition is fulfilled, the trigger fires. This means, for example, if a player selects a certain unit, the trigger will fire immediately (if selecting a certain unit was that condition).If this button is not checked, it must be activated by another trigger. To do that, you must use the “Fire Event” effect, which will activate a trigger of your choosing. Once a trigger is active, the next time its condition is fulfilled, the effect will happen.

Loop= Once the Condition has happened, the effect will just keep repeating without the need for the condition to be fulfilled again. These triggers cause MAJOR lag, so it is advisable that you use three, or at most four, of these, unless you don’t want anyone to play your scenario.

Run Immediately= Checking this box will by-pass the condition. For example, if the condition was a timer, the trigger would skip the timer, do the effect, then start again, this time with the timer. It makes the effect happen twice, once instantly, the other after the effect.

The priority slider beneath those three boxes has three parts, as you can see. Those parts are: Low, Norm, and High. If a trigger is Low Priority, there will be a noticeable delay, especially if there are higher priority triggers going on at the same time.

High priority triggers on the other hand have barely a delay, but too many high priority triggers (especially at the same time) will lag or crash the game. To the right of all that is the overview of your trigger, with its conditions and effects.

Some people may not understand what “conditions” or “effects” are. To explain, I’ll use an analogy. We’ll say, you only eat if you are hungry. In this case, the “Conditions” is “you are hungry”, while the effect is, “eat”. This is similar to AoM/AoT triggers. If you have a Timer of 10 seconds with the effect of grant god power, the game knows “I will only grant a god power when the timer reaches ten seconds”.

Anyway, back to the picture. In this trigger summary, you can see that the condition is always, and the effect is SetIdleProcessing. A thing you need to learn. SetIdleProcessing means that it stops the game from processing information, or in other words, a crash. So you need to change that. Also, the condition “Always”, means that the condition happens immediately, similar to if I had checked the Run Immediately box.

If you go back to the “Trigger, Condition, Effect” box, and you check the “Conditions” box, you get a menu similar to this:


Number 1 is where you see all the conditions that you have added. Number 2 and 3 are check-boxes for Not and Or, while number 4 is where you select a trigger from the drop-down menu.

To elaborate on the NOT/OR principle, we’ll go back to the hungry analogy. Without those boxes ticked, the trigger is in “AND” mode, which means that for the effect to happen, ALL the conditions must be fulfilled. In “NOT” mode, ALL the conditions must not be fulfilled for the event to happen. In “OR” mode, you must have one OR another condition fulfilled. For example:
AND= I will eat if I am hungry AND there is food on the table.
NOT= I will eat if I am NOT bloated.
OR= I will eat if I am hungry OR there is food on the table.
Understand?

If you select the “Effects” box instead of the “Conditions” box, you get:


As you can see, this has less complexity then either the Conditions or Trigger box, but it is where 99.9% of trigger work happens.

Once again, it has a list of the effects, and the place where you can select those effects to change them.
Before the end of this, I’d like to add a list of some of the most important conditions and effects a starter uses and what they do.

EFFECTS:
Fire Event= Pretty much the most valuable effect. It activates inactive triggers, or restarts a trigger which has already done its job.

Army Move= Moves an army (look at some other guides to find out what armies are )

Kill= Kills a unit with the death animation

Destroy= Deletes the unit without the death animation

Modify Protounit= Change unit stats (I once made an Arcus which fires 50 arrow which can kill a Gaia in one hit. You don’t need to go so overboard, but it’s still fun)

Change Name= Changes the name of the unit

Send Chat= Sends a chat message to the selected player.

CONDITIONS:
Timer= Starts a countdown timer. When the timer is finished, the condition is fulfilled.

Chat contains= Checks if the chat contains a word/phrase. If it does, the condition is fulfilled.

Unit Selected= Checks if a unit(s) is selected, if it is, the condition is fulfilled.

Unit in LOS= Checks if a unit(s) is in a player’s (of your choosing) Line of Sight. If it is, the condition is fulfilled

Unit is Dead= Checks if a unit(s) is dead. If it is, the condition is fulfilled.

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Hopefully some people found this guide useful. Just remember:

USE THE BLOOMIN’ QUESTION THREAD!!!!