Adding building slots in cities?

[Centurio Pax]

Somewhat into my campaign I noticed that the expansion of cities is limited to 3 (for small cities) and 5 (for large cities) building slots for cities without ports. Is there a way to increase that to 4 and 6 respectively?

[Centurio Pax]

*Update*

*Note: I originally wrote this for myself.*

I decided to try to add a building slot to region 131 first. It’s the Etruscan town above Rome.
Everything I will talk about next is in the ESF-file under COMPRESSED_DATA > CAMPAIGN_ENV > CAMPAIGN_MODEL > WORLD > REGION_MANAGER > REGIONS_ARRAY > REGIONS_ARRAY – 131.

First I added a REGION_SLOT_ARRAY by duplicating one.


Number 3 is new, I changed the first number to 701 to have an unique ID. I changed the last number from the second line from 2 to 3 since they appear to count upwards.

Line 3 and 4 designate what kind of building slot this slot is. On a minor settlement it’s possible to have a primary slot, a port slot and multiple secondary slots.

I have no idea what the rest does but they seem to be the same for all the regions.

I also changed the GARRISON_RESIDENCE ID to an unique number; 874.

Unfortunately only changing this didn’t work.


So I went on to see if I could make sense of SETTLEMENT_EXPANSION_MAP_DATA



The first SLOT_MAP_DATA seems to designate the position of the main village building.

The second SLOT_MAP_DATA is only used in regions with a port, which this one doesn’t have.

The SECONDARY_SLOT_ARRAY appears to designate the positions of the expansion slots for secondary buildings (farm/temple/barracks).

SPRAWL_BLOCK appears to designate the total layout of the village.


I have added the SECONDARY_SLOT_ARRAY -2.

The expanded SLOT_MAP_DATA pretty much looks the same as the other ones (except the port one, which is empty).

The numbers on the left appear to be as follows.

The first number is 0 for the primary building, 1 for a port if it’s there, 2 and upward for secondary buildings. So I made the number 4 for my new expansion slot.

Numbers two and three designate a location on an x/y axis. Specifically it’s the center of what I think is the building location.

I have no idea what the fourth number is or does.

SLOT_FOOTPRINT_ARRAY and SLOT_ZOE_ARRAY have 7 respectively 10 locations on the x/y axis.
SLOT_FOOTPRINT_ARRAY draws a figure that’s either 3-3-1 or 1-3-3. (for all non-capital regions at least, I didn’t check the capitals) So:
0-1-0
1-1-1
1-1-1
Or:
1-1-1
1-1-1
0-1-0
They are ordered as follows:
0-5-0
6-1-4
7-2-3

Number 1 in this figure is the same location as the one in SLOT_MAP_DATA.
SLOT_ZOE_ARRAY draws the same figure but also has, in this case, 3 other ‘tiles’, which border the other ones. The amount and locations of these extra tiles vary but always border the other ones.
The order of the entries is as follows (example):
1-4-7
2-5-8
3-6-9



SPRAWL_BLOCK contains all the above locations and more. Each SPRAWL_HEX_MAP_DATA contains the above entries.

The first two numbers designate a location on the x/y axis.

When the location is also listed in one of the SLOT_FOOTPRINT_ARRAY for this region, the first system Boolean is true, else it’s false.

When the location is also listed in one of the SLOT_ZOE_ARRAY for this region, the second system Boolean is true, else it’s false.

The third Boolean is always false for this region, I have only found ‘true’ entries on regions with ports, have not yet figured out what it means.

Then there are 9 other number entries. I do not know what they stand for or what they do. I do know that locations belonging to the same SLOT_FOOTPRINT_ARRAY have all 0's except for one which can be seen in the above image. That number is the same for all those locations.

I have tried to add an expansion slot by a SECONDARY_SLOT_ARRAY, drawing out a new location inside the existing SPRAWL_BLOCK's, and I have tried drawing one outside the existing SPRAWL_BLOCK's by adding new entries.

Unfortunately when I try to expand the city with the extra slot it keeps saying that: “A character is blocking you from building here.”

I hope anyone else is triggered by this and has a clue as to what is causing this. I think it is possible to add slots, I just don't know how, yet.

In case anyone is interested: province 7 is Italy, ‘growth’ can be added by changing the number in Faction_Province_Manager_Array – 0, province development.

[Labrat07]

I hope you figure it out bro because I am getting tired of those little towns. All towns should be a minimum of four slots in my opinion. Will be checking back in to see if you have made any progress. Good Luck

[Jingo]

Unfortunately I think even if you DID add the building slots the problem is there is no room in the graphic for them, at least in provinces full of settlements like Italia. It'd actually be easier to just ADD a whole new settlement for those provinces with only 2 or 3. I think the boxes are pre-set to 4 for non-capitals, and if you added a fifth you'd have this weird building jutting out of the box looking really lame (IMO, untested). A solution though may involve setting the BOX only to look like the capital's (6 slots), while not actually changing the settlement into a capital as far as actual settings (i.e. take the graphic from the capital). Then we could allow towns to have 6 slots which should more than placate most (extra 2 slots x 3 towns = extra 6 slots in some provinces).

[vialabo]

Any town that doesn't have a port could have another slot added without graphical oddity.

[Jingo]

Any town that doesn't have a port could have another slot added without graphical oddity.

That's not really much IMO since by the time you get a ton of landlocked settlements you're already so big you've pretty much won the game unless playing as Parthia or Helvetii or someone who starts landlocked. At most in a normal game that'd maybe give us 5-10 more slots. Honestly just creating ONE extra settlement in a province with only 1 or 2 towns would achieve the same thing and be much easier (give about 6-8 more slots)

Or perhaps someone could create a new graphic or find a way to stretch the current one once we get the slots figured out....

[Dekent]

This is one of my annoyances too, I'm kinda hoping it's easy to change in one of the tables we can't see yet in the pack files....Honestly I would have much rather had more buildings to build and more upgradeable cities, right now everything caps before 100 turns in game. They could of had a system that allows small cities to upgrade to large and large to metropolis or something

[Grazgul]

Is adding new settlements achievable?

Apologies to hijack this thread but I would love to figure this one out!!!

[Centurio Pax]

I have switched the building slot that I added with one of the old ones for testing.

When I expanded the city's third slot in game it showed on the new location, not on the old. So that works fine, and I didn't make a mistake somewhere.

That means that something else is blocking the fourth building slot. It's possibly something not in the startpos file.

[vialabo]

There are a couple files in the db that have something to do with slots. I haven't actually gone through them though.

[Centurio Pax]

Good! Could you point me in the right direction?

I'll have a look and see if I can make sense of it.

btw, I must say that the graphics of city expansion respond nicely to replacing the location of the expansion.

[vialabo]

slot_template_to_building_superchain_junctions, slot_templates, slot_types, slots_tables, start_pos_region_slot_templates_tables.

From what it looks like in the db they've made addding the port slot seperate from the other regular slots. For examples go to start_pos_region_slot_templates_tables.

You might run into trouble because of that.

[Centurio Pax]

Thanks!

I didn't find anything in those tables though.Nothing that might suggest needing any changes at least. The slots I want to add are secondary slots, and there is nothing that limits the ammount of secondary slots there.

The campaign_variables table suggests that the infrastructure for up to 4 secondary slots is there. That does mean that adding a fifth secondary slot to a capital might be harder.

I did find something interesting in the map_data.esf apparently there is a lot of info there that corresponds with the start_pos.esf file. Looks like there area lot of double entries in both files. It might be as simple as adding an extra slot in the map_data.esf. (Probably isn't.) Strange thing though is that I did manage to place buildings on the map in a different spot. That would make all the location stuff in the map_data.esf practically obsolete, which would be strange. So only thing that might be blocking it there is the missing slot.

Didn't have time to test it, so that will have to wait until I'm home.

Unfortunately I lost 30 minutes yesterday trying to get PFM to work. Took me that long to think of running it as administrator.

Also, the message saying "A character is blocking you from constructing a building here." must be coded in somewhere. Could that be in the packs too? If I could find that it might tell me what to change.

[Centurio Pax]

I've been changing variables to see if anything would help. Nothing helped. A lot of the entries don't actually look like they do anything.

I'm now thinking there's a variable that's 2 for minor settlements, and 4 for major settlements that needs to be changed.

I hope I missed something but I certainly ran out of ideas.

[Labrat07]

I am beginning to think some of the files needed to make some of the changes we all want in different area's are still either locked or we can't find. The quest continues though, good work and good luck with continued progress

[super_newbie_pro]

Hi. we monitor near your research and work on it. We envision a model where we can add not only new locations, but also full of new buildings. good luck

[crzyrndm]

but also full of new buildings.

Shouldn't that be relatively easy?

building_superchains: 1 entry per basic building (ie. 1/background colour)
building_levels: Sets construction time/cost
building_upgrades: Seems self explanatory
building_effect_junctions: Sets the economic/order/squalor/growth etc. for each building
building_level_armed_citizenry_junctions: garrisons
etc. (mostly faction/culture/sub-culture stuff)

ui/buildings/icons
All the little icons are stored there. Possibly tied to building levels using the same name as I can't find a db entry for them.

[super_newbie_pro]

Anyone have tried to add locations buildings ? is does not crash the game ? Each new building is linked to an animation in city. If we add news locations, how does it work ? Crash or not ?