Auto-generated campaign battle maps alteration with Metadata

[Sirlion]

Thanks to a series of coincidences I started messing around with campaign map files and terrain attributes this afternoon and I made an interesting discovery that might result in nice developments.
Apparently, what uanime5 stated 6 years ago in his guide about NTW mapping was not correct: changing the file metadata.dat from the campaign_maps subfolders actually works and it works well. As a matter of fact, I believe this file is crucial to the auto-generated system that employs it to find coordiates on the campaign map and replace them with actual calculations of width and height for the generated battle maps.

I'll explain further: the file metadata.dat is found in all campaign_maps\yourmapname subfolder. For example, Italy has a very large metadata.dat (4 MB!) while Europe only 2 MB. I have no idea why this is - the file cannot be opened with conventional means, in text format it's just gibberish - however changing the European Campaign metadata for the Italian Campaign one proves clear results.

For one, as the Italian campaign is clearly fought over mountainous terrain, the height must be higher and the slopes steeper. Secondly, since they are all villages \ small cities inside mountain passes or small valleys in concave terrain, the city must be nearer to the player to prevent it to be on a nearby mountain. This is all confirmed by my experiments.



This is Konigsberg, metadata from Italian Campaign





Konigsberg, same situation with regular European metadata





Berlin map, regular European metadata





Berlin map, Italian Campaign metadata




The city in the distance wasnt planeed to be this resistent

[izzi]

Nice work. I will watch closely how this goes further. Thanks for the info.

[rohan97]

I did this for empire and my custom maps are showing up but i feel like some other map is also coming along that is messing it up when it comes down to the height Itself do know where i can find that file?

[Sirlion]

Empire doesnt have any metadata.dat, I suspect it was added later in development as an extra measure, or it was created internally therefore is not extractable.
I'm afraid that you cant use it at all.