convert_to in export_descr_buildings, some progress and a roadblock

[Whacker]

Welp, I decided to fiddle with this again, because it's been annoying me since day 1. The crux of the issue is I want to be able to convert the larger city sizes to castles.

I finally saw the convert_to listings at the bottom of export_descr_buildings.txt, and started to fiddle with them. Half an hour later, and export_descr_building_enums.txt edited and some pain and agony with fixing the descr_buildings.txt.strings.bin file, it finally works!

Only, it doesn't work. The building graphic shows up as the roman barracks in the build list, and I can 'successfully' build the castle. When I use "process_cq city" to finish the building, it just goes right back to the city with nothing changed.

My question is, what governs the behavior of the convert_to function? Is this hardcoded in the exe, or is there some file that handles this that I don't know about? I seems like I'm so close, yet just that one last step.

Any ideas guys?

Cheers

[alpaca]

Yeah I tried to do the same and I believe it's probably hardcoded.
I couldn't find anything else that might change the behaviour of this, however interestingly the game is fine if you remove the convert_to buildings or some levels of them.

I guess the game just reacts on the level in the tree.

[Whacker]

Most interesting. I went back in, and in the sections that govern the walls and the wall conversions, I commented out the "convert_to" statements. When I test converted a castle to a city, it converted it to the absolute lowest settlement possible, the sub-village settlement, as I had the option to build the wooden pallisades. The other way was the same, I had the option to build a motte and bailey castle. What's interesting and buggy is that the game I think keeps track of what "level" the settlement was at, as on the last conversion back to a city, I could only build up to the wooden walls, BUT on the campaign map my city showed as full sized, and I was able to build all of the huge-city sized tech buildings.

I don't have and don't plan on buying Kingdoms, and I doubt this is fixed there, but it'd still be nice to know. Is there any way one could get around this through scripting alpaca?

Thanks

[alpaca]

In fact it is possible to convert to larger settlements by specifying another convert_to level, but it's not possible to convert from them as new levels don't seem to do anything really.

And no, there's no way I can think of to script this stuff.

Besides, my current approach is to remove the two highest convert_to_city levels so that castles can't convert anymore either once they're grown pretty large.