Tying Building Requirements to City Level, not Upgrade Chain

Hello all; I posed this question on the ezboard forum and was referred here. Apologies if it has been answered elsewhere, but I had a pretty thorough look through the scriptorium and this forum and couldn't find an answer:-

Basically I'm fed up with having to build an entire new sequence of temples every time I take over an enemy city and demolish their indigenous one.

After all, a huge city should be able to build a pantheon directly, without having to go through the rather silly (and tedious) exercise of first building a shrine, then a temple, large temple, and awesome temple (The same applies to other buildings such as barracks of course, but you don't have the same incentive to demolish those)...

If I edit the export_descr_buildings.txt file to remove the "upgrade" line after each of the temples - and presuming that this doesn't cause a crash - I guess it might mean that the building requirement is tied only to city level, but then I guess it would also be possible to have several temples in one city?

Do any of you experts know if such a change is even possible, and if so, how to make it?

Thanks!

First, here's a reason not to do what you want to do. :) The rebuilding from scratch represents the time required to shift the religious views of the local population. In other words you are doing more than just putting up a new building.

Assuming you don't care about that, I can suggest a couple of ways to do something close to what you want. The easiest way to go is to make all temple types buildable by all factions. About all you will need to do is change the faction reuiqrements in [rome]/data/export_descr_buildings.txt, and add suitable descriptions in [rome]/data/text/export_buildings.txt. This won't allow you to build any temple type you want when you capture a settlement, but it will allow you to upgrade the exiting one to your culture's version of the same type. (This is what I have done in XGM)

You could also get a bit more sophisticated and use branching upgrades that would allow you to upgrade a given temple building to one of several types. But this would be complicated, and probably not worth the effort.

Thanks DBH!

Regarding the time taken to change their view, I had the feeling that there was a period of unrest for about 2 or 3 turns that was hard coded and not necessarily related to any temple building (or lack thereof), but what you say makes good sense.

However I might give your first option a go just for the sake of trying.

Thanks again.

You can easily balance it by making the temple buildable in 8 or 10 turns. Still a good 7-10 turns shorter and accounts for the view change. You should be forced to build at least a shrine first though.