Indestructible buildings in VI?

[Axalon]

Hi all,

Main halls moderator & part time samurai, Lord Naga, revealed in another post that 2 buildings in MTW-VI apparently are “indestructible”, as in not ever razed when a province “changes management”. I thought this was fairly interesting and relatively unknown so my guess is that perhaps others as well might be interested in this little secret. This is enough for me to start a thread on the subject to straighten the whole thing out and as a bonus “spread the word” about it.

Ok, one of these was the “forest clearing” building apparently - so far so good, but what about the other one? Which is it? Anybody?


Indestructible buildings in VI:
---------------------------

1. Land Forest clearing
2. ???


- Cheers
---------
Drone, this is definitely something you should include in your MTW wiki-project
if you ask me (that is if you have not already done so)....

[gollum]

Wasnt it that Furherbunker thing?

j/k btw

I knew that the Forest Clearing (thanks for correcting drone and raz) farming upgrade of VI is indestructible - VI had much more farming upgrades than the MTW campaign - and the initial ones took long to complete, so it made sense to have an indestructible one half way in order to have a saving bench mark for AI investments. It may have been also to show that once you claim land from the forest, the forest is unlikely to get it back (its an almost permanent action).

Just hold on - Asai Nagamasa will come to the resque soon.

[drone]

Drone, this is definitely something you should include in your MTW wiki-project
if you ask me (that is if you have not already done so)....

The entry for the Forest Clearing does mention that it is indestructible. Not sure if there was another building with the same property.

If the modding section of the wiki ever gets underway, it's definitely something that should be mentioned there as well as a useful workaround to a problem.

[Raz]

Forest Clearing is the indestructible one. Also, I always believed there was only ever one indestructible construct in VI (being Forest Clearing). Unfortunately, the indestructible trait is hardcoded and it's impossible to transfer it to other buildings - at i believe so.
I haven't put all too much effort into testing it, one test i suppose could be swapping the same line and the same upgrade number in VI's build_prod.txt as the Forest Clearing building with a different building and see what happens.

[caravel]

I've only ever found one, but I've seen posts referring to another, several times now. Personally I think it's a myth and that the Forest Clearing is the only one.

It is possible to use it as another building, but I am also wondering if it could also be used with upgrades and if so would this mean that the upgrades are also indestructible?

[gollum]

It starts sound like cryptonite-based cloned enemies of Superman.

[Garnier]

What exactly is hardcoded though? Is the building name hardcoded as indestructable.. or what?

What I really think we need to know is if it's possible using this fact to somehow make the castle building in the main campaign indestructable. This would help AI teching a lot of the castle was never lost.

[drone]

I would imagine it's hardcoded to the localized name in the build prod file:

3	IMPROVED_FARMLAND	"Forest Clearing, Basic Farms, Improved Farmland1, Improved Farmland2"

the "Forest Clearing" part of that. I don't think they could use "Improved_Farmland" (the Name field used to link dependencies) since this is shared between the VI and Main campaign. To make a building indestructible using this I would imagine you would have to call the building a "Forest Clearing", but have the desired real name in the NAMES.txt file.

This is all speculation on my part, I have not actually tried it.

[western]

It is used in the MedMod to set a level below which farmland can't be razed (ie it is the second level, 40% improved farmland). I've used it myself (suitably disguised) as a proxy for economic development in pike and musket - once you cross that threshold in a province, you can't be pushed back over it.

My experience is that you can use it at any level in a tech tree, but you can only use it once and you can't use it in a specialised chain (castle, port).

It's a very useful device so I'm intrigued what others have discovered, and if there is any second indestructible building (an MTW legend I suspect)

[caravel]

I would imagine it's hardcoded to the localized name in the build prod file:

3	IMPROVED_FARMLAND	"Forest Clearing, Basic Farms, Improved Farmland1, Improved Farmland2"

the "Forest Clearing" part of that. I don't think they could use "Improved_Farmland" (the Name field used to link dependencies) since this is shared between the VI and Main campaign. To make a building indestructible using this I would imagine you would have to call the building a "Forest Clearing", but have the desired real name in the NAMES.txt file.

This is all speculation on my part, I have not actually tried it.

I think you're right drone in that it's likely the label. The labels for "Royal Knights" and "Ghulam Bodyguards" also have some hardcode linked to them, this is what allows for the early to be retrained into the high and high retrained into the late etc.

[Garnier]

Is it possible that "Basic Farms" are also indestructable? This could be my mind making up memories, but that thought just came to me.

[caravel]

No unfortunately not. Basic farms take an absolute age to build and I can remember being very annoyed when they get razed. They should have been indestructible but aren't.

[Axalon]

Many thanks for the replies guys,

I think that we can all assume that there only is one building with this attribute - forest clearing – as in indestructible. If there was another building someone would have probably pointed out which one it was by now. Anyhow, the fact of an indestructable building at all is remarkable and I'm certain that one could come up with some good and interesting uses with it - if needed sometime.

On a general note, I also believe what Drone suggests and that it is the exact name/label of "Forest Clearing" that is the key here for the hardcoded attribute to kick in. My previous experiences with MTW supports that kind of thing. All hard-coded stuff is very specific and non-bendable on a general principle. You can at times fool the program of course but only so much. Sometimes you can apply all the right labels on some “file-X” or an entry within a file and still the game won’t have anything to do with it. It is hard-coded to act that way. I am fairly certain that it works the other way around as well - as in it must have a very specific label to function as desired within the game-program. It’s yet again hard-coded and designed to act that way. It isn’t much fun but that is how things usually are with MTW (especially so in plain MTW - the VI-version always have been a friendlier place to work in).

So, thanks again all of you guys for sorting the whole thing out. I am sure that there was a lot of people other than just me that found all of this interesting.

- Cheers

[Knight of St. Ignoramus]

Hi. New poster - old lurker here. Here's what I know about Forest clearing improvement: it is possible to make an entire 'line' of Forest clearing buildings. To prove it, just fire up Gnome editor, open build prod file, scroll down to row 22 and find string:

Improved Farmland1, Improved Farmland2, Improved Farmland3, Improved Farmland4

(column 3). Now replace it with:

Forest Clearing, Forest Clearing, Forest Clearing, Forest Clearing

[Knight of St. Ignoramus]

(pictorial evidence)
Pic1: first forest clearing improvement already built, selecting second

Pic2: second forest clearing built, selecting third

Conclusion: both improvements are indestructable, second takes longer time to build, is more expensive, AND generates more income (function as expected)

[Raz]

Wow! Amazing, simply amazing!
That's a great find, Knight of St. Ignoramus. Now I wonder just how far we can take this, I really wanna try this out.

[drone]

With that change, I see it is possible to have multiple building times/costs within a line, but I'm not sure it would be possible to have two separate building names. It would have been better if CA had used the building line notation (for example, castle7 as used in the MakeBuilding:: lines in the eras files) to determine the localization text.

[Axalon]

Yeah… Don’t get your hopes up to much there Raz - while this is an interesting discovery here by Knight of St. Ignoramus (and appreciated as such. And, a good call with pic-proof as well), I think what Drone is trying to say is that from an operational/practical perspective it will unfortunately enough only have limited uses.

The critical name-references will be completely messed up and the game will probably discard all but one entry (either top or bottom entry, no matter how correctly entered within the files since there are none distinction between the names). It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible to create any distinction what so ever between them as far as descriptions, nametags and GFX go - while still retaining the "indestructible"-trait for the building in question. Thus it will be rather goffy “in-game” if applied - even so on this limited scale.

In this case we have, 4x”Forest Clearing” while we still can essentially only apply one text-description, one distinctive name-tag and one GFX-file (technically perhaps up to 4 in regards to GFX in the whole game but not in any faction) which will seriously limit the practical possibilities of this inside the game. In essence, "nice try but no cigar". Sorry…. Now, for what it is worth and since the other guys failed to do so. I’ll do the customary and formal “Welcome to the Org-routine” for you. Here we go….

Welcome to the Org Knight of St. Ignoramus and may your “active”-time here be long and prosperous and the ‘ol lurker-ghost put to a well earned and eternal rest. The MTW-areas (regardless the section) are always looking for fresh and eager posters so why don’t you try some of that since your shameful lurking days are finally over?

Anyway, it is better for the MTW-community and it might very well be more fun for you as well.


- Cheers
-------------
There is an introduction area as well at the “Entrance Hall”, perhaps you could
check and try it out? But you already knew that, now didn’t you? You ‘ol lurker you!