The Complete EDB Guide - discussion

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Bizarre. Can you eliminate that conditional and still recruit the unit in your second level of barracks? In other words, are you sure it's that added conditional that causes the CTD?

[Dol Guldur]

Yes, the unit is recruitable without the conditional. I even tried it with another unit and it CTD withthe conditional added (even with a different building tree).

It must have something to do with the second level of barracks rather than it being the first. The weird thing is that the same line works in the third level of barracks! Actually, that is not quite true as it CTDs when you build the 3rd level barracks.

EDIT: Both the barracks and the conditional buildings are new buildings (and new trees) btw.
EDIT2: using vanilla buildiing conditionals (market trader) does not get rid ofthe CTD either. Do building conditionals only work in the first level of new building trees???

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Ah. Buildings that recruit troops have weird problems unless you use the barracks tree. For one, I'd also make sure no bonuses are being given by this building (we had CTD's with non-barracks buildings that allowed unit recruitment and bonuses both, until we removed the bonuses). I'm sure that building conditionals can work in higher levels of new building trees though.

[Dol Guldur]

Ah. Buildings that recruit troops have weird problems unless you use the barracks tree. For one, I'd also make sure no bonuses are being given by this building (we had CTD's with non-barracks buildings that allowed unit recruitment and bonuses both, until we removed the bonuses). I'm sure that building conditionals can work in higher levels of new building trees though.

Teleklos, that was the answer! Thank you very much. This was not known to me. I wonder wny one earth it is so?


EDIT: CTD #2 - it seems that each building level will only accept 4 recruitment lines of units with building_present_min_level conditionals. 5 or more wil cause a CTD. Have you found the same?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

We weren't even sure that it was legitimately an issue, but we took the bonuses out and it *seemed* like that might have stopped the problem, so we kept away from doing that, even though we weren't sure of it. Now instead of doing that we will let bonuses be present in another structure and then be dependent upon whether or not the recruiting building is present in the town or not. I've no idea at all why it does that - so many things about this system don't make sense...

As for your second one, I don't think that is possible. We have a lot of these, with conditionals for buildings in their recruitment lines, and it doesn't cause CTDs.

[Dol Guldur]

I can only add 4 (this is in the level 4 (top) barracks). 5 or more def. causes a CTD. Interestingly, it is 6 or more that cause a CTD in the level 3 barracks.

There is no distinction between the two that I can see. This is very frustrating; it was supposed to be a half day recoding and it's now day 3

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I can glance at a totally new building we implemented for 1.2 and see more than 30 lines of recruitment text inside one level (a level four one, top level) and every one has multiple recruitment conditionals. Not all of those have building restrictions, but about 10 do. They require building minimum levels.

Have you downloaded EB just to look at the EDB files and compare? If you have got a copy of our EDB for reference, I'm refferring to the nomadcamp complex, and the fourth level, shahrdarm, recruitment lines. It's a new building and has lots of recruitment in all levels.

[Dol Guldur]

Yep, just looked at it - I notice you do have bonuses in them (!) and that (as far as I can see) no more than 4 building conditionals (negatives) in any one level. ???

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Oh. I misinterpreted what you were saying. Sorry. I thought you said no more than four recruitment lines with building conditionals, not more than four in one unit's line. But we do have more than four when we use "or" conditionals (look at core building levels, which force the use of governments).

You must have an older build also - since we have removed all bonuses from those non-barracks buildings that recruit units (really just the nomadic buildings I think). I'm pretty sure, but not certain, that they were the cause of some CTD's for our Yuezhi faction (pontus in vanilla coding terms).

[SigniferOne]

Teleklos, don't forget that some of these CTDs and limitations you've found for EB could be solely due to the 1.2 version, and fixed in 1.5. So I really think you'll find the going getting easier after upgrade, and maybe you won't have to limit yourself as much.

[Dol Guldur]

Does anyone know of a mod in BI 1.6 that has an edb with a new building that contains a level which has more than 4 units being made available for recruitment by virtue of building conditionals?

If so, I need to look at that mod's edb!

Thx.

[nikolai1962]

edit: deleted as not useful

[nikolai1962]

edit: deleted as all nonsense :)

[nikolai1962]

edit: deleted as all nonsense :)

[nikolai1962]

edit: deleted as nonsense

[nikolai1962]

edit:

game crashs when a building has both a bonus capability and recruits units with a building conditional.

1) it may crash while loading the campaign.
2) under some conditions it will crash when constructing the building
3) under some conditions it will crash when you right-click the building in the construction list

[Dol Guldur]

Thx. for the reasearch. yes, you cannot have building bonuses and recruitments conditoned on buildings in the same building level it would seem. And, also inexplicably, the total number of active recruitment lines for building conditioned units cannot exceed 4 as far as I have found.

After a week of pondering and coding I cannot work out the principles by which these things work (or do not work!) :(

[nikolai1962]

I think it is a text/space issue related to why i was messing with it in the first place to try and get rid of the name of the conditional buildings all being placed next to the unit in question (or splurged all over the building info if there was more than one conditional).

There's space allocated for capabilities and space allocated for recruitment but but the extra text added by having a building condition on the recruitment messes it up.

[nikolai1962]

A couple of other things.

Some confusion (including mine) over the two trade bonuses.

trade_level_bonus

only affects land trade, seems to have same effect as getting trade rights, possibly same as a road level (didn't check fully as was mainly checking something else). basically adding it to a building carthage has at the start in vanilla 1.5 tripled the trade value of it's land trade with the numidian city to the west.


trade_base_income_bonus

This is th eone on the markets. Adds 10% to the base value of land trade and sea exports (not imports). It won't look like 10% if there is already another building giving a bonus e.g if base value of the trade route is 50 and you have a market there on its own then the value will go up to 60 i.e market gives +20%. If testing and add a bonus to another building that gives 10% of the 50 not the 60 so the total value goes up to 65 not 66. I think this is where some of the confusion over percentages comes from.


trade fleets

This capability seems to do nothing other than display on the building info. Changing the value of trade fleets on the port buildings and firing up the game, adding levels, making levels multiple upgrades etc etc.

Basically the game creates one trade route for each of the first three buildings in the levels list (if the route exists for that region.) Changing the number of trade fleets doesn't seem to affect either the number of routes or the value of the routes.


descr_ui_buildings.txt

bunch of lines in this file of the form


temple_of_battle_shrine shrine
temple_of_battle_temple temple
temple_of_battle_large_temple large_temple
temple_of_battle_awesome_temple awesome_temple
temple_of_battle_pantheon pantheon
temple_of_farming_shrine shrine

what these all do is give the game an alternative name to look for when loading a building graphic. so in vanilla in tells the game for all the different temple buildings all the shrine level ones load the shrine graphic etc.

This can save on the number of graphics you have to keep track of, rename etc. For example if you had modded the game to have seperate barracks for each of the barb factions called brit_barracks, gaul_barracks etc, instead of having a separate graphic for each one you could write

brit_barracks barracks
gaul_barracks barracks
etc

in this file and the game will look for the graphic called "#barbarian_barracks" in the UI folder/pak file.

[nikolai1962]

taxable_income_bonus:

displays in building info as bonus 1%, 2% etc depending on the value of the bonus. however what it actually does is add 20 per point i.e taxable_income_bonus bonus 5 adds 100 to the tax. it doesn't seem to relate to population size.

I added a building with a tax bonus of 5 to the 4 starting briton cities in 1.5.

(Normal tax) / Tax bonus 5 / Tax bonus 10
Londinium 681 / 781 / 881
Samarobriva 578 / 678 / 778
Deva 501 / 601 / 701
Eburacum 501 / 601 / 701

negative values don't reduce the tax amount.


trade_base_income:

if you set this to a negative value it does reduce the trade income even if there are no other buildings with trade bonus but this bonus always displays as "increase in tradeable goods" even if you have made it negative.


law and happiness:

negative values only negate the bonuses from other buildings but don't reduce the city happiness in themselves but negative values of law bonus does increase corruption.

[Dol Guldur]

Thanks for your testing, Nikolai! It is appreciated and I am taking it in ;)

I've so little time to reply or edit the Guide due to it being pretty hectic here on the Fourth Age at the moment - we could do with some more staff

[Atilius]

edit:

game crashs when a building has both a bonus capability and recruits units with a building conditional.

1) it may crash while loading the campaign.
2) under some conditions it will crash when constructing the building
3) under some conditions it will crash when you right-click the building in the construction list

I've nearly posted to this thread several times but was puzzled by the fact that my experience didn't really square with yours. Now things seem to be making a bit more sense.

I was seeing a crash when trying to build a colosseum (which allows races) and enabled recruitment of certain units if other buildings existed. This scared me away from using building conditionals for unit recruitment. Perhaps I'll go back a try it again.

Thanks very much for the hard work nikolai.

[Dol Guldur]

Another problem with using building conditionals for recruitment of units...

The feature that allows you to right-click on a unit name listed in the building description scroll seems to be affected by units whose recruitment is dependent upon buildings (new or vanilla). This causes a displacement and a CTD thus:

UNIT LISTED----ON RIGHT-CLICK

unit1------------displays unit1 info scroll
unit2------------displays unit2 info scroll
unit3------------displays unit3 info scroll
BCunit4---------displays unit5 info scroll
unit5-----------displays unit6 info scroll
unit6-----------CTD

BC = Building conditioned unit

Can anyone confirm this? It is possible other factors may be at play, but it seems like another quirk of the building capabilities to me.

[nikolai1962]

I get something similar where i have too many units buildable by one building. CTD's when I right-click the building. Comment out one of the units in turn, while leaving the rest, and it is fine. All of this seems to be to do with the allocated space for text in the units buildable section. Either the quantity of text or the number of lines?

[Dol Guldur]

I do not think it has to do with the normal limitations; this occurs when there are only a few recruitment lines.

[TiFlo]

Hi all,

I came across this page this morning and found everything I've been looking for for two weeks now
I just wanted to say you guys saved me lots and lots of hours of work to fix my mod: http://forums.rometotalrealism.org/i...howtopic=18311

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[TiFlo]

Hi all,

I came across this page this morning and found everything I've been looking for for two weeks now
I just wanted to say you guys saved me lots and lots of hours of work to fix my mod: http://forums.rometotalrealism.org/i...howtopic=18311

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[nikolai1962]

I do not think it has to do with the normal limitations; this occurs when there are only a few recruitment lines.

Yeah but i was thinking each extra bit of text for the building the unit is conditional on might use up a unit slot? Dunno. I pretty much gave up on giving units building conditions as the game doesn't seem to have been designed with it in mind. Instead i was trying to make all the units buildable by the buildings they were conditional on and those buildings conditional on other buildings. It's a bit of a pain but seem to run into so many problems otherwise.

[Dol Guldur]

Yes, I see what you mean. There may be some truth to it. I always avoided using building conditionals until recently. I wish I had not succumb - still, it saves on coding and tech trees used. I do not have enough tech trees left to revert to a faction-specific building tree for all three recruitment buildings now :(

[nikolai1962]

annoying isn't it