The Complete EDB Guide - discussion

[LestaT]

 dockyard requires factions { carthaginian, eastern, parthia, greek, egypt, } and hidden_resource major_port or factions { romans_julii, } and building_present_min_level barracks_roman muster_field and hidden_resource major_port 

Just would like to check. Are these lines correct ? It didn't caused CTD, but haven't tested it yet.

Base on RTR Gold, I wanted to make for roman to have that level must need another building built.

[nikolai1962]

Those kind of conditions have never worked for me. The only kind that have, have been of the form:

requires factions { a, b, c, } or factions { x, y, z, } and a_condition

i.e the first set of factions has no other conditions other than the factions.

[alpaca]

I don't know if I remember correctly but when I once tested this I think the game took all that's to the right of the "or" as one statement and the condition directly on the left of the "or" as the other statement.

[LestaT]

Those kind of conditions have never worked for me. The only kind that have, have been of the form:

requires factions { a, b, c, } or factions { x, y, z, } and a_condition

i.e the first set of factions has no other conditions other than the factions.

So, if doing that only factions x, y, z, have the condition ? I guess I have to do other means, by making the x, y, z, still be able to build but not having the intended bonus.

Something like what we call here , a white elephant project.

Thanks.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Just in case this was missed or not mentioned elsewhere, it can possibly help a situation that I haven't seen many folks mention. nikolai1962 (magnificent bastard) figured out a way to get around this nasty error in 1.5:


(typed out for search engine catching):
Script Error in data/export_descr_buildings.txt

Building DB error - faction X has gap in building prior to X (unavailable at level zero)

Here is his explanation - you may chuckle at how he fixed it - edited a little by me for use by a non-EB audience and a few other clarifications (he hasn't been on the site in a few days - hope he forgives my meddling ):

This error message is the annoying 1.5 thing where the parser doesn't like breaks in faction requirements across building levels.

for example: levels b1 b2 b3

b1 require greek, roman
b2 requires greek
b3 requires roman

Even if b2 and b3 are set up as optional upgrades from b1 (which works in game, and worked without error in 1.2) the initial parser doesn't get it and throws an error message, stopping the game from successfully loading.

You can suppress the error by having a "not" condition somewhere as that throws an error too but it isn't caught by the show_err mechanism so it cancels the other one out (no idea why).

In limited cases where the a *break* building level has no conditions you can get round it with:

b1 require greek, roman
b2 requires greek or roman and not_here (not_here being a hidden resource we have in EB when we don't want buildings to be buildable - as it never appears in a province)
b3 requires roman

So he has a way to stop the error message from occurring, basically by introducing another "mistake" (as EDB doesn't like "and not" requirements - they mess up the building browser and it won't read the building). In this case, two wrongs certainly do make a right.

[Makanyane]

Lots of brownie points if anyone can explain this one. Based on tutorial we thought using:

academy requires factions { eastern, roman, } and hidden_resource sughdian

etc. should disable academy buildings - as sughdian isn't in our regions.txt

two of us were at different stage of modding text files, one found above line worked in EDB other one using same line found it didn't disable building. After many hours copy'ing and pasting sections of working / non-working EDB have found:

Within mod (without changing any other files) EDB line;

academy requires factions { eastern, roman, } and hidden_resource sughdian

works to disable academy buildings if line

city_plumbing requires factions { barbarian, roman, }

is not modded within EDB,

if the above line is ammended to;

city_plumbing requires factions { barbarian, x, roman, }

and here 'x,' can be literally 'x,' or 'faction,' or 'culture,' then the and hidden_resource requirement for the academy is disabled and the roman cultures can build them in any province again.

These appear to be from entirely different building trees and I can't think of anything that would link them. Help!!!

[Makanyane]

Have just re-tested the above using a vanilla version of BI 1.4 (mod was on 1.6) just in case excess intake of fermented apple juice was messing up yesterdays results.

Added new hidden_resource, 'unbuildable' to vanilla EDB and used it to disable building of all barracks, farms and academies. As expected these no longer appeared in building browser or construction screens in game.

Played about with

city_plumbing requires factions { barbarian, roman, }

line

have tested this with requires factions including:
{ barbarian, goths, eastern, hun, nomad, roman, } in various combinations and that is fine; barracks, farms and academies all remain unbuildable.

However adding: 'carthaginian,' 'carthage,' or 'x,' in combination with any of the above gives in game result that barracks remain unbuildable, but farms and academies re-appear on building browser (for Romans) and can be built. Also if playing as Saxons and Goths the barracks remain unbuildable, but they now have the ability to build academies and higher level farms that they / their culture is not on the requires factions list for!

Thought that barracks not being effected could be due to position in EDB relative to city_plumbing. Cut and pasted entire health building section down to bottom of EDB and we're back to everything working as expected i.e. all three sets of buildings stay unbuildable even with 'carthaginian,' in city_plumbing.

So it seems that when game can't find something (?what) related to city_plumbing for 'carthaginian,' 'carthage,' or 'x,' instead of crashing or giving an error message it just decides in retribution to reverse the effect of your and hidden_resources below that point!

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Oh. Maybe it has something to do with carthage not autodefaulting to another culture for building images. Go open descr_ui_buildings.txt. What does your first few lines look like? up until the "temple" lines begin? Something like this?

lookup_variants
{
	carthaginian eastern
	carthaginian egyptian
	eastern egyptian
	greek roman

I don't have the original installed files anymore - but making sure you have a proper set of images to default to for that culture may be the issue. (as nikolai figured out I think)