I checked out the thread barocca pointed to...

Quote Originally Posted by barocca
now here is a little thread about castle maps

but the basic idea is the same
...and I also looked in the Viking Era-file, for comparison, but it is also set at "4".

Now, I've still never played a Viking campaign, so I have no idea how many castle levels are possible or what they look like (and I cannot imagine large stone-built fortresses and such being appropriate for that era!). So I was puzzled to see no difference in this setting, for the Viking campaign.

My initial thought had been that 4 meant "0 to 4", hence 5 possible numbers, representing the 5 main (medieval) castle types, selected by an algorithm like {1 + RANDOM(4)} but this doesn't make sense if the more advanced castles don't appear in the Viking campaign. (*)

"Flat", "Plains" and "Hilly" is only three terrain types, so it can't be connected to that, either. Or so it would seem.


* - on the other hand, maybe the Viking tech tree limits you to building only the most basic wooden forts and they never saw reason to amend the SetNum... thing?


So I have, similarly, drawn a blank on this one, so far. You've probably thought through most of what I've just said already but I thought I'd add it to the thread, to save other people the bother of mentioning it.


Just for ease of reference, here's the note from the Era file

Code:
//========================================
//Castle Map Groups
//specifies the number of castle map groups
//available to this start pos. 
//This is needed for determining which
//castle maps are to be used for each region
//in siege battles.
//========================================

Hmmm... those battlemap inf files all start with something like this :-

Terrains:: LUSH ARID ROCK_DES TEMPERATE

That's four items...

(note: SAND_DES only ever seems to appear in the Architecture:: entries in those files)