How to bypass the 16 industry limit using city buildings

[fultron78]

Hi,

Here is a long-windedd post on the theory behind replacing industries with city buildings. In the next post, I'll include a release of the new Chemical Works and Iron Ore Mine, and maybe some screenshots if I can get that to work.

Enjoy,
Bryan


How to bypass the 16-industry limit using city buildings:

1. Create/modify a city building to produce the desired commodity. Setting the production level to 255 will give you ~12 units / month. Putting it in both production slots gives up to ~24 units / month.

2. Set the last year of construction to a date sometime before your scenario date. This way the building is never built by Loco when the cities begin to expand.

3. When making your scenario, have “bit_1, bit_2, bit_4” flags unset for these buildings.

4. In your scenario, place your building(s) in any desired layout to create a “fake” industry. For example, a set of 1x1 buildings producing the full limit of a commodity can easily be arranged in a 3x3 block to generate 200+ units of cargo per month (similar to a normal industrial levels).

5. Replace all “base” industries with these buildings. For example, the coal/ore mines and oil/chem facilities can easily be switched. The same logic applies for “acceptor” industries, like the power plant.

6. As long as you designate industries for throughput only (ie: require commodity A to produce commodity B), you can open 5+ industry slots this way.

7. Once you’ve finished creating your scenario, edit all of the industry replacement buildings you have created, setting “bit_1, bit_2” flags = 1. This now makes your buildings indestructible, so they won’t be built over by city expansion.

8. Let me repeat this last point: it is crucial that you first build your scenario with these flags unset, then play the scenario with these flags set to 1. If you play it without setting the flags, your new industries will be built over and destroyed as cities grow over time. If you try to build a scenario with the flags set, the industries you add will not produce/accept any cargoes when you play the game.


So far, I’ve discovered a few drawbacks to this method:
1. Production is now fixed and will not change throughout the game…

2. However, it seems you can effectively multiply the amount of production by building a second/third/fourth station nearby. All of the stations appear to collect the full amount of cargo produced, rather than dividing it amongst competitors. (Note: This might even happen for industries, so it could be a “feature” of the game…I haven’t checked closely)

3. Unlike industries, to get the full amount of cargo you need to cover all buildings in your station cachement area, instead of just a corner. This makes 1x1 tiles far more useful than 2x2, as they effectively produce 4 times as much cargo per space.

4. The AI does not recognize or transport cargoes from these industries. Compared to the rest of the farcical things the AI does, this is probably not a drawback.

5. Although these industry buildings are supposedly indestructible, in extremely rare cases I have seen them get built over. I have a very strong suspicion that this is directly related to AI construction nearby, in particular I saw buildings destroyed by the AI to carve its ridiculous track through the centre of a city (as it often does). I have run solo test scenarios (some up to 200+ years) without this happening, but haven’t made a real study of it yet. In any case, the buildings in question survived on their own for many years in the heart of a metropolis, and I have only ever lost 1 tile out of 12+ to AI interference. I doubt there would be any problems for buildings located far enough away from cities. Furthermore, if you try to run a test like this without setting the proper “indestructible” bits, your industries start getting wiped off the map within a few years (and are usually gone within 10 or 15, no matter how close/far away they are from a city centre).


Personal comments
I have separate folders of “BUILD” and “PLAY” .DAT files that I copy into the ObjData folder as necessary, so I can quickly make and play scenarios.

I don’t know which of one of the bits sets the buildings to “indestructible”, but it doesn’t seem to matter if you set all three.

So far I have replaced the chemical works and iron ore mine by taking the individual .png files from those industries and making city buildings out of them. This way they even look like the original industries they've replaced.

This also opens the door to building single “acceptor” buildings for specific cargoes, so you don’t need to clone the entire city set and modify it to accept modded/new cargoes. Also, I never liked the idea of using a busy downtown passenger station to unload a huge pile of goods and food (or cars/gas/etc.). With this method, you can put a block of acceptor buildings at your city limits and call it something like “freight warehouse” or “gas distribution centre”. You could also simulate the “rest of the world” by placing a block of buildings in the corners or near the edge of the map that produce and accept many different cargoes at once.

[The Fjonis]

Now, I don't know much about modding, but this seems like what we've been waiting for! Great job!!

*awaits experts' comments with excitement*

[scrat]

A most excellent piece of research!

[DeletedUser21]

well he knows what he is talking about, I welcome you, and I forget about your 2 topics

Excellent work!

[Steve]

Very nice!

[chevyrider]

Welcome fultron78,
I accidentally saw your input in the Locomotion WIKI some days ago.
Very impressive. I'm sure you make some programmers here very happy.