creating tiles for 'outside city' usage but with city properties

ahoy folks,

is there a way to make a tile with fixed city properties, but is outside city limits? I'm thinking of so called "Border outposts" in various tech & city levels, that have fixed LOS (depending on tech/city size), area of influence and specific units storage capacity limits and specific ongoing resource requirements, which all depend on tech level and city sizes. basically a "tiny fort", as SMALL version (@ city 3) it's nothing more than a wooden outlook with a few tents around (LOS 3, ZOC 1, 2 units/chr storage), at city 4 it's a MEDIUM outpost/fortress and has wooden palisades and a smaller stone-tower (LOS 5, ZOC 3, 5 units/chr storage) and at city 5 they are LARGE/BIG "mini fortresses" all built in stone (LOS 8, ZOC 6, 10 units/chr storage).

depending on size they give various healing/defense bonuses to units within those tile-storage.

The graphics side of the tiles i've already mostly done (aside missing various details, like KINGDOM SITTING SOLDERS which DO exist as FALLEN SITTING SOLDERS), I've a good idea what parameters i'd need, but i'd want to know if that's actually possible. am thinking it'd work a similar way as pionners abilities to built city-startups. but fixed.

Also, such outposts are not upgradeable to higher tiers (needs destroyed and built a new one), in additions they do NOT allow to 'take over' resource-tiles! the ZOC radius is intended for (as far as i understand it) that the game-engine is not spawning mobs in the ZOC-radius.

My reason of such outposts are as they had them "back in the day" to "see whats coming" with "kingdoms military/sovereign influences".

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Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

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Unless you add world resources that you can build the stuff on, I don't think it's possible. We can also not add functions like "build city" for the pioneers those are hardcoded, for now.

I am also not sure exactly how these improvements work. Even if you add sight to them, it is possible that (the way modding works for now) it just gets added to the city instead.

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I like the idea and have wanted to make my own unique "Camp, Castle, and Trade Center" improvements. Here is what I have pondered on what it'd take...

You'd need to make your city tile a custom "city hub" and somehow make it so it can't build any structures (build distance = 0). POSSIBLE RIGHT NOW
- You could make a minor race that uses your tile for their capital... but that doesn't help us much.
We'd need to copy the "Pioneer Pack", make it into a "Engineer Pack", and create a new "Pioneer" ability that settles this custom city hub instead of the standard city. UNKNOWN RIGHT NOW
Figure out how to make unique improvements for unique city hubs (ie. Can only build a few unique upgrades to the tiny fort and not city improvements). UNKNOWN RIGHT NOW

Unfortunately, like Heavenfall said, it does seem that the Pioneer's "Settle City" function is hardcoded right now with no way to replicate it. We just have to wait and hope that Stardock delivers.

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I've tried using several workarounds to "build" forts. None worked.

<RequiresCity>False</RequiresCity>
<RequiresResource>False</RequiresResource>

Didn't didn't work, so I then tried to create a spell which would allow my avatar to build forts in any friendly land...that didn't work either. I can change the environment of a tile, I can change the terrain of a tile, but I can't seem to "magically" place an improvement on a tile.

Modding is pretty weak as it is right now, especially without any sort of official documentation...I'm REALLY hoping this beef up what modders are able to do.

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well my idea was based on having a "micro city" on its own tile outside citylimits, that can not expand and has defined/fixed properties, like running costs in food, gold, materials and later in metal and crystals too in varying degrees.

what about creating a "unit" that TRANSFORMS into such a "microcity" like the Pioneers do ?

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Don't know a clean solution but maybe a workaround like an improvement that adds -10 housing and a lot of negative prestige so the city couldn't grow and train troops...
but adds influence / sight range so it could still act as an outpost. (deny monster spawns, healing stationed troops, defense bonus...)

Normally you don't want negative growth in real cities so that might be enough of an abuse deterrent.

Although people would probably still build a market. For shopping and gold but one gold isn't going to affect the game one way or another.
Besides, your troops have to buy their booze somewhere.

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I like James009D's approach, I might play with that later.

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