Unique / Custom Settlements for Strat Map

[j.a.luna]

Perfect @Sin, it would be ideal if you could create unique models for all the historical capitals of factions and subfactions but that would be a lot of work... For now the most famous and important ones like the ones you say, Rome, Venice, Baghdad, Cordoba/ Granada, Paris, London, Kiev/ Novgorod...

[Anubis88]

I'm probably the biggest sucker for custom settlements for the Strat map on this forum... And these look so so so sick it's crazy. Great work!

[Sin_]

Tsardoms Venice:



Revised Venice


Saint Mark's Basilica was built using the floor plans of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople - the version we see today is a little different in terms of the domes, and didn't have the columns, marble, mosaics etc. as those were stolen from Constantinople during the sack in the 13th century. I'll likely extend the land walls of Constantinople and add this version of Saint Mark's Basilica into it as the Church of the Holy Apostles, given that was nearly as important as the Hagia Sophia. I'll then retexture this one so it doesn't have all the mosaics and marble, given it would have looked more like this at the time:



Tsardom's Venice full view:



Newer full view:



There's still a handful of buildings I need to retexture/model, which you can probably spot. I've updated St Mark's Campanile (the bell tower in the square) as that's a fairly recent build (and the Tsardom's one is taller than the empire state ), the old one from the time would have looked similar to the one I've done. The other thing I want to do is make the Doge's Palace next to St Mark's Basilica more accurate, as it should have looked similar to this:



Technically, it would have been more of a castle at the time, but in 1172 Doge Ziani commissioned it to the above (well based on best estimates). It wasn't until about 300 years after the campaign start date it began looking more like it does today.

I've reduced the vertices in the old Tsardom's model by nearly 40%, so have plenty of details I can add without straining the engine as well!

[j.a.luna]

WOOW @SIN!!! You are a f... machine in strat map models! Pretty amazing and historical! i think this is what sship mod needed and was missing on his campaign map

[Max.1985]

This is really amazing!!

[keksimir]

Absolutely freaking phenomenal!

[_TotalWar_]

This is amazing, I'm looking forward to see this in-game.

[Sin_]

I'm probably the biggest sucker for custom settlements for the Strat map on this forum... And these look so so so sick it's crazy. Great work!

Thanks! Heh I admit I've done the same over the years, but it's a shame there aren't more modellers for historical settings in this.

Thanks for all the positive feedback to everyone else as well!

[Sin_]

Finished off Venice. I got a little disappointed with the detail not showing as well in game, so examined the lighting for the strat map as everything did look a little shiny. I found SSHIPS settings were at 125% Diffuse and 30% Specular!! Probably won't mean much to most, but those are ridiculously high for a game engine.

I've put them to a setting where you still get the sun is shining on buildings effect, but you don't lose the detail. Looking far better, along with the other cities I've previously done.

Venice before in Tsardom's:



New model:



I went a little extravagant and added bridges, which upped the vertices/poly count, but it's still about 30% less than the old model. I've found out that you can't have unique ports for factions - can only have one per culture, which is a shame. I updated the existing southern Europe port to make it look a little better and more Mediterranean, plopped it on the island near the Arsenal so it blends in and means the ships can leave from that famous shipyard.





Next on my list is Baghdad, given it was the richest and largest city in the world during the Arabic Golden Age and hasn't been modelled by anyone yet:





I'll likely do Paris after that, as I haven't seen anyone release that city in a mod yet.

[Khevsur]

Tbilisi







https://foreigners-georgia.blogspot....of-tiflis.html

old tbilisi maps



https://ka.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%83...3%A1%E1%83%90)
https://www.gegma.ge/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...82_%281%29.jpg

https://ka.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%...ilisi_1782.jpg

https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess...f35b268e59e20f

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://thechiefendoflife.wordpress....-1856-cropped/
https://www.google.com/search?q=tbil...Vu0rZ8UW_rxHIM
https://www.google.com/search?q=tbil...Vu0rZ8UW_rxHIM

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E1%...P6PiSC68SPC6pM


https://georgianjournal.ge/culture/3...s-artists.html

https://www.google.com/search?q=tbil...0gIiP9KSKPULWM

[Sin_]

Tbilisi

Would be interesting and pretty unique! I'll add it to the list.

Now onto the bad news I did some playing around with the custom cities, and found that upgrading another city overrides the faction creator you set in the strat map, so Thessalonica turned into Constantinople when I upgraded it to huge. Silly me as I was focusing on testing the upgrading for the unique cities.

I've been digging around for a solution or alternative way to get the cities in, but it appears the engine is just limited in that respect. The only options are:

1) Not have any unique cities

2) Sacrifice a faction for each unique city

3) Reserve huge cities for unique cities/capitals and they start out with huge walls, none of the prerequisites to get them would be needed, so they don't start out overly powerful than they should but obviously at an decent advantage. If you start a capital not as huge, once it gets upgraded it becomes unique (the problem is if you capture an enemy capital and upgrade, it will get your unique capital e.g. Venetians capture London and upgrade it to huge, London will look like Venice.

Looking through the files in mods with unique cities, I believe they've just gotten around this by limiting upgrading entirely and/or using unused factions, which I think takes away from a lot of aspects of the game. For SSHIP all the factions are used. Rather than limiting huge walls to only unique cities, you could always have lower level walls provide the next tiers perks so non-unique capitals can upgrade to an equivalent huge city e.g. large walls provides huge level defences and buildings, a village provides town level defences, buildings etc.

I kind of like the idea of capitals being strategic plus the bonus of them all having unique city models, but depends on what the Devs for SSHIP are comfortable with in order to get these cities onto the map.

[keksimir]

Ras:


https://ras.rs/utvrdjenja/stari-ras

https://oblakbeli.com/wp-content/upl...-600x400-1.jpg

The first two links are the only reference we have of what Ras would have looked like in the medieval period.
Very close to it is the "Trgoviste" area. Essentially a market area.

The other thing that can be added to the model is the Sopocani monastery: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Pudelek%29.jpg

[j.a.luna]

Bravo for the great model of the city of Venice! and wishing to see more unique models... but the problem you have encountered regarding the upgrades of the rest of the cities in unique models is a serious problem... That could ruin your work and the strat map models of sship mod... So is possible that you know if the developers of Tsardom mod could help you with this issue?, there will be some way to keep your historical city models and at the same time the rest of the generic models....

[Jurand of Cracow]

Would be interesting and pretty unique! I'll add it to the list.

Now onto the bad news I did some playing around with the custom cities, and found that upgrading another city overrides the faction creator you set in the strat map, so Thessalonica turned into Constantinople when I upgraded it to huge. Silly me as I was focusing on testing the upgrading for the unique cities.

I've been digging around for a solution or alternative way to get the cities in, but it appears the engine is just limited in that respect. The only options are:

1) Not have any unique cities

2) Sacrifice a faction for each unique city

3) Reserve huge cities for unique cities/capitals and they start out with huge walls, none of the prerequisites to get them would be needed, so they don't start out overly powerful than they should but obviously at an decent advantage. If you start a capital not as huge, once it gets upgraded it becomes unique (the problem is if you capture an enemy capital and upgrade, it will get your unique capital e.g. Venetians capture London and upgrade it to huge, London will look like Venice.

Looking through the files in mods with unique cities, I believe they've just gotten around this by limiting upgrading entirely and/or using unused factions, which I think takes away from a lot of aspects of the game. For SSHIP all the factions are used. Rather than limiting huge walls to only unique cities, you could always have lower level walls provide the next tiers perks so non-unique capitals can upgrade to an equivalent huge city e.g. large walls provides huge level defences and buildings, a village provides town level defences, buildings etc.

I kind of like the idea of capitals being strategic plus the bonus of them all having unique city models, but depends on what the Devs for SSHIP are comfortable with in order to get these cities onto the map.

I think we'd like to achieve 1, but 2 is out of question and not efficient.
Now for 3, I have a few questions to understand better:
(a) is it so that there's 1 unique model of a city per faction (as it replaced the huge city model)? I would mean that you can have only 30 models - but then if you'd introduce Thessaloniki (so 2 for the Romaioi), one of other faction would have no uniqe model.
(b) the moment when the map model changes is only when you upgrade from large_city to huge_city. What follows, you can upgrade from, say, town to large_town without that change of the model on map?

On your proposal:
- the "village" level is so rare on the SSHIP map that I would be positive on your proposal - we could do that;
- the issue is: there's so much other stuff (files) that should be adjusted as well, that it may be not reasonable to do that (alternative costs of our work, or just interests) - and in some aspects we may even be unable to get coding skills to change parts.

Anyway, me, I'm personally open to the discussion (don't know about @Macaras, @Belo, @kostic).

[Anubis88]

I don't really remember what the issues with the custom settlements were. While i was with EBII i know it was rejected out of hand, but not because it wouldn't work gameplay wise, but because Rome/Carthage/Alexandria in 272BC would look different than Rome/Carthage/Alexandria in 100BC, so better to just have generic settlement :S.

IIRC it has to be a huge city that can't be upgraded for it to work properly. But i don't know what the limits were. I'll ask around

[Miszel]

Hey! Nice work!
The way we dealt with it in Tsardoms was to use huge city and citadel(highest castle) level only for the custom cities.
With "faction variants" mechanic from Kingdoms it means that you can have 2 custom city model for each faction + 2 per each culture.

[Sin_]

Hey! Nice work!
The way we dealt with it in Tsardoms was to use huge city and citadel(highest castle) level only for the custom cities.
With "faction variants" mechanic from Kingdoms it means that you can have 2 custom city model for each faction + 2 per each culture.

Thanks for confirming - it's a shame you can't disable the functionality where upgrading a city overrides the faction creator, would solve all the issues

[Sin_]

(a) is it so that there's 1 unique model of a city per faction (as it replaced the huge city model)? I would mean that you can have only 30 models - but then if you'd introduce Thessaloniki (so 2 for the Romaioi), one of other faction would have no uniqe model.

You can play around with who gets what, and can use Citadels if you run out of model "spaces", but that requires a bunch of work in converting Citadel mechanics to act as cities. In your example, you could give Lithuania a unique Thessalonika city model for their huge city, and just have their capital not be huge (so they'd only ever get a huge city by conquering another one), and then set Thessalonika to huge with a faction creator of Lithuania.

(b) the moment when the map model changes is only when you upgrade from large_city to huge_city. What follows, you can upgrade from, say, town to large_town without that change of the model on map?

That's correct - any towns/cities below huge their upgrading isn't affected, they just upgrade as normal. We'd be ring-fencing huge cities for specific settlements, which goes on to the next point ...

On your proposal:
- the "village" level is so rare on the SSHIP map that I would be positive on your proposal - we could do that;
- the issue is: there's so much other stuff (files) that should be adjusted as well, that it may be not reasonable to do that (alternative costs of our work, or just interests) - and in some aspects we may even be unable to get coding skills to change parts.

That is the issue, it would be a fair amount of work in the EDB bringing the level down potentially. It depends on how badly you'd want settlements that don't start out as huge initially to be upgraded to have the same benefits and capabilities of huge cities. If there are enough unique (huge) cities at the start, it probably isn't much of problem and makes capturing them more strategic. Again, they don't have to have all the upgraded buildings, just the walls.

There can also be huge cities that don't have a unique city model, it will just fall back to the cultures default huge city - the critical thing is that any huge city needs to set at the outset of the campaign start, and nothing can be upgraded to a huge city during the game.

[Jurand of Cracow]

@Sin_, a few more questions:
- if a city starts the game at lower level (eg. town) - would it keep your map model through the consequtive upgrades: town->large_town->city->large_city?
- would your model be save-compatible (and your minimod would function like a patch)? I mean: a player may start in 1132 with the standard models, but then he could apply your mini-mimod in 1250 and only then the new models would appear in-game? If this is save-compatible than (1) it could be used even without any other adjustements, (2) your minimod could be tested agains pitfals before we get on the other files for adjustments.

Anyway, I think that a potential upgrade for a number of cities to huge cities should take place in the SSHIP game. In this context it's different from the Tsardoms mod.
However, I think we could get rid of the village level, rename the levels one-level bolow (village->town, town->large town etc.). Remaking the initial set of settlements should be feasible. Then EDB - also, I'd think. The EDCT - perhaps also. Then I don't know which other files would be concerned, frankly speaking.

As said, we could start doing it only after you make a reasonable set of models and test averything works. Reasonable I mean: at the end almost each faction (but Mongols and slaves) should have such a model, but close to 20 would also be ok. Maybe we could skip also some other, I don't know.

[Sin_]

@Sin_, a few more questions:
- if a city starts the game at lower level (eg. town) - would it keep your map model through the consequtive upgrades: town->large_town->city->large_city?

I can set it to do that, but you run into the problem of when you upgrade other settlements, it will switch to the unique model i.e. Jerusalem has the unique model for a city, large city and huge city, but when you upgrade a large town to a city as the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it will turn that town now turned city into another Jerusalem - it's why you'd have to reserve huge cities for the unique city models.

- would your model be save-compatible (and your minimod would function like a patch)? I mean: a player may start in 1132 with the standard models, but then he could apply your mini-mimod in 1250 and only then the new models would appear in-game? If this is save-compatible than (1) it could be used even without any other adjustements, (2) your minimod could be tested agains pitfals before we get on the other files for adjustments.

Originally it would have been, as it is just graphical, but because we'd need to set the huge cities at the outset and nothing further, it wouldn't be. In theory you could have it save game compatible, you just would need to consciously not upgrade your cities to huge. Not sure how competent the AI is in upgrading it's cities tbh, never paid much attention to what they are doing in them

However, I think we could get rid of the village level, rename the levels one-level bolow (village->town, town->large town etc.). Remaking the initial set of settlements should be feasible. Then EDB - also, I'd think. The EDCT - perhaps also. Then I don't know which other files would be concerned, frankly speaking.

I could prob have a stab at it as a proof of concept. Looking at the files using Notepad ++:

- desc_strat should be able to move them down a level en-masse
- EDB to move the building reqs down a level, should be able to do it en-masse as well. Walls would need to be edited so it reflects on battle map.
- descr_settlement_mechanics will need to be moved down a level
- text > export_buildings to change the upgrade names
- text> event_titles to change the notification that a village/town/large town/city/large city is ready to be upgraded
- text > shared to change the actual names e.g. large city is now huge city.

The cities models for the cultures would also need to be renamed i.e. eastern_european_huge_city would need to be eastern_european_large_city (assuming you'd want to stick with the way the cities look as well).

Probably need to swap the UI for the settlement icons as well when you look at the settlement info, but not really important. How out of date are the 0.98 version of these files compared to what is currently being developed?

As said, we could start doing it only after you make a reasonable set of models and test averything works. Reasonable I mean: at the end almost each faction (but Mongols and slaves) should have such a model, but close to 20 would also be ok. Maybe we could skip also some other, I don't know.

Not sure I could commit to creating a unique settlement for every faction - even 20 is a big ask but I was planning to do the most important ones, such as Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, Cordoba, London, Kiev. Ultimately you could have one for every faction with this approach, but just need to be mindful of the engine's vertices limitation.

I'm fairly confident with the ones I have listed that limit wouldn't be reached. Even with the 12 or so listed, that's a nice amount of high quality, unique cities, and the rest can upgrade to default "huge" cities.