Question regarding Towns and Airfields

[Spikes]

Is it possible to place a town without an airfield? IE can 4 towns be placed around each other? If they had to be tied to an airfield, can the airfields be placed elsewhere? Looking at options for "cities" that are smaller than our massive cities.

[Larry]

I'm pretty sure towns from bases can be put anywhere.

[Easyscor]

Minimum distance between square tiles is one mile between because of the different elevations of the verts along the edges. Also, they must belong to different airfields. Otherwise you get errors reported for both conditions, too close and multiple maprooms respectively.

The 2x2 mile tank town tile is an alternative. If you want ack, you'll need to add it.

[ghostdancer]

I actually have never tried to place a town and not attach it to a field. Not sure what would happen if you did that.

As far as I know their is no max distance that a town can be placed from an airfield. As Easy points out they still have a minimum distance they need to be from each other and other objects and I agree with him that the Tank Town object will be your best bet. It doesn't need to be tied to an airfield and its restrictions are not to be touching another object ... so need 2 miles (2 squares) between it an other objects.

Also remember that you can place as many strats facilities as you want. Possibly one of those can fill in depending on what you are wanting to accomplish.

[Spikes]

Interesting...thanks guys. Devil was the one who was wondering so I figured I'd ask. Basically looking for something smaller/less industrial than a city, and I think he looked at some of the other strats but none really fit. Hmm...will have to look into it more.

[Devil 505]

Yes, the strats are the size I'm looking for, but all the buildings are industrial and they have flak towers. I'm thinking that SEA maps could benefit from some medium sized settlements without any military/industrial objects to fill out the scenery.

[Easyscor]

Yes, the strats are the size I'm looking for, but all the buildings are industrial and they have flak towers. I'm thinking that SEA maps could benefit from some medium sized settlements without any military/industrial objects to fill out the scenery.

Have you thought about simply removing or swapping the unwanted items from the tile? If you have the .til files in your tiles folder it's a pretty easy fix with the OE. This sort of thing is my main draw for building non MA terrains.

Ehmm, I can't look to confirm they are shipped with the game's download without a reinstall. Let me know if you need the files.

[Devil 505]

I have not even tried to edit anything yet. I have no idea ho the object editor works.

How easy would it be to take a strat object and remove the existing buildings and guns and place the town buildings along the existing roads?

[ghostdancer]

Some of the current SEA maps already have Tank Towns places on the maps (Blcksea and blckseaw come to mind) to give larger targets than your standard town but smaller than the current cities. We lost the 1x1 city when AH3 was released.

That said many of the European SEA maps that have been created are already close the to the object limit allowed for a terrain so it would not be a simple thing to just go add in new custom tiles since I would actually have to remove other things from the map (airfields, bases, strats) from the map to accommodate them.

[Devil 505]

That said many of the European SEA maps that have been created are already close the to the object limit allowed for a terrain so it would not be a simple thing to just go add in new custom tiles since I would actually have to remove other things from the map (airfields, bases, strats) from the map to accommodate them.

The objects I'm envisioning would be more suitable for Eastern Front maps, where only the large cities have industry.

I'm not looking to convert any existing terrain, except maybe Black Sea.

[ghostdancer]

Okay, so next question are you asking for Black Sea to be modified or are you thining of taking a shot at creating some terrains for the SEA? If you are thinking that I'll send you my guidelines of what I am looking for since I have to review and approve terrains for use in the SEA.

[Devil 505]

Mostly I'm asking if the guys who know how to already use the terrain editor and object editor if they have an interest in making these large town objects for future terrains.

I would not mind learning how to use the terrain/object editors, but I would rather stick to skinning aircraft.


I'm really spit-balling ideas because I would like to see more variety in the objects used in SEA maps since most are out of place in theaters outside of Western Europe. It seems to me we have the items (buildings, hangars, etc) available already to make more unique bases, towns, strats, etc.

 

[bustr]

If you simply want to use the static buildings from the object list to populate a custom village, and it's not for an MA terrain. You gents have always been free to create them. It's time consuming laying down one object at a time. You can create several villages on a test terrain and save them as group objects to be reused. Unless you follow Easyscor's advice and create a custom tile set or a custom object like the town object, you will have no way to paint in streets. Maybe use the new path function and lay down a "view only" street grid then populate your building objects. The view only road objects would not be saved if you saved the village as a group object when you were finished.

Time is the biggest hurdle and I've had a lot of experience with how much time it takes lately to populate MA terrains with static road systems and extra objects aside from fields, ports, vbases, and strats. I just got done updating Oceania with supply paths after submitting riftval back with fixes for terrain and river\road issues that were getting worked out by Hitech.

Devil you can use the skin viewer to look at the building objects available to do something like this. If you can get someone to help you setup a small test terrain with one airfield so you can up on it offline only. Easyscor and the crew here can get you up to speed enough that you can play with combinations of the available building objects to create villages. I suspect the width of a view only road path and a few buffer feet will be the separation you will need for the building objects. It does look like there are a group of buildings designed to be placed together to create court yards though. You can paint down a village from the Euro terrain set and measure Waffle's placements as a benchmark.

Once you have something you like, highlight that whole area and save as a group object to be reused on the SEA terrain you want to update. The benefit is you can rotate that object group's orientation 360 while a square object like a town can only be rotated four directions.

I can always zip up a copy of my test terrain for you so you have something to start with. It will have all the tests I did for riftval on it but, you will have those to monkey with to see what happens. It's painted with the Med tile set so flipping the menu selection to the Euro tile set should be entertaining and instructive for the outcomes.