Quote:
Chazar said:
Very nice! Very useful! Thanks for including the .sxc files, saves the conVersion trouble!
|
You're welcome.
As I recall, there was a bit of a request from several people in one thread to have all the DBs also in OO format, which I also personally prefer over MS Office file formats (I won't go near those with a ten foot pole, if I can help it...), so I thought it would be the decent thing to do to give people what they wanted.
Quote:
Chazar said:
Comments:
-Does the site database really imply that it is always useless to search for Air4 if one has searched for Air3 already and the terrain type is not Plains?!
|
Yes. The site levels and terrain restrictions have been lifted directly from the source code of Dominions 2.
Palace of Dreams is the only Lv 4 Air site, and can only appear in plains terrain. Likewise, Fire 4 searches outside waste provinces are useless, because Prison of the Desert Sun can only be found in wastes and is the only Lv 4 Fire site.
It hardly matters, really, because I tend to use Auspex, Augury and the other radar spells (and Acashic Record in late game) to do searches, much faster and more cost efficient than having mages running around costing money and being able to do useful things only every other turn.
Quote:
Chazar said:
-I find it confusing that "special" is used in two ways: once within the level column to indicate a level-less national site and within the frequency column. I assume that a special frequency means that the site will not appear unless specified within the map file, right? (Not explained in the legend what special means.) If so, then those two "special"'s are not related and maybe replacing "(special)" with "(National)" in the level column might save others the confusion I had...
|
Thanks for pointing out my oversight in forgetting to put the explanation into the Legend sheet. I'd been working enough on the file to summarily overlook it and never notice anything.
You're right, the Level "special" and Frequency "special" are unrelated. The level could easily be changed to "national" or something else, but I kept Sunray's notation in this case. The DB is a rework of his original DomPPP Site DB that just had new sites tacked on without rechecking old ones.
The special frequency means exactly what you suspect, that the site must be scripted manually to a map file, or is only generated by events (such as The Deepest Cave of the Province).
The source code is not consistent in this regard, because there is a list of special/scripted/national sites as well as some others that never appear randomly, while some of them are mixed in among the randoms but are scripted or special or National (e.g. the Carrion Groves). E.g. Iron Mine, Copper Mine, Gold Mine, Silver Mine, which are always event or map file generated, despite being common, it's some kind of idiosyncracy of the coding.
Quite a few other sites have also been marked "special", because unlike the script-only sites, these can appear randomly, but they have other operations done on them (e.g. assignment of special guardians like Starke the Ice Druid for Starke's Ice Cave) that invoke additional scripts.
The rarities in the source code are 0, 1, 2 and 5, which stand for common, uncommon, rare and special/script-only/scenario specific sites. That's why when comparing DB and source yields a couple of inconsistencies (like the mines). I don't know what to do about it, it's confusing to try and make totally accurate notation without resorting to long explanations, as this post indicates.
Edi