[DrPraetorious]

Incidentally, I believe that one of those dark fortresses is *under water* and the other is for surface provinces.

I'm not sure what difference this makes - if any.

I'm working on a random special province generator - it's a bit less extreme than the one in Gandalf's er... uniquely challenging maps. These are designed to add a little spice to multiplayer, so they are only placed at strategic locations - actually, they are placed at provinces that are as close to equidistant from all existing start locations as is possible (possible given that I'm lazy and my heuristic doesn't work that well.) If you know perl you can easily change how my map-funker works, however.

Anyway, I need two things, provinces, and squads to put in provinces. Squads (which can actually be any number of units strung together) can be reused as guardians in multiple special province placements.

Special provinces have both names and numbers.

Here's an example of how this all works out. I generally use #s instead of names so that I don't have to escape quotes (\") but it might be harder to read, maybe I should shift over:

-- special province 16, fortress of a barbarian khan.
$mask[16] = 0;
$descript[16] = "#poptype 26\n#fort 2\n#knownfeature 562\n#knownfeature 483\n#knownfeature 492\n#knownfeature 500\n";
@{$squads[16]} = ("major khan","horse chief","horse chief","ancestor shamans");

$def_squad{"major khan"} = "#leader 930\n#mag_priest 4\n#randomequip 4\n#bodyguards 10 1577\n#units 20 939\n#units 20 939\n#units 30 938\n#units 30 938\n";
$def_squad{"horse chief"}= "#leader 136\#randomequip 2\n#bodyguards 10 137\n#units 40 137\n";
$def_squad{"ancestor shamans") = "#leader 1709\n#randomequip 4\n#bodyguards 10 139\n#randomequip 2\n#leader 1710\n#randomequip 2\n#bodyguards 10 139\n#leader 1711\n#bodyguards 10 139\n");

If, when placing special provinces, it rolls 16, if the mask meets requirements (there are none, so that's easy) it'll put a simple hillfort, a dragon mountain, a wolven gate, a tundra, a haunted torture chamber and a a khan, two horse tribe chiefs and three shamans (with significant armies each) into the province.

If anyone wants to contribute more such useful snippets, it'd be quite coo. I can reformat them for you if you find all the \n stuff difficult to deal with - just separate each entry with an extra line of blank space or something.