Construction Capability

[jcrohio]

Construction Capability. Can't find anything in the manual. Only one old post in the forums which was relatively inconclusive. Does it have any bearing on constructing units? I see the numbers in cities but see no correlation to units being built. I assume it restricts the number of units that can be built in a city.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jack

[Gray Fox]

I have never encountered a limit when building units. Captain Orso may know if this was a feature that made it into the final game but was not fully developed.

[Citizen X]

Afaik construction capability affects buildtime. Where cities have land capability and harbors and such have naval capability. This should effect mostly large units like big brigades, cannons and ships. Just order a few timberclads along the Ohio and you will see that days-to-build differs quite well. Also, it makes a difference if you build stuff in seperate stacks or all in one whole stack.

[jcrohio]

Thanks for the help. Just bought 6 transports and put them in 6 different ports - some with Naval Yards, some with ship yards and some just regular harbors. Didn't seem to make any difference. Build time was all the same.

Jack

[Citizen X]

Hm, maybe look at it after one turn resolution. Just had a Timbreclad ready one turn earlier than in the one with smaller capability.

[grimjaw]

OK, help me out here. Where are you seeing the term "construction capability"? Are you referring to the text in-game that shows up when you hover over specific structures? Like when you hover over a structure and see "land constr. capa." and a number?

[Citizen X]

Yip. Not what you are talking about?

[grimjaw]

Yip. Not what you are talking about?

I'm sorry, is that a yes or a no? I'll assume you're talking about what I referred to, "land constr. capa." or "naval constr. capa."

Orso listed an explanation in this post:

viewtopic.php?f=368&t=43737&hilit=construction+capability

I can flesh it out a little more, but it won't help much. This is only with regard to CW2; I don't know about the other games. The text in game comes from a string description for values in the structure file. They're defined in LocalStrings__AGE.csv (truncated value shown below)

strBuildWeightLand;Land Constr. Capa.
strBuildWeightNav;Naval Constr. Capa.

BuildWeightLand and BuildWeightNav are values in the structure files. AFAIK, they are only given non-zero, integer values if the structure is related to building units. Here's the values for city, harbor, and gold mine structures:

city
BuildWeightLand = 3
BuildWeightNaval = 0

harbor
BuildWeightLand = 0
BuildWeightNaval = 5

gold mine
BuildWeightLand = 0
BuildWeightNaval = 0

The value in game will go up as the level of the structure increases, but I don't understand the way it increases. A level 2 city has a BuildWeightLand value of 5, and a level 3 city has a BuildWeightLand value of 6. The level 20 cities in NYC and Philadelphia have BuildWeightLand values of 24. Go figure.

Recruiting depots are BuildWeightLand = 50, etc. Since there can be multiple structures in a region that have a non-zero BuildWeightX, I suspect it sums them up to give a total for the region. If I understand correctly what Orso posted, higher numbers would seem to me to indicate higher weight for building land units. I don't know if that directly corresponds to element/unit weight. Orso's post indicates the value is displayed to the user even if the game isn't using it to compute anything else. One of the developers or maybe a beta tester could tell you if they are actually used in CW2. If none of those are forthcoming, you could always test it by backing up your structures folder and then setting all the BuildWeightNaval values to zero. If CW2 is actively using that to compute what size unit can be built in what region, a zero value would prevent any naval units from being built, or at least naval units that have weight.

If that wasn't you were referring to, I apologize for a superfluous explanation.

[Citizen X]

Ok. We are talking about the same thing.

I never observed a cap in the number of units that can be build in a city. Some units require a certain structure to get built, so such a cap in numbers might still exist.
Naval units need a naval facility to get built, e. g.. Those also speed up the the construction time for ships, depending on the size of the structure. They influence the repair time of ships in a similar way.
This basically applies to construction of land units, too.
All Ageod games of a certain built number of the game engine work similar in the handling of such things.

[KamovHelix]

Okay, so that's what I did think I understood.
At first I thought it's allow for unrealistic situations, but the troop numbers and industrial output are kept at reasonable levels by all of the other factors, so that's fine.