Getting rid of migrations.

[Albalrogue]

I haven't played BW2 in a long time now and am wanting to start again.
It makes me sad to see that Kayssplace is no more but this site has done a great job salvaging what was left of it. Good job.

Anyways, the biggest problem that I have had with BW2 is that, when doing a military playthrough, I was unable to build a great and beautyful city without winning and not even having to have to conquer a single town (that wasn't already seduced into migration).

So I was wondering, is it at all possible to make it so towns won't migrate at all once you get to the maximum impressivness for them to migrate or even make the required impressiveness to be ridiculously high?

 

[Willy]

I agree with you, the most annoying part of BW2 is the concept that one can take towns purely through impressiveness. I've been working on a solution to this, something which can replace the impressiveness in the game. But that solution is still just a theory that I'm working on.

Currently there are two ways to fix this: (1) is to set the towns impressiveness to an extremely high value or (2) set all the Greek building impressiveness' to 0.

The first way: Set the towns impressiveness to an extremely high value. Can be done by editing the landscape with the landscape editor which you can download from this site. The problem here is, the landscape editor can be very difficult to work with, and you'd also have to go through every land you want to play on. So its very time consuming.

The second way: Set all Greek building impressiveness' to 0. If you open the file PlacementData.xml located here:
Lionhead Studios\Black & White 2\Data\Balance\PlacementData.xml
You can set the building impressiveness'. Here is an example: We'll change the Greek's temple impressiveness
In the file you'll find this kind of format for each building

<object type="abode" name="greek_abode_temple">
    <basevalue impressiveness="6.5" />
    <basevalue impress_falloff="0.7" />
    <basevalue happiness="0.06" />
    <usesmap impressiveness="true" fertility="false" />
    <rule stat="happiness" applyto="all" radius="40.0" startvalue="0.7" endvalue="0.7" />
</object>

To remove the impressiveness we only need to change two numbers
<basevalue impressiveness="6.5" />
becomes
<basevalue impressiveness="0.0" />
And
<usesmap impressiveness="true" fertility="false" />
becomes
<usesmap impressiveness="false" fertility="false" />

When changed the temple's values should be:

<object type="abode" name="greek_abode_temple">
    <basevalue impressiveness="0.0" />
    <basevalue impress_falloff="0.7" />
    <basevalue happiness="0.06" />
    <usesmap impressiveness="false" fertility="false" />
    <rule stat="happiness" applyto="all" radius="40.0" startvalue="0.7" endvalue="0.7" />
</object>

In the game when you build a temple you'll see the impressiveness star appear but there will be no number, and your town's impressiveness won't change. The only down side is that you won't know your towns real impressiveness, it will just always be 0.


Those are my suggestions on how you can remove one's ability to capture towns through impressiveness.

I hope this helps.

 

[Albalrogue]

Thank you for your answer.

As of reducing all the impressiveness of greek buildings, I tried it (years back mind you) and the influence ring that appeared around it was also reduced.

 

[Willy]

I just did a real quick test. When I removed the impressiveness from the Greek temple just as I described above, the influence ring around it was unaffected.

 

[Albalrogue]

I must have tweeked the wrong value then.