Preventing Construction Firms from being built

[Wolverine@MSU]

I'm working on a scenario, and despite my best efforts to prevent them, Construction Firms are being built by the game when the map is seeded. Their density is set to "0" in all cities/territories/regions, and it is unchecked in the Industry Availablility list. Any clue as to why they show up or how I can prvent them from appearing?

[Stoker]

I think they are set as "core" city support buildings, just like houses-bakeries-museums-etc and will spawn with city growth. They appear in the "overall industries" and in the city menus as they can be set to be buildable by the player, but setting this to zero or unchecked will not stop them from being spawned . You can see this to be true by "unchecking" "house" in the overall industries menu and then setting "houses" to zero in city menus, and they will still spawn as they are part of the core support buildings.

[nedfumpkin]

There are three different types of buildings in RRT 3. General industry such as your mills and plants, etc that can be built and bought, and then there are limited industries like the bakery and chemical plant. These are all included in the city/region industry list.

The houses, stores, and offices are municipal buildings that are automatically spawned by the game based on the economic situation of the town it is in. These shouldn't be listed in the industry list.

It's not possible to control the municipal buildings since they are built by the residents, however, there seems to be a glitch in the 1.06 patch that permits their building and buying, at least from what I've read, for some reason they are treated like limited industries at the same time as being municipal buildings.

[JFMarvelous]

Please note, you can only own the ones you build, the ones spawned by the game cannot be bought.

[JayEff]

Construction firms have a pretty strong demand for steel and lumber (one of each per year, and they can really shift the balance on a map. As an individual player, you can remove the Construction.BTY and Construction.BCA files from the Building types folder, but as a mapmaker or scenario designer, you are hooped.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Couldn't you just set the building sliders for it to "0" in all cities and regions and not check it in the available industries so it couldn't be built?

[low_grade]

Sounds like the answer is no, Wolvy. But don't worry too much, if I don't want a construction firm in my town (because I own the furniture factory there or the T&D) I just have to make the decision a la James Hill whether the annoyance is worth the cost of razing the firm. I pretty regularly do end up razing for the $200K it costs. Plus I often don't like the 2x3 footprint the firm takes up out of my city, frequently preventing me from utilizing my preferred route. Not sure, but maybe you can set the cost of building/buying construction firms to 10% of normal or something so that razing is really cheap.

But on the positive side, it's sometimes nice to have one in a town where you own the lumber or steel mill, since it helps to boost your revenues. Yes, you won't be able to haul that cargo, at least not for as much profit.

Also, you can often cut off the flow of lumber or steel with strategically placed furniture factories or T&Ds, especially if they're upgraded. But the extra demand there will increase the cost of resources for your factories, and reduce your profits. That's why I usually just raze. I see it as an expected cost of doing business.

[sbaros]

Won't construction firms disappear if you just delete their .BCA & .BTY files from the Tycoon installation in question?
Addition:Instead of eliminating the .BCA & .BTY files altogether, it is a more flexible and elegant practice to assign to the Construction Firm's .BTY at byte address 195 an architectural style code lower than the default 63 (all styles), which will prevent it from appearing in places with certain architectural styles. So, you can regulate whether Construction Firms will appear at a place by defining the architectural style of the place.

[RulerofRails]

Yes, you can do that. Check JayEff's [ur=viewtopic.php?p=18551#p18551l]post[/url] above.

Municipal building seeding is controlled with internal values in the bca files: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1552

1.06 patch added the ability to place municipal buildings via event. My theory is that the non-functioning density sliders and ON/OFF entries in the building list are a trade off for enabling this. Perhaps there is info or at least a clue hidden in some of the 1.06 notes or in an obscure thread?