I was thinking that building with level higher than, say, 10 shouldn't be upgraded/replaced AFTER their retirement date. This would preserve, in long games, nice historical centres.
Also, their removal cost should be 3 times the current one for building of the same level.
Isn't this also very eurocentristic, thinking of china (or old japan or korea or europa before 50 years) where historical building common were scrapped if there was enough money? Imho so stuff should be rather gained by tourist attractions.
and you can also buy this building yourself ;)
One could think of an additional flag for such buildings to preserve. But this makes only sense, if the city growth will be poerformed with timeline, which is not (yet?) done this way.
I think a historic center (add an option in simuconf.tab for those who don't want this feature) would be a great addition to the game.
Maybe you could do this optionlike this:
#if this is 0 the function is deactivated
#elseit gives the number of years ...
years_for_replace_building=0
How about this:
#if this is 0, buildings over a certain age will not be replaced, leading to a 'historic district'
#second option is what the game will consider historic (in years)
allow_replace_historic=0
historic_building_age=50.0
In German forum they told me, that this flag already exists.
Translated answer was:
Edit: In pak128 it is not included in the menus, but it is available by pressing "K" (no artwork for cursor and button so far)
Forgive me. I do not see the connection between that and the previous posts. Please explain.
If you buy the building, you can preserve your city centre, because the AI will not change the buildings anymore. That's actually, what you wanted, isn't it?
No. What we've been discussing would happen automatically, and produce something like the historical centers (old town/stare miasto) you find in many of the older European cities.
The AI would replace like normal, but if a city got to the moment where it would replace a certain building, and that building was over a certain age, it would consider it a historic building and look for another tile to place a new building. So, if the historic cutoff were 50 years, and the city wanted to upgrade a building, it would replace it if it were 49 years old, but not if it were 50 years old.
My suggestion was to have two flags, one to determine if the city would replace 'historic' buildings, the other to determine (either in whole years or in years.months or in years.1/10years) how old a building needed to be to be considered 'historic'. Nothing like this exists in the game, AFAIK, and I have not personally seen a buy building option in the game ever (I use pak64, in case that makes a difference).
The 'buy building' option is a more or less hidden flag so far. It is accessible via pressing the 'K'-key.
More or less this is a manual function of something similar, you talk about. For this, you edit the historical city centre on your own. By buying the houses, the AI will never replace these buildings, unless you sell them back.
I think one of the non-easy aspects of your automatic function is, that you need proper dates of introduction and expiration dates of buildings. If you look, which different kinds of buildings can be built at a certain time in the game, the city centre would look really weird. (In fact, the buildings are alright, but the dates in the dat-file are sometimes strange).
But try out the key-option. I made good experience with it, leading to a similar result as you wanted.
Pak128.Britain, and, I think, the latest nightlies of Pak128 have a tool button for "buy building", but they are in a submenu, not the main menu.
wouldn't it be better to include buy button in object information window? Current implementation is pretty unintuitive.
Then do not use it. Buying/preserving buildings is against a *transport* simulator. Doing so at your own fun. (And it is pretty easy to add a button for this.)
But buying up buildings is not the suggested extension.
I understand that this is a transport game, but I think the proposed extension would be a good flavor enhancement. Maybe it's not important enough for the core programmers to do it, but I think someone ought to take the idea and build a solution for it, because it would add flavor to the game.
Just to point out, that in fact both requests do make sense in a transport game:
I use the idea of city centres/historical buildings for editing a scenario. When I spend much, much time to construct a nice city, then I also want to preserve that. This is the same as with AI road building, which you can, thanks god, switch off by the cityrules.tab.
More or less, Simutrans is for me not only a transport game, it is also a modeling game. :-)