[$300] #89 | Sub-Regions

[Eric.B]

Price: $300

Description: This bounty adds sub-regionals below regions. For example, the "Middle East" is a sub-region of Asia. With this bounty, we'll use sub-regions in the districting system and a sub-regional sales report.

But this feature is mainly the base for several other sub-regional-focused bounties.

Requirements: None

Required By: #90, #95, #329

Concerns: This bounty adds extra data to the city structure files, which means more work than the bounty. Players might not like how I split cities into sub-regions.

Eric's Opinion: On its own, this bounty isn't worth it. But it will serve as the base to a few other bounties that would make good use of sub-regions. With that in mind, it should be funded so we can get those features. I have discounted this bounty in the hope that it gets implemented.

Links:

[JC_Denton]

Quoting some additional relevant information from a support discussion:

But in short, the sub-regions bounty removes the hard-coded limits to the districting system, thus allowing for more premade districts defined in the xml files. Case in point, you already described sub-regions in your example, "splitting Asia into two or three top-level districts." If you're splitting a continent into three, you're making sub-regions of that greater region...

So you pretty much just described sub-regions and how they'll be implemented in the game.

I'm also not really sure if it's a bug or a missing feature that there seems to be a limit of 6 regions.  Not a big problem for me, I had a list of six regions before having the idea to just add more in the XML, but maybe an alternative way to go about that bounty.

Continents were hard-coded into the game. They were moved to XML at some point in the last 6 years so translators could translate them. I did not originally design the game for translating, nor was it designed to add more than 6 continents. As a side effect of that, I started allowing people to change the names of them for regional maps.

The sub-region system simply allows for more districts in the game. Instead just a predefined Asia group (id=5), we'll have a predefined Middle East (id=7), South East Asia (id=8), and North Asia (id=9), and all of those will still be a part of the current Asia group (id=5). This will likely be done by adding a sub-region variable to the city.xml file. In game, it'll work like any other district. Work wise, it's practically the same amount of effort as adding additional regions to the system, except now we'll be able to support 2 regions per city listing... And then of course, we'll have a few more reports generated based off sub-regions.

I forgot to mention in typing all that, Vehicle type popularity is specifically hard-coded to the 6 continents. And that is why the system is hard-coded to begin with. If it were dynamic, you would have problems with missing vehicle popularity in the database and in the xml.

That in turn is also another good reason to have sub-regions a separate variable for cities. It allows for all the benefits of being able to add more predefined districts, without breaking the game database... At least until the bounties to break that data is funded.

This definitely makes this bounty (and possibly #90) rate more highly in my evolving spreadsheet-of-favorite-bounty-items.

I think #89 + #90 is what would be required for my modding goal: being able to set regional popularity for e.g. Scandinavia, Southern Europe, USSR, etc.  Though this one (#89) would probably allow having Scandinavia, Southern Europe, USSR as regions in reports, just not with separate vehicle popularities.  Currently I could have those regions in reports, but they would use the continental popularity hard-coded in the game, which wouldn't really make a lot of sense.

[Eric.B]

Though this one (#89) would probably allow having Scandinavia, Southern Europe, USSR as regions in reports, just not with separate vehicle popularities.

Correct, but the bigger use case for #89 is to have Autoproduction "restrict to sub-region" feature in #95. #89 lays the ground work in the engine/data for sub-regions. #90 and #95 are the toppings to the pizza, if you will.