Hex Action - Hope This Helps
Short version:
To properly change a hex from one type to another (say, burning down a forest (forest -> clear) you need one hex action changing three things: terrain, overlay tile, and string.
Update hexes:
You can either specify which hex or hexes to change by coordinates/radius or by zone. (This part is fairly easy to understand if you have used scripts before, so I won't go into detail here and now)
Change:
First off, like the message says, leave a field empty if you don't want to make any changes. "Empty" for a checkbox is the special undecided state, neither empty nor checked.
There are 6 things to change in this dialog:
Terrain
Terrain Features
Tiles
String
Flag
And the column of check boxes for things you'll find in the editor under "special hexes". Let's explore each in turn, okay?
Terrain:
Change the underlying terrain type. This is what affects units, not how it looks on your screen. (Remember how you normally "generate" the looks of the map out of this raw map?)
This is how you can reduce a town into rubble (change a city hex into fortification), simulate flooding (change clear hexes into swamp) or build an airstrip (change clear into airfield).
Again remember that changing terrain changes nothing of how your map looks, only how it works!
0 = Deep sea
1 = Shallow sea
2 = Lake
3 = Swamp
4 = Clear
5 = Countryside
6 = Bocage
7 = Forest
8 = Thick Forest
9 = Hills
10 = Mountains
11 = High Mountains
12 = City
13 = Airfield
14 = Port
15 = Fortification
16 = Desert
17 = Dunes
18 = Rough Desert
19 = Escarpment
20 = Strait
21 = Jungle
Terrain Features:
There are four terrain features in the editor: Thick (impassable) river, thin (normal) river, rail, and road. And there are four edit boxes in the hex action dialog. So by entering a number in the third box from the left, you would specify a rail line in that hex.
The specific numbers you need to enter specify the orientation of the feature. (Whether a river runs from east to west, or whether it branches to the southeast etc).
I simply do not know these numbers. Best guess: to look at the ordering of the terrain tiles that follows. (For instance, road tile #5 looks like a road coming from the north bending to the left, to the south-east. So if we're lucky, entering a 5 in the last (rightmost) edit box here would tell the game there is a road going between the N and SE borders of the hex, and you'd enter the same number in both places)
See fsx's excellent bit value map in the link below
to demystify these numbers!
Tiles:
There are nine edit boxes and nine types of tiles in the editor, so from the left:
Backgrounds
Coasts
Overlays (including terrains)
Rivers
Roads
Rails
Ports
Stations
Markers
So, if you created a city by entering "12" in the Terrain field above, you would also want to set the overlay tile of that hex to one of the city tiles if you wanted the player to see a city on the screen. Counting the Overlay tiles, you would find three city variations as number 25, 26 and 27. So enter the number 25, say, in the third edit box from the left to make what the player sees ("a city tile overlay") match how the game treats that hex ("city terrain").
Backgrounds: variations on green grassy backgrounds (and three oceans).
Coasts: I am thankful for how well the editors generate function handles these and wouldn't want to change them for my life, so I'll simply skip this step. ;)
Overlays: By far the most important sort of tile, providing the visual cues to the player about what terrain his units travel through. Here's a few "bookmarks" :-)
10 Mountains
15 Hills
20 High Mountains
24 "No anchorage"
25 Cities
29 Airfield
30 Swamps
35 Countryside (Bocage?)
40 Countryside
45 Extra patches of trees (to round out adjoining forests)
50 Fortifications
65 Thick forest
70 Countryside
73 More cities
75 More hills
90 More mountains
97 Oasis
100 Specific cities (103 = Moscow and the Kremlin)
105 Jungle
110 Desert City
114 Desert Airfield
115 Rough Desert
120 Rough Desert?
125 Escarpment (since these are directional much like roads, there are dozens of them)
149
More Escarpment at 179 below
150 Dunes
155 Deserty Hills
160 Badlands?
165 Peaks
168 High Road Pass
169 The Pyramids
176 The Sphinx
177 More Jungle
179 Escarpment, Cont'd
194 The Wire
203 Even More City, including patches of added city (much like 45 above)
Rivers, Roads, Rail:
What would be useful here is a PDF with a graphical matrix of all the variations, to quickly look up the number of a particular tile. Me giving textual descriptions "river from north to southeast, branching to the south" feels more like a chore, both for me to write and you to read :-)
See fsx's excellent bit value map in the link below
to demystify these numbers!
Ports, Stations:
The same reasoning goes for ports and stations too...
Markers:
The ninth and last (=rightmost) edit box concerns markers, and here a list could be useful. Remember, this is only graphics on a screen and doesn't change any functionality by itself. (In other words, don't forget to tick the exit zone checkbox below if you add an exit zone graphic to the map here)
0 = mission area "A"
1 = mission area "B"
2 = mission area "C"
3 = dollar sign (gain prestige here)
4 = Axis exit zone
5 = Allied exit zone
String: Strings are edited in the editor and stored in the pzloc file. Enter the index number here to set the label of the hex. The first strings are often always the same, but then scenarios add specific city names and the like. Remember our city hex? You would probably want to add the new city's name here and specify a number (or at the very least set it to 12 for the generic word "City").
0 = Deep sea
1 = Shallow sea
2 = Lake
3 = Swamp
4 = Clear
5 = Countryside
6 = Bocage
7 = Forest
8 = Thick Forest
9 = Hills
10 = Mountains
11 = High Mountains
12 = City
13 = Airfield
14 = Port
15 = Fortification
16 = Desert
17 = Dunes
18 = Rough Desert
19 = Escarpment
20 = Strait
21 = Jungle
22 = ...
Flag: Set a flag and make the hex capturable. Remember airfields need to be capturable to be useful...
-1: No flag (remove?)
0: Neutral (white)
1: Germany
2: UK
3: US
4: USSR
5: France
6: Italy
and so on. 27 is "Free france" for instance.
Actually "flag" seems tied to something else; order of "nations" perhaps?
Finally the check boxes allow you to change whether hexes are neutral (and impassable), add or remove deployment and exit zones.
Example: building an airstrip (clear -> airfield). Let's say you want a neutral airfield to appear on turn 3 in zone 29.
Then you'd add a script with the trigger [3,3] and the following hex action:
Code: Select all
Update hexes:
Zone 29
Change:
Terrain 13
Terrain Features (empty) (empty) (empty) (empty)
Tiles (empty) (empty) 29 (empty) (empty) (empty) (empty) (empty) (empty)
String 13
Flag 0
All checkboxes left undefined
As you can see, there are
four things changed:
Terrain 13 = Airfield,
Third Tile 29 = Airfield Overlay,
String 13 = the word "Airfield" and
Flag 0 Neutral.
Of course, normally you'd add message actions and possibly require the player to have an engineer at location to simulate the construction of the airfield etc etc.
