Hi guys,

I'm sure there's a lot of people who share my hatred for having to constantly refill Norias. Even fully upgraded, they still run out pretty fast, and you can be stuck constantly flitting from one island to another keeping them all topped up on a large map.

So here's the solution I came up with. A modified assets.xml file that changes the Small and Large Noria capacities to 900000 each, and lowers their 'drain rate per object' from 20 down to 1. Now your Norias should take a very, very long time to run out -- if ever. The cost to refill these Norias, not that you'd ever need to, remains the same as before, so don't worry about accidentally spending a million gold for it.


Download: Link

Installation: Place the assets.xml file in ..\ANNO 1404\data\config\game, and make sure you have PreferLocalFiles set to 1 in your Engine.ini (which can be found in C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Ubisoft\Anno1404\Config).


Note: I tested this in a new continuous game, but it should work in games already in progress when you build new Norias. Old Norias will probably retain their old capacities; you may want to demolish and rebuild them to take advantage of the changes.



There shouldn't be any problems with this but let me know if you experience anything strange. I didn't have any luck finding the capacities of stone/quartz/ore/etc or I would have changed those too... hopefully someone else can figure that out.

Have fun!

There is a good forum here...

http://www.annozone.de/forum/b...f30f442efabcd8915650

...providing you can read German or use a translator, where you can find quite a few mods. Some are still being developed but they do seem to be maturing nicely.

Now this sounds interesting.
I am generally against any kind of mods/cheats because imho they just kill the challenge; but refilling norias is a hideous boring task and no challenge at all - thanks, will try. Thumbs up

Whoopie! I have only one thing to say to you, fine sirah

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dobber_SF,

quote:

Originally posted by Cyberkatx:
Now this sounds interesting.
I am generally against any kind of mods/cheats because imho they just kill the challenge; but refilling norias is a hideous boring task and no challenge at all - thanks, will try. Thumbs up

Same. In my opinion, the developers didn't correctly estimate just how many Norias a player would end up having in a long-term game, and didn't give them enough capacity to begin with, even with the upgrades. Besides this, the concept of "refilling" Norias (and other resources) just seems silly to me, and they certainly wouldn't realistically run out within a few hours. :P

I would hope mods like this help to alleiviate some of the unecessary tedium in the gameplay, allowing people to focus more on the actual gameplay challenges that they would otherwise have to ignore while they bunnyhop around refilling things every few minutes.

quote:

Originally posted by Moogiefluff:
Same. In my opinion, the developers didn't correctly estimate just how many Norias a player would end up having in a long-term game, and didn't give them enough capacity to begin with, even with the upgrades. Besides this, the concept of "refilling" Norias (and other resources) just seems silly to me, and they certainly wouldn't realistically run out within a few hours. :P

I would hope mods like this help to alleiviate some of the unecessary tedium in the gameplay, allowing people to focus more on the actual gameplay challenges that they would otherwise have to ignore while they bunnyhop around refilling things every few minutes.

agree 100%, it's ok in early game but late game is totally out of whack. what would really be awsome is if we could figure out a way to mod in some sort of warehouse item or attainment that would be bought or found to place on islands with norias, it would makes sense to give up a warehouse slot for something like this imo.

Here is what I suggest they do in a patch.



Small norias have same water supply, once they run out, you can refill them like you used to.

Once you build a large one, it has 2x more supply, and runs out like normal, but when it runs out instead of refilling, you can make it infinite with ~100 tools, wood and moasic.


Same for mines. You build a mine, you have to refill it, but when you get alot of Nobels, lets say 5000, you unlock infinite mines

quote:

Originally posted by whyme123wewe:
Here is what I suggest they do in a patch.



Small norias have same water supply, once they run out, you can refill them like you used to.

Once you build a large one, it has 2x more supply, and runs out like normal, but when it runs out instead of refilling, you can make it infinite with ~100 tools, wood and moasic.


Same for mines. You build a mine, you have to refill it, but when you get alot of Nobels, lets say 5000, you unlock infinite mines

I agree. At around 5000 Nobles it becomes annoying and it would be nice to unlock a building you can build that will refill all mines in its area of influence.

Curious question. Could you eliminate the drain alltogether by putting in a zero or negative number - or doesn't the engine like that?

quote:

Originally posted by Illanair:
Curious question. Could you eliminate the drain alltogether by putting in a zero or negative number - or doesn't the engine like that?

Didn't try it at zero, I've heard the engine can be a bit finicky about these values so I didn't risk it. It wouldn't cause any harm if you wanted to try it out, at worst the game would just crash when you try it.

The tag is <NoriaTicksPerObject> if you want to experiment, just edit the file in Notepad and ctrl+F to find it. There's two (for the Small and Large Norias).

quote:

Here is what I suggest they do in a patch.



Small norias have same water supply, once they run out, you can refill them like you used to.

Once you build a large one, it has 2x more supply, and runs out like normal, but when it runs out instead of refilling, you can make it infinite with ~100 tools, wood and moasic.


Same for mines. You build a mine, you have to refill it, but when you get alot of Nobels, lets say 5000, you unlock infinite mines

Terraforming. Wait. That's pretty much what norias are. Well then, have the nanobots conform the land and make it fertile.

Seriously, though. They should just have the standard norias the way they are and make large norias so that never need replenishing. Just mark up the upkeep cost.

In previous anno games, (I'm going to use ore mines as an example) you unlocked ore mine after your first house upgrade and it was able to mine ~80-120t of ore to be used for tools.
Once you got to the third civilization level, you unlocked a deep mine that allowed another 100t of ore. After that, you needed to get merchants to research endless deposits.

I want something like that. Though it is a shame they removed research :\

Well this fix works with norias like a charm
It affects every new built one and I havent noticed any side effects.

Finally I could build popcorn stand near tournament arena without interruptions..... thanks a ton

I agree this is a great help...new + ones already build work well.

it's great, thanks.

and this doesnt feel like cheating either, since the ammount of gold you spend on norias in endgame is insignificant.

Where does the assets.xml in that link come from? I looked through it to check some stuff and it shows a different Wood consumption rate for the Warmachines workshop that I observed in the game. Is it an accurate representation of the game without using it?

Thanks for this mod! Great, finally I can enjoy the game rather then refilling norias.

quote:

Originally posted by Theodosius1968:
Where does the assets.xml in that link come from? I looked through it to check some stuff and it shows a different Wood consumption rate for the Warmachines workshop that I observed in the game. Is it an accurate representation of the game without using it?

It comes straight from the Data1 file. Usually, the game will just look inside the Data files and read the information from there. However, with "PreferLocalFiles" on, you can extract individual files and make modifications to them, and the game will read these files first and use their values.

As for the Wood consumption you mentioned, I have no clue about that. It seems the game is looking to many different files at once for these values, and some may even be hardcoded and uneditable. I searched for hours for a way to adjust the maximum capacity of resource mines (Stone, Quartz, etc) to no avail.

Just tried this and it works brilliantly, I no longer dread building on the sth islands.

Thanks a lot.

thanks it worked great, clicked to refill old norias and they filled to 900000.

Awesome, glad to hear it has helped some people.

Now we just need someone with a better head for coding to figure out the other resources.

Thanks for this mod, I LOVE IT! Now if we could just fix the freaking mines the clicking would be 95% taken care of.

PS works on my existing norias just click em to refill and the new level shows up.

Total awesomeness

*Nearly unlimited Mines, Gems, Stone, Caves*

@Moogiefluff

I took a look for you at the xml, I didn't mod any myself, but as a coder I thought maybe I could help you out there

There isn't anything in the file you edited that could change the mines, but there were some fun things in feature.xml and randommapgenerator.xml

In feature.xml you can edit the noria upgrades e.g. so you could make a mod that gives you +100000 water for the last upgrade for example, if you would find that unlimited at start would be to easy. That way you would start with normal noria's but you could upgrade them to near unlimited later.

In randommapgenerator the values for the initial mines/gems/etc are there. These are used when starting a new map/game. The game then saves them to your savefile and doesn't alter them further. So to fix it to unlimited, you need to alter the randommapgenerator and start a new game.

There are low,medium and high ResourceAmounts in the file and just as example I've edited high. So when you use this file I'll attach, and start a new game, select high resources and you should be getting nearly unlimited instead.

The code for mines and such is in randommapgenerator.xml

I've uploaded one edited here: - This one only gives unlimited mines when you choose high resources.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WZQG9W7V


*Edit extra:
Second one here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4DFNPTPY
The second one has all resources high, regardless of your settings, even if you select low, this will ensure that you would never have to refill resources in the scenarios too. So you can play the diplomat scenario e.g. with resources you don't have to refill.

I hope that is a bit what you were looking for

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mytharox,

How come this assets.xml file is about twice the size of the original one? My original file is only 763KB and this one is about 1.6MB.

What extra data was added to it? Anything I should be aware of? I downloaded it from the link in the first message in this thread (in case theres multiple copies in this thread)

Sorry if it's been asked.

I have the steam version of the game so I wonder if that is the difference and if it's going to be a problem.

Anybody tried this on the steam version of the game?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: citybuilder,

The one in my store bought version is also 1.6MB (found when extracting the data file).

Did anyone try my unlimited mines, caves mod? I thought it was pretty wanted as people got tired of refilling those mines

You can use it next to the unlimited noria mod to have them both. The install procedure is the same as the one for the norias, only you need to copy the file I uploaded to your config folder as well. It should then work when you start a new game.

quote:

Originally posted by Mytharox:
Did anyone try my unlimited mines, caves mod? I thought it was pretty wanted as people got tired of refilling those mines

I was doing Roadmap in your head and Tale of two islands or w/e those achievements are called, not much refilling resources there
Now I am going to get myself the Executress title methinks

After I get tired of achievements and war and get in mood for some big lazy game again I am going to try that mod. Got it bookmarked

quote:

Did anyone try my unlimited mines, caves mod? I thought it was pretty wanted as people got tired of refilling those mines Wink

Where is it? I didn't see it

I posted it in this thread, a few posts up

http://forums-de.ubi.com/eve/f...711027387#5711027387

Maybe we should have a mod-overview thread

Does the Noria mod only adjust the larger Norias or both small and large?

I installed this one, and in the game I was playing I was only up to the small norias, which still showed 500 water and still ran out of water at what I think was the normal pace.

However there were other oddities in the game for me, strange things that I had never noticed before for example...

1. Charcoal Huts couldn't produce enough charcoal to feed 2 iron furnaces and one tool maker. I had it setup as one marketplace upgraded once, and all that market serviced was teh charcoal hut (which was really close by, as close as the other buildings) and two blast furnaces, one tool maker and the iron mine. In the past this has not been a problem, but now charcoal hut couldn't keep up. Charcoal hut had good location, and good production percentages 100% I seem to remember, so that wouldn't have been an issue I don't think so anyway.

I can't remember more specifics however, there seemed to be more things similar to this with production amounts and or under or overproducing compared to what I'd seen in previous games.

Now... Im not saying anybody tampered beyond the Norias water amount, but it does make me wonder if there is a huge difference in that extra 750kb of data between my files original size of 750kb and this ones 1.6MB file size.

The noria mod adjusts both.

I've compared his mod to my original game file using SVN compare and these are the changes:

From: <NoriaTicksPerObject>20</NoriaTicksPerObject>
To: <NoriaTicksPerObject>1</NoriaTicksPerObject>

From: <ProductionCapacity>5000</ProductionCapacity>
To: <ProductionCapacity>900000</ProductionCapacity>

Nothing else so it should be fine, however there just might be a difference between the steam and the store bought version perhaps. You could post your file and I could have a look for you