Campaign-Only Buildings

Campaign-Only Buildings are a special class of structures in Rise of Nations, which are only used in certain campaigns/scenarios.

Overview

These buildings were introduced in Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots.

They cannot be constructed outside of the scenario editor and do not provide any benefits (except for aesthetic purposes), unless they are given some extra purpose via additional scripting (and possibly modifying the game).

There are 7 types of Campaign-Only Buildings, 4 of which are represented by single unique structures, and the other 3 have many differet styles (36 Houses, 13 Apartments and 12 Office Buildings).

List of Campaign-Only Buildings

Building	Information
Courtyard Fountain	A small aesthetic piece, which can be seen in cities during some campaign missions and scenarios.
El Dorado	A mythical place of immense wealth, as believed in the 16th and 17th centuries. It appears only in the New World campaign, during the Amazon scenario where El Dorado is found.
Lenin Statue	A statue, only used during the Cold War campaign. It is only seen during Soviet missions or when attacking the Soviet capital territory.
Washington Monument	A historical American structure, made to honor the first president, George Washington. The building appears only in the Cold War campaign.
House	There are 36 styles of Houses, which can be seen in various campaign missions and scenarios.
Apartments	There are 13 styles of Apartments, which can be seen in various campaign missions and scenarios.
Office Building	There are 12 styles of Office Buildings, which can be seen in various campaign missions and scenarios.

Scripting and Modding

General information

These buildings, can actually be useful for scripting to create unique custom scenarios. The game modding can make them especially interesting, as it would be possible to build them and they could add more variety to the gameplay. Additionally, these buildings can be replaced by some other kinds of structures and scripted to have various new roles in the game (which is important, since there is no other way to add actual new buildings into the game).

Note:

• Big Huge games released a comprehensive set of documents that give detailed instructions on how to use the Scenario Editor in Rise of Nations as well as the syntax for the scripting language used in the game and the list of all functions with their descriptions.

Important parameters

Each building entry in the buildingrules.xml file has a lot of parameters (XML elements).

Here are the most important parameters for modifying the buildings.

Paramater's name	Description and application
GRAPH	This parameter's value can be used to find the TGA texture files (and other graphics related settings) for a specific building inside the game file building_graphics.xml
NAME	This parameter's value is actually really important for scripting and it can be modified. Most functions require unique names of buildings to actually do anything with them. And those functions don't seem to work with the values from the TYPENAME parameters, even though those are unique for each of the campaign-only buildings. It's especially important when dealing with Houses, Apartments and Office Buildings, because those originally have the same values for this parameter. So, before trying to script anything for them, the values of their NAME parameters must be changed to some new and unique ones (you can't use the names of other existing buildings in the game). It's also possible to change a building's name for specific custom scenarios in the Scenario Editor.
TYPENAME	It's easy to locate specific kinds of Houses, Apartments and Office Buildings in the game file buildingrules.xml by the values of their TYPENAME parameters. All styles of these buildings can be found in the respective sections of their articles: Houses Apartments Office Buildings There are listed all possible TYPENAME values along with the images and icons that represent all kinds of such buildings.
PREQ0 PREQ1 PREQ2	Research requirements (preq = prerequisites) to construct a building (up to three requirements can be used). Possible values are any technology (e.g. Enlightenment Age, Mercenaries or Steel), none, or disable (which will make that building unavailable to all players). For tech names, the default ones need to be used, as defined in the techrules.xml file. By default the PREQ0 parameter's value is set to disable, which should at the very least be changed to none, to be able to build such a building in the game.
BUILD_FLAGS	Lower case letters are used. These give a building specific properties such as e (can be built outside of city's economic radius) or n (not captured when assimilating a city). A list of all available BUILD_FLAGS is given together with basic explanations in the buildingrules.xml file itself.
GRID_X GRID_Y	These parameters determine the position in the Citizen's lists of structures available to build.
CAT	Used for setting a category, which determines on which of the citizen's three build menus a building would appear. Possible values: E = Economic, M = Military, W = Wonder
TEX_COL TEX_ROW	These parameters are used for choosing an icon from the iface_buildings_CTW.tga file, which can be edited by some image editing software. (TEX_COL is the position in a column, TEX_ROW is the position in a row.)

Clearing the texture cache

This might be unnecessary for the Extended Edition, since the texture cache doesn't seem to be used in that version of the game.

After modifying any TGA files with images or icons, it's recommended to find this location:

C:\Users\<USER NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Games\Rise of Nations\textures

and remove all the files from that texture cache directory.

Otherwise some texture or icon changes might not be visible in the game.

Gallery

All the Houses in the game (maximum close-up).

All the Apartments in the game (maximum close-up).

All the Office Buildings in the game (maximum close-up).

Courtyard Fountain.

El Dorado.

Lenin Statue.

Washington Monument.