Compound Placement
This page describes a theory of compound placement and will use an overhead view of a Falcon style compound for illustrative purposes. Any other observations and discoveries are welcome, whether they support this theory or not.
Compound walls are built along the midpoints of coordinate sets.
For our example compound, the northern-most wall is placed at y = 1528.5. The eastern wall is placed at x = 1202.5.
Each sector is centered on a coordinate intersection.
The sector just north of the man is centered on the intersection of x = 1200 and y = 1527. The corners of that sector are: 1199.5,1527.5 (NW), 1200.5,1527.5 (NE), 1200.5,1526.5 (SE), and 1199.5,1526.5 (SW).
Coordinate intersections can be located.
We can't see the decimal value of our location. We see the coordinates x = 1200.00 to x = 1200.99 merely as 1200. But we can locate the intersections by finding a spot (like where the man is standing) where a small movement will change the apparent coordinates.
All compounds styles have a special "cornerstone" sector.
The cornerstone is important because expansion costs are based on the distance from the cornerstone and...
Builder's location determines cornerstone placement.
Because the cornerstone sector is placed on a coordinate intersection, it might not be precisely centered on the builder. In fact, it can be as much as 0.5 coordinates away, both in the x and y directions, depending how far the builder is from the closest intersection.
To accurately place the cornerstone, the builder should get as close as possible to the desired intersection. In the example compound, the builder was located where the chest placed now, and the cornerstone was placed there as expected.
This is excellent!
It nicely correlates with my data, if not with my observations, and explains why my chests kept ending up on the edges of the sectors. The nearest terrain intersection was being selected as the mid-point of the cornerstone sector.
As soon as I get the Tale 3 model compounds set up, I'll go sacrifice some more tabpoles and rework the Initial Styles floorplans to clearly show that the center of a cornerstone sector is always right on a terrain boundary intersection. Thanks! - MarvL
