How to make cities keep their original architecture?

[forlornfire]

Hello! I was wondering if there is any way to make captured cities keep their original architecture (let's say England captures Mecca and it keeps its original style). I've found some threads on the internet where people asked the same question but no answer was given.

Would be possible/hard to make cities retain the architecture of the civ that founded it?

Thank you!

 

[TopHatPaladin]

As far as I'm aware, that wouldn't be possible; Firaxis is fairly restrictive in what they allow us to do with terrain/map graphics.

 

[Ja Mes]

Unfortunately, while it seems like you can change a tile's art style with Plot.SetContinentArtType, and can get a city's architecture style with City.GetArtStyleType, there is no "SetArtStyleType" (and trust me, I tested it out just now in spite of there being literally no evidence of it).

If I were a betting man, which I'm not, I'd wager that the game's internal graphics engine determines how a city looks outside of what we the modders can easily access. Unlike the different "continent" art styles that the plots get through a simple Lua method during map generation, how a city looks is likely homogeneous for all of a player's cities, and can't be set on a city-by-city basis. (If anyone more familiar with the DLL could elaborate I'd be forever grateful.)

I wonder, though, the feasibility of just making the city's buildings invisible (maybe with a bad database building) and creating a new city belonging to a dummy player on top of it, to give the appearance of a different art style. That's above my pay grade, though.