I didn’t see this reported so I figured I’d post it. Maybe there’s nothing to report? Maybe this has been beaten to death? (Again, haven’t seen it though)
I’m trying to wrap my head around whether this is a bug or a feature.
The current behavior is for a pre-placed mill in the scenario editor to switch to a Folwark when playing as Poles or switching the civ in question in the scenario editor to Poles.
The expected and desired behavior (IMO) is to allow Poles to have mills that are pre-placed in the SE without switching them to Folwarks automatically.
The bug / feature / unexpected behavior is that the game and the SE think existing mills switching to a Folwark needs a 4x4 tile space for the new building, and so it renders the 3x3 tile Folwark in the middle of a 4x4 tile grid centered around the previous mill’s 2x2 location.
In the SE, when placing 4 farms around a mill which switches into a Folwark, those 4 farms can’t be re-seeded and you’ll need to rebuild them 1 tile further out per the above restriction that your Folwark is now technically 4x4. This results in the space requirement for a Folwark initialized this way with 8 continuously re-seeding farms around it (with the bonus, that still works) to increase from 81 tiles to 88.
I imagine this is done to better preserve the visual integrity or representation of equidistant space between possible surrounding buildings placed initially as well, and them visually colliding, since, if the Folwark was placed technically in the same spot, it would protrude one full tile (visually) to the right, instead of one-half tile (and thus cover more of whatever buildings or objects might be on the right of it in favor of covering all things equally).
I am personally a fan of function over form in a way that is not game-breaking. I would rather have a tower or a house on the right side of a Folwark half covered by a Folwark than a 4x4 tile Folwark that takes up more space and also, that collision only works for buildings. Yes, units can pass between collision based buildings and a 4 tile Folwark if the surrounding buildings were constructed after. Kind of broken there.
There is a reliable work-around trigger (which shouldn’t be needed but it is) Edit: this workaround only makes sense if you are hand crafting a map where Poles are a civ pick option but not set from the start and the general desired building in a specific place is a mill OR Folwark. It won’t work for dynamically pre-placed mills that turn into Folwarks using some other scripting methods (and maybe then it’s not even a problem):
C1: Research Tech: Poles
AND
C2: Objects In Area: 1 alive Mill for that player
E1: Remove Object: Mill in same area for that player
E2: Create Object: Mill in the same place (Folwark is 3x3 so it’s the same placement tile as a 2x2 Mill)