Setting up shipping zones and methods properly

Hi,

I have several questions about setting up manual shipping options properly. For future searchability, I'll put them into separate posts.

My first question is about the correct way to set up a slightly strange set of shipping zones.

Background info:

--My client's store will for the moment only ship to 45 out of the 50 provinces of Spain. For other destinations, we need people to "contact us"

--Everything will be sent via one shipping company

--The shipping company, as you'd expect, groups the provinces into about 5 price bands.

--***They charge a different price for delivery within a capital vs. the rest of the province (so in reality there are 10 price bands)

--The provinces within each price band have very different post codes, so for instance, the following ranges of post codes all would have the same shipping prices: 01000-01099, 09000-09099, 26000-26099, 31000-31099, 39000-39099, 48000-48099. 6 discontinuous ranges.

--I am supposing I should use the pre-installed Spanish "states" (provinces).

So here are my questions as to how to set this up most efficiently:

Q: Should I create two Shipping sub-zones within each pre-existing "state", a "Capital" sub-zone and "Rest of Province" one? I suppose it's alright to add my own zones within a pre-existing zone...
If that's right, I'm unsure what to do next, here are my two ideas:
1) create a Shipping Zone for each of the 10 price bands, and add to each one either the appropriate Capital subzones or the Rest-of-Province subzones. But with the differing post codes I'm not sure that will work, it's not as simple as just putting a single minimum and a maximum, I need several ranges. So the other option is
2) create 90 separate Shipping Methods (one each for the capital and the rest of each province we ship to), as Shipping Method seems to be the only place you can restrict by post code, and forget grouping the places with the same shipping prices into some sort of price group as an unnecessary step?

I would appreciate any advice about what's the most efficient way to do this. Thanks!

BTW, small bug-fix, just so you know: Two provinces, León and Granada, were not properly set up as "sub-zones" of Spain. That should be fixed in a future release if possible.

Hmmm... in the end it seems like the zones don't really matter for my purposes.

The key seems to be the shipping method, that's where I enter the post code range, price, and basis (weight, volume, etc.) I can choose zone "Spain" for everything, I think, no?

Anyway, yes there are 10 price bands and each one has between 5 and 20 separate ranges of post codes. (I don't believe there is any way to specify more than one range of post codes in a single shipping method.) So in total there are 90 price band/post code combinations. 90 x 40 combinations of weight range/price = 3600 shipping methods to create! Ouch.

I hope as you said elsewhere that it will be possible to automate this either through OOo/Excel macros operating on the exported hikashop_shipping table, or through hiring a programmer to make a shipping plug-in (though I think the latter may be beyond my budget).