police actions


anybody else play around with giving certain land units nationality not revealed?

i found:
1. AI knows exactly who attacked. even if city not taken or not razed.

2. it does prevent MPP from being triggered.

3. you can still trade with them.

4. they use those same sneaky warrior against you and other ai.
AI loves these type of units even if weaker and way more expensive than other units.

5. anyone thinking of leaders/settlers/workers without nationality:

a.settlers sans nationality do not build cities - upon pressing b, they just disappear.
b. workers had a simlar problem regarding colonies.
c. leaders sans nationality don't seem to appear /nor apear if made buildable on the selrction list...

anyone else do this kind of research?

I used to have my French UU be French Legion. I gave them hidden nationality, so they could fight in France's interest without France actually declaring war. I had no problems. The AI used them mostly to steal workers. There were no problems with MPP or anything.

Originally posted by hahntsak
anyone else do this kind of research?

Dude, these units are the only reason I still play Civ3/PTW! Well, that and UUs and the plethora of fan made animations...but anyway...they make the game not boring.

Originally posted by hahntsak
1. AI knows exactly who attacked. even if city not taken or not razed.

Sometimes it seems as if this is true and sometimes not. They usually do get furious with you if you attack with hidden nat units but once in a while it seems they don't have a clue. I need to open up my current savegame and see if the Chinese are mad at me. I just used a force of assassins, ninjas and adventurers to kill off some Chinese defenders and steal some settlers to secure a chokepoint peninsula for a canal city. :goodjob:

They'll probably hit me back with some Shaolin Monks. :goodjob:

Originally posted by hahntsak
2. it does prevent MPP from being triggered.

3. you can still trade with them.

I love it. It's like Cold War. The Soviets and Americans were maintaining diplomatic relations (often strained) while fighting each other by proxy. Same with hidden nat units. You maintain diplomatic relations and remain at peace but they know it's you and they do get mad at you. And any little slip up and you can trigger a war since they're already furious with you.

Originally posted by hahntsak
4. they use those same sneaky warrior against you and other ai. AI loves these type of units even if weaker and way more expensive than other units.

The AI uses them well. I give 'em to civs at different points in time to mimic historical shifts in power, reflecting each civ's "golden age." Before PTW, I gave the Chinese a Mongol unit (renamed the Chinese Rider and gave it hidden nat). When it became available, they'd start building hordes of them to attack the neighboring civs. And it would really make a noticable difference in the game with the Chinese seizing weak enemy border cities. :cool:

In my current game, I was getting worried about the Spanish. From the north the Japanese were hitting them with Ronin (hidden nat samurai) and even took a city. From the east the British were starting to hit them with Adventurers (but the Spanish managed to hold them off). I sent some ninjas over to just observe the procedures and maybe help out a little bit (since Spain is home to many beautiful actresses and supermodels) and was pleased to find that Spain had discovered the tech allowing Partisans and had started hitting back the Brits and turned the tide of aggression.

See...hidden nat units give you something to do (fight) during those long boring peaceful times that seem to occur so often in Civ3. The good thing is...you don't have to commit your entire nation to war to do this. And the AI takes to this strategy like a fish to water. One of the best things about the Civ3 AI. :goodjob:

How the AI knows how to take cities with hidden nat units (since Privateers can't take cities), I don't know. And they know enough to stack the unit with a regular unit to prevent counterattack. :love:

As you can tell, this is a favorite subject of mine.

I haven't found that the AI will build the hidden nat unit in place of a stronger regular unit however, unless you flag with a different strategy. Also, you have to make these units weaker and more expensive to prevent them from being more than a minor diversion and minor influence in the game. If not planned out properly they can easily overpower the game.

Some other tidbits:
If you have a unit that is hidden nat, invisible and with zero defense, it is pretty much indestructable. That's what I do with the ninja. To keep it from being too dominant, I give it a small attack value and a small bombard value, this allows it to function like a spy unit that can harass and cause some minor damage to enemy units. Why is it nearly indestructable? Because enemy units can occupy the same square as this unit but you retain control of it. :goodjob:

What else? If you put a regular unit in a Privateer, other civs won't attack it. You can still attack them w/o causing war though. :goodjob:

Hidden nat cancels "invisible" for your units (the AI will see them no problem). You will not be able to see invisible hidden nat AI units however.

I haven't experimented with hidden nat air units yet but plan to do so in the future.

The AI loves to use these units to steal workers and attack cities. Sometimes they use them to pillage also. I have a unit called "prisoner" (just the worker animation) and have designated that as the unit you get when you capture settlers and workers. Prisoners have the abilities of workers and settlers. I know the AI use the hidden nat units for capturing workers and settlers because I find lots of Prisoner units running around, even in the absence of war. :goodjob:

Can't think of anything else right now.

Many seem to shy away from these more radical unit ideas for fear that the AI won't use them correctly. The AI does a very good job using these units. They will kick your butt if you're not careful.

Sorry to ramble but hidden nat units make the game fun for me and keep my playing. :cool:

In some other threads I've read that people had big problems using hidden nat land units, especially because the AI mass-produces them.
But reading dog's post I think about including them into my game. Sounds really interesting. I think I will give it a try.

I already included a pirate galley with hidden nat, which the AI built several times. It upgrades to privateer, which I never saw the AI use before I put in my ancient pirate.

they get angry with you if u attack em whether ur units are land or water...and i bet air too...

i change my subs to hide nationality in the modern day to replace the useless privateers... and all of the country are angry with me cuz i use em to sink their transports..

Dog,

U said u gave the chinese a mongol hidden nationality (HN) unit. Did this unit replace the normal cavalry unit or could the chinese now chose between two units of saimilar stats ?? If so, did china continue to build both of these ?

I also added a number of hidden nationality land units. The first time I did this was however a disaster, because I created a hidden nat/invisible 'spy' unit with 1 attack, 1 defense. It was also very cheap. For some reason I gave it both attack and defense flags, so the AI had dozens of them fortified in their cities, which made the game rather boring, 'coz with modern armour I could take all of their cities without any casualties! :king:

The second time I made a more expensive 'commando' unit, which was like the 'spy' above, only with higher attack and defense ratings, and only with the attack flag checked. It also treated all terrain as road. The AI used them very well - it attacked my workers, pillaged roads connecting resources and generally caused mayhem. So this made me actually have a fully sealed fortified border with my neighbour. Whenever my neighbour's commandos attacked my 'border guards' it felt like cross-border terrorism, so actually in my latest game I renamed commados to terrorists.

Also when I was at war with a civ, other civs which were actually at peace with them used commandos to captured cities which had their defenses weaked by my attacks!

So hidden nat units in Civ3 are great fun! :cool:

Originally posted by sgrig

The second time I made a more expensive 'commando' unit, which was like the 'spy' above, only with higher attack and defense ratings, and only with the attack flag checked. It also treated all terrain as road. The AI used them very well - it attacked my workers, pillaged roads connecting resources and generally caused mayhem. So this made me actually have a fully sealed fortified border with my neighbour. Whenever my neighbour's commandos attacked my 'border guards' it felt like cross-border terrorism, so actually in my latest game I renamed commados to terrorists.

Also when I was at war with a civ, other civs which were actually at peace with them used commandos to captured cities which had their defenses weaked by my attacks!

So hidden nat units in Civ3 are great fun! :cool:

Amen! :goodjob:

Doesn't it make the game seem more real??

Instead of 8 (or whatever) big civs sitting around peacefully waiting for a world war to break out, there's all these little skirmishes going on all the time.


W.i.n.t.e.r,
I had the Mongol unit come out just before Chivalry. I forget which tech. My experience is that the AI will always build the unit with the best stats whether it has hidden nat or not. What I try to do is give the AI a "window" in which to build the hidden nat units. You don't want the AI building nothing but partisans so you make the partisan unit available with technology x and then decide how much time you want to give the AI to build that unit. Pick a tech that you think is appropriate for ending that time window and with that tech give them a unit that is not hidden nat and is a bit stronger in stats. You could also obsolete the hidden nat unit but I don't do that b/c I don't want the AI to upgrade their hidden nat units for a long time. Hopefully, the result is that the hidden nat units are produced in a flurry (you could make 'em cheap if your window is short) for a short time before a stronger unit is available. But they hang around and cause trouble for a long time before they can upgrade.

Remembered another tidbit: change the "barbarian" color to something other than white. Maybe a shade of blue. When the barb color is white the hidden nat units stick out like sore thumbs. Change the color and they can sneak up on you better! :eek:

I did that with one of my mods up here. Unfortunatly only one person dl'd it and i didn't get any feed back. I don't know exactly how balanced it is. Its still there somewhere, Its called the terror mod. So if someone wants to give it a test run with debug mode in PTW to see how it runs and if its balanced be my guest. I included an early terrorist unit that comes with currency (its a mercenary if i remeber correctly). Mind you I've been busy so i never got a chance to test this mod as it takes a long time to play through a game of civ. So its still in its beta phase but its out there somewhere. Mind you there are no civpedia enterances.

One problem i noticed with terrorist units is that they can take over cities with no war. So was allied with the french one time attacking the US, and they started taking the cities i just took from the states. I flagged them invisible so i couldn't see where they were at all, so all of a sudden I'd see my cities falling to the french. So that is something to beware of. Make sure you don't start flagging units with invisible untill you have quites a few detecting units. Another problem that occurs is if you have an invisible unit in your territory that you don't see and if you have automated workers. THe workers will attack the unit and will obviously get killed if they wander into the square. They wont be captured, they will be destroyed.

(all that is from Civ vanilla, not PTW by the way)

I use both Special Forces and Counter Terrorist units in my normal game. It adds in interesting way to approach the cold war that usually forms in the early modern age. Well balanced with all the other units you have is the key.