I'm trying to create a fire ship unit to be used during the sailing age.

The fire ships can only be used once (like cruise missiles), and have a limited operating range.

Are cruise missiles (and the nukes) the only units which can be used only once? They are declared as land units.
And the AI will start using fire ships on land, which doesn't make sense.

Any way to set the use once flag for sea units?

I also tried using the immobile flag and a bombard range of two.
That way the ships would not move across land. However the AI would still use them to bombard land units.

Any other ideas?
Help will be appreciated

capman

Try giving the ship a very high attack value and a big reduction in hps. A unit will always have at least one HP, but a unit with one HP even with a high attack is unlikely to survive combat with a regular unit but it should cause some damage, test it out and see how it works. Remember historicaly fire ships were just used to soften up the enemy not to win the battle.

Sorry, no ideas. Smoking mirror's idea don't work, I'm afraid. On one side, AI ships with very low (or no) chance of succes will not attack. Beside that, the fire ship HAS to be sunk in both cases, if the attack failed or if it succeeds. If a ship with low number of hitpoints is winning the battle (IMHO this is possible, becouse of Civ3's combat calculations) the fire ship is still there...

im pretty sure that u just have to flag the unit Nuclear Weapon and it will only be usable once.

OR cruise missile flag and then just give it a bombardment ability with no attack or defense. Maybe that would work.

Thanks for your input

Unfortunately no solution at hand.
Cruise missiles and nuclear weapons are land units. So the AI would use the fire ships on enemies troops aswell.

As to giving the fire ship bombard capability. Even marked as sea unit the AI would use fireships against troops (or terrrain improvements).

So the obvious solution would be
- sea unit
- no bombarding
- can be only used once. But this flag cannot be set for sea units :-(

I also tried smoking mirror' idea with the hit points.
But it doesn't work as in some battles the fireship wins.