Capturing unavailable units

You all know what I'm talking about. You go fight Korea and capture one of their hwachas, but it gets destroyed because the unit is not available to you.

Well I always thought the reason it got destroyed was because you could not build it, but I was wrong. In fact you could not build a unit, but that unit still be available to you using this technique http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=558226.

This means I could have auto-produced units like cattle, ammo, metals, resources, etc, be unavailable in the build list inside a city, yet available at the same time for every player. This means that you can capture something which you cannot build and not be destroyed as in the hwacha case!

I didnt know if some of you guys knew this, but I'm sharing it anyways. I got lots of updates to do now. I was relying on making those units cost 100 population so you could never build them, but capture, but that does not go very well with the AI. This is a ground breaking thing for me and it will even help the AI.

In my mod your civilization's wealth is not just gold. It's also how much cattle, bread, metals, and weapons you own. Going to war against an enemy is much more rewarding because when you capture a city not only do you get gold, but you also capture those resources, which upgrade to units and do other things.

Some of these things are too hard for the AI to use efficiently so I divided them into human resources, and AI resources, but both accomplish the same goal. They just work a little different.

This new trick will make my AI much more efficient and not get stuck trying to build an impossible unit that wasnt meant to be built. I like the idea of civ working like the 'stronghold' series.

ZergMazter said:

In my mod your civilization's wealth is not just gold. It's also how much cattle, bread, metals, and weapons you own.

Click to expand...

How have you implemented this?

Have you ever played 'Risk' the board game? Basically I took their concept of time and applied it to my mod using auto-production. Every turn=more stuff. its the same idea.

Example:

Connect an iron resource to your city. The iron allows you to build a forge, which requires proximity and connection to that iron in order to be powered. Every 6 turns the forge will produce an iron sword. You could save it for later use and keep building bronze age units. My unit cost has been greatly increased depending on the government (4-8 gold per unit per turn over the support limit). I also increased the unit support by a decent amount for every government.

The AI will automatically upgrade those resources they auto-produce, but sometime in the near future they hit my hard unit cap. In my experience I've found they stop upgrading those resources which by the way cost no support. Only after they further develop their economy, then they start upgrading again. No need to worry about unit costs as in the later ages your economy will be strong enough to afford exceeding the limits.

I'm still trying to figure out the exact science behind it, but for now it seems they follow some rules. If they are broke, then they won't upgrade for the most part. This is how it is possible for both humans and AI to have a wealth of resources within their empire.

You might also think why wouldnt humans just upgrade all their resources as they get them? To make sure both humans and AI have resources within their empire I just told you how the AI does it, but this is how humans do it:

I basically made some units very costly and you would likely dump some gold to rush it. You have a choice to either use gold for heavy equipment, or use gold to upgrade your resources. This creates the need to make balance for humans. I did it this way with myself in mind lol. I don't cheat, but if I know I can take advantage of something that might be unfair to the AI, I will in times of need.

EDIT:

Oh and about the AI only and human only units. I have an auto-produced coal for example. The human auto-produced coal has a shield cost of about 100 shields, and has only the fortify and disband options. This means that when you disband it the coal will produce shields which simulate power produced.

The AI can't even think about it so I made their coal be auto-produced in much longer intervals, but be more like leader units which can instantly fully rush a project/unit/building to make up for it. If a human captures the AI version it will be used as the human version because the 'rush project' option is off. The difference is that the AI doesnt care about that. They only care that the right strategy is on, and they will use it as it. On the other side that same item will work different for humans if you forget to check the ability flags such as 'finish improvement'. Thats how I get multi-use units.

-Weapons upgrade to units.

-Bread/food is an immobile naval unit that joins the city and makes it grow. I posted a while ago how to trick the AI to instantly doing this. The trick is to make a building that auto-produces a naval unit (not restricted to inland cities) that is immobile, and has the worker join function enabled in a hacked editor. The AI will join that unit to the city 100% of the time for some very odd reason. I also got more testing to do about this one for some of the other rules the other resources follow since it is a naval unit.

-Resources power up factories as I just described.

-Cattle I'm still deciding what I'm gonna use them for. They might be an earlier version of powering up your cities as my coal does.