Issues with new Great People?

[bouncymischa]

I've been experimenting with a Great General UU that could "upgrade" itself to two other versions of itself, which I added to the game as additional great people. I assumed this wouldn't cause too many issues, as other civs would have no way of generating these new GP (although in playtesting I realized the "choose a great person" Liberty finished would permit it...)

However, I ran into an unusual glitch -- when I spawned one of my GPs in a city, the game would crash. They spawned fine outside of cities, and it doesn't seem to be related at all to the graphics files I was using, as the game crashed even when using models I knew to be reliable, and the initial UU spawned fine once I commented out the extra upgraded versions.

I won't have much time to do more comprehensive testing until the weekend, but I did want to ask if anyone else had run into any issues when adding additional GPs to the game? Not UUs that replace existing great people, but entirely new ones?

 

[onmy6]

I made a holy cross crusader style very powerful unit to have on the battlefield and made it upgrade to an great prophet, now he upgrades fine but his abilities are nurfed ie no conversions the only thing he can do is create holy site, no idea why... Also I made a grand master of the knights of the temple of Solomon and made his upgrade to a great general with absolutely no problem ie all his abilities are intact, I was warned though apparently civ5 doesn't play nice when you mess with there great people

 

[bouncymischa]

Mostly I'm wondering if there's issues with adding new great people (or even new civilian units) to the game -- I'm somewhat suspecting if the issue may be that the game recognizes there's a civilian unit in the city, but because it's a new civilian unit there may be problems with the game figuring out how to handle stacked units in the city or something?

I've done UU replacements for great people before without problems, and from your unit it's apparent you can have combat units upgrade to great people... but has anyone actually tried adding entirely new GP types?

 

[LeeS]

DJSHenninger has done it apparently, but there appear to be inherent issues with it.

Also my Great General Replacement broke the Great General Spawn system for that civ, and I had to add lua code to track the accumulated player experience toward Great Generals, and manually force them when appropriate.

 

[ThorHammerz]

I made a holy cross crusader style very powerful unit to have on the battlefield and made it upgrade to an great prophet, now he upgrades fine but his abilities are nurfed ie no conversions the only thing he can do is create holy site, no idea why... Also I made a grand master of the knights of the temple of Solomon and made his upgrade to a great general with absolutely no problem ie all his abilities are intact, I was warned though apparently civ5 doesn't play nice when you mess with there great people

The issue with "upgrading" to new Great Prophets (or missionaries, for that matter) is that the game engine has 2 processes to initialize a new unit. The initialization method (CvUnit::init) invoked when upgrading a unit is different from the method used when buying/building/getting-a-free unit (CvUnit::initWithNameOffset).

The latter is the only one that adds the conversion uses to each prophet/missionary upon spawn. On a similar note, Great Musicians will also fall under this category (no tourism will be granted for tours if the Great Musician was created via unit upgrade).

 

[bouncymischa]

DJSHenninger has done it apparently, but there appear to be inherent issues with it.

Also my Great General Replacement broke the Great General Spawn system for that civ, and I had to add lua code to track the accumulated player experience toward Great Generals, and manually force them when appropriate.

Hrm... I think the Great General replacement I made for the Oni Clans has worked without issues, but it's a pretty simple replacement.

Doing some additional testing on my other computer, my UUs were working fine, spawning in cities without crashing. Another effect I'd noticed was that the civilopedia was broken for great people in my test game, but works fine when I'm running just one mod. So right now I'm starting to suspect it's a conflict with another mod that may be the culprit.

Still, I may have to keep some alternative designs in mind, in case adding more GP to the game does cause more problems.

 

[LeeS]

Hrm... I think the Great General replacement I made for the Oni Clans has worked without issues, but it's a pretty simple replacement.

Doing some additional testing on my other computer, my UUs were working fine, spawning in cities without crashing. Another effect I'd noticed was that the civilopedia was broken for great people in my test game, but works fine when I'm running just one mod. So right now I'm starting to suspect it's a conflict with another mod that may be the culprit.

Still, I may have to keep some alternative designs in mind, in case adding more GP to the game does cause more problems.

I think my GG replacement problem was that I was making them gain XP and choose new promotions -- which meant I had to assign them to a dummy CombatClass in order for the game's promotions system to work -- which lead to .... rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.