Q: archer with flaming arrow?

[wr3zzz]

Occasionally I see them but when I use world builder to check they are neither unique units nor has some special promotion.

 

[IPEX-731BA5DD06]

its a random event promotion. I don't know what the criteria is to be meet, but its a special promotion or a blue coloured promotion.

 

[wr3zzz]

I cannot find flaming arrows in the promotion tree nor in sevopedia. I have no idea what it does. Other random event promotions like poisoned arrows are included and explained.

 

[Vokarya]

Are you sure it's a promotion or just a graphical effect? There are some graphical effects that have no actual effect on gameplay. A screenshot would help.

 

[wr3zzz]

I don't know if it's a promotion or not but it's definitely random. WorldBuilder doesn't show anything special about this archer other than the flaming arrow. It's not unique to England as well. I have seen it appear in others and my archer doesn't have this effect when I played as England.

 

[Vokarya]

I think it's just a graphical effect built into the Viking Archer model. I did a search on the NIF files [unit skeletons] and the Viking Archer has a node [important subsection] for a "SuperSpray flame ity-Emitter". I have no idea why it is named that, but if it's part of the NIF then it is graphical only.

England uses the Viking model because there is a limit on the number of art definitions a mod can support (this is inherent to Civ4, although I don't know what is the limit and I suspect it is more the total complexity of all included art definitions; what I do know is if you go too high, you get crashes via Memory Allocation Faults). To maximize the ethnic diversity, I try to have two or three closely-related civilizations use the same model.