C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 23

[Thorvald of Lym]

When mods have custom music lists, the game always starts with the first song on the list and continues from there. This means that if you play for short or moderate periods of time, you miss a lot of the mod's music. It would be nice if, when the game loads a mod with a custom music list, it picked a random start position in the list rather than always starting at the top.

For your consideration:

Custom era playlists.

 

[Flintlock]

Just tossing a few ideas around, I think the game checks whether a civ is in x/y/z "Required Government" for the building to be operational, would it not also be able to check for its resource requirements at the same time? Or does it simply make this check upon changing governments?

What other changes could potentially be made to building (and possibly unit) requirements? For example:
-Could the "Requires Resources in Radius" flag be restricted to one of the resources needed in the radius instead of both? Perhaps a specific one if that would make the checks easier?
-Could single-choice requirements be overruled for multiple choice Either/Or requirements, for example if I gave the Arabian civs a Bazaar improvement instead of the Marketplace, would the Bank improvement be able to require [Marketplace OR Bazaar] instead of having to make two different Banks and then two different Stock Exchanges and then two different Wall Streets?

The required government checks are not done ahead of time, they're done each time the building's effects might potentially be applied. The problem is that those checks are scattered throughout the code. If there were one single function that determined whether or not a building is active, that would make my life easy since I could modify that. Instead there are many checks for required gov't, resources, and obsolescence scattered throughout the game logic at any point where a building being active may or may not matter. In order to accurately modify when a building is active I would need to modify all those locations and I don't even know where they all are.

Strategic resources already have a UI method of dealing this - when it hits too many to display, it instead gives a little icon that you can click on for a pop-up list (pictures attached to give an example). Perhaps this function can simply be duplicated for luxuries once a city has access to more than 8 types?

That might be easier than adding a scroll bar, I'd have to look into it more to say for sure. Probably the easiest thing would be to reduce the vertical distance between luxuries when there are more than 8 so they don't overrun the box. The down side to that is it would look pretty bad with many more than 8 as they'd all overlap, but with only a few more it should be okay.

Afraid there's no option to do this on the map setup screen nor in the editor.

You can for strategic ones, but not for bonus resources.

That's pretty weird that you can't change the appearance rate for bonus resources. I had a look at the map generator logic for placing resources, and unfortunately it's not obvious how the game determines how frequent bonus resources should be. I think it's related to what terrain they can appear on. I'd have to investigate more. I might be able to modify the appearance rate by modifying a call to the RNG but I'm not sure. I would have to test that and see what happens.

A new behavior from the AI, they pillage tiles that were adjacent to my land. I had only notice pillaging of my tiles in the past. I counted on tiles not mine to be left alone. Not sure why they would do that nor if it is even a good idea.
...
Egypt has 90 cities, so they may have more armies around. I wonder what makes them use cavs as opposed to infantry? Both have the same attack and on has a much greater defense. The 3 moves, is the best choice, but
I would rather not face a army of infantry. Some of the armies were undoubtably made, before they had infantry.

I haven't modified the AI's logic for pillaging, at least not intentionally, so I'm not sure what's going on there. The reason that AI isn't putting infantry in its armies is probably that it doesn't have many infantry running around using the offensive unit strategy. With the custom C3X AI army composition, the AI will never put defensive units in its armies, only offensive. With the original Firaxis logic, it was supposed to put defensive units in armies only if they already contained at least one offensive unit. I decided to remove that since it's better IMO for armies not to contain mixed unit types. And of course the Firaxis logic never worked anyway since it's broken in several ways. Also the AI will never add a unit that would slow down one of its armies, so if the first unit it adds happens to be a cavalry, all the later units must be cavalry, panzers, or modern armor.

This means in that turn on the 250 x 250 map, the interturn time by the use of trade_net_X was reduced from 400,015 seconds to only 231,218 seconds (see the screenshot in post 1684) - and this is really a lot.

That's more like it. Reducing turn times by almost half on late game huge maps is the kind of thing I was hoping for with Trade Net X. I'm hoping to do even better in the future.

Splitting up the different features of the barracks building could be an interesting addition to this great mod. In my eyes the barracks building with its three combined features to produce veteran units, heal damaged units in one turn and allowing the upgrading of units is the most overpowered building in Civ 3.

When mods have custom music lists, the game always starts with the first song on the list and continues from there. This means that if you play for short or moderate periods of time, you miss a lot of the mod's music. It would be nice if, when the game loads a mod with a custom music list, it picked a random start position in the list rather than always starting at the top.

Alright, I'll keep these is mind. They shouldn't be too difficult. Splitting up the barracks functions is something I'm pretty sure I can do. I'm not so sure about changing how music is selected but I've touched that code before and it didn't seem complicated. (Last time I touched it was for the hotseat AI replay feature, to allow the game to be reloaded without resetting the playlist.)

 

[Civinator]

Probably the easiest thing would be to reduce the vertical distance between luxuries when there are more than 8 so they don't overrun the box. The down side to that is it would look pretty bad with many more than 8 as they'd all overlap, but with only a few more it should be okay.

The great graphics modder Pounder made City Screen graphics to display 10 Luxuries plus pollution in Civ 3. They can be found here. The RARR mod uses these graphics since a longer time, as this mod includes more than 8 luxury resources and it will also be used in the next version of the CCM mod, as the balancing of happiness now possible with the Flintlock mod (different level 1 religious buildings allow the same level 2 religious building) allows the reasonable use of at least two more luxury resources in the game. Here is a screenshot about it in the next version of CCM:

They shouldn't be too difficult. Splitting up the barracks functions is something I'm pretty sure I can do.

This is great , as I think a building that allows the upgrading of units (when all other conditions as normally are met like tech, cost and needed resources) and can be added by a small wonder to every city of a civ, can improve the game play considerably by reducing micromanagement and increasing the upgrading opportunities for the AI without disturbing the balance of the game.

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

I'll +1 the request for the barracks function as well. Have you had a chance to see about buildings adding yields to the city through resources? I know you have about a million items on your list, but I am at the point we're I'm setting up buildings and tech trees and it would be a great help if I could plan this out ahead of time. Regardless, your work is always much appreciated, and it's been interesting to see the changes in the R17 Preview thanks to you and Vaughn's sponsorship.

 

[Civinator]

Have you had a chance to see about buildings adding yields to the city through resources? I know you have about a million items on your list, but I am at the point we're I'm setting up buildings and tech trees and it would be a great help if I could plan this out ahead of time.

So this question is addressed to Flintlock, I also have experimented with the item of "virtual" resources. I did not note any additions in food and production by virtual resources and my guess is, that there must be a citizen who is working on that resource on the map to directly influence those factors in a city - and this (at present) is not possible, as a resource that is provided to a city by a building is only virtual and not on the map. I did not look for happiness provided by virtual luxury resources, as in my mods and scenarios at present there is no need for them.

 

[SG52]

Thank you very much for the appreciation. The limit on the number of city improvements is something I haven't thought about much until now. Looking at the code, it might be possible to remove it. The challenge is that internally the game stores a fixed size array per city of 256 bits, one for each possible improvement, recording which improvs are physically present in a city (as opposed to being granted by a wonder). Because that array is embedded in the city object it's not possible to expand it. On the other hand, if the array is always accessed through a function, which it looks like it is, I could modify that function to store additional data elsewhere. There's again the problem of storing that data into the save file, which is probably doable but not something I've done yet. Assuming this works, it would be easier than morphing one improvement into another one depending on a technology.

Getting past the 256 improvement limit would certainly be a turning point for all modders. Since you said the array can't be expanded, my no doubt uneducated idea would be to add a second array with one array just for improvements and the other for small wonders and Wonders. However, I suppose your idea of storing the additional data elsewhere is far more feasible. I can only ask, what are the options or limitations for storing data elsewhere? Or is it something you consider solvable with reasonable effort and therefore doable in the foreseeable future?

2. I could modify the build logic to allow an improvement to be built if any of its required resources are present. Anything else that depends on the resources being present wouldn't work, though, unless I modify that too. Unfortunately there's no single point in the game logic that decides whether or not a building's resource requirement is satisfied. About turning off a bank's gold bonus when it's missing a required resource, I could try that but I'm not sure it would work. There may be ways a city could lose access to a resource that I don't know about.

It would probably be best to replace all the random checks for resources, government types, and so on across the entire code by calling one single function to handle and modify these checks more easily. However, this seems like an overly complex task at the moment, which would be good to solve, but which can wait quietly at the same time.

4. Force selling improvements once they become obsolete would be easy. This was requested before as a way of saving the AI from paying maintenance on obsolete improvs, but it turns out obsolete improvs costing maintenance was a bug that I've since fixed.

Actually, I was not referring to the forced sale of an improvement in conjunction with it becoming obsolete. Rather, I was thinking of this ability in conjunction with the previous points, where the improvement would just be forced sold and modified a bit (for example, after a certain technology is achieved, it would be forced sold, its maintenance cost would increase, and its cost to build would also increase).

5. Sadly working with the interface can be a real pain. It can be difficult to know when to create/destroy UI objects, when to draw them, and how to tie them together (e.g. attach a scroll bar to a window). There's a lot of UI code in the EXE and it's mostly an over-complicated mess. But who knows, maybe this would be easy?

As for Luxuries, even an unpleasant-looking overlay for a larger number will be better than the current situation where Luxuries in the city from 9th onwards appear in the pollution area or completely out of the screen. Of course, a similar solution to the one for too many strategic resources in the city would also be great.

6 & 7. These should be simple changes but I'd have to analyze the map generator first. It's not something I've looked into in depth yet. Can't you increase the rate at which resources appear using the editor? Is that not good enough for some reason?

I can confirm what has already been said about this. Increasing the appearance ratio of strategic resources will cause fewer bonus resources to be generated due to the maximum spot capacity for resources (this is calculated from the number of map tiles and players, all based on observation).

Another interesting thing is that it looks like the calculations for the water and land resources are done separately, because in the experiments where I deleted all other resources except bonus resources, the random generator always placed significantly more water resources than land resources.

11. I wish I knew how the AI selected targets. I've looked into that before for some other changes I wanted to make but it's not obvious. I'm sure I could figure it out with enough effort, maybe some day.

I suppose anything related to AI diplomacy will have to wait as well. It's really annoying how childishly nonsensical the decisions AI makes when making all sorts of alliances, or how easy it is to turn AIs against each other when you only have a bit of money.

Some more random thoughts about your list:

Finally, I'd like to go back to my big first point. Since you didn't write anything on it, I don't know if I made myself and my examples clear enough or if my suggestions for additional options for resources generation by buildings were silly, unfeasible or too difficult to implement. I think just having the option for a building to generate resources depending on the government, for example: a Palace generating a Democracy strategic resource in Democracy and a Republic strategic resource in Republic, would incredibly expand the government's potential uses. Similarly with the ability for a building to stop producing resource without becoming obsolete, or conversely, to start producing resource only since the invention of a certain technology.

Of course, I have no idea how big of a task any of this is or how much work is involved, so if you have higher priority tasks on your list, like optimizing late game turn lengths, address them.

 

[Ozymandias]

Dear Heavens, the places I spelunk! On "CodeHappy.net" from the Yer Of The Flood I found the following (undocumented) assertion:

"Whoever has the best defense ability after terrain, hit points and fortification status are considered, will defend."

! From here (also anecdotal) -

"You can't.The strongest defender is chosen. So pikes defend against knights, maces against pikes etc."

 

[Civinator]

Dear Heavens, the places I spelunk! On "CodeHappy.net" from the Yer Of The Flood I found the following (undocumented) assertion:

"Whoever has the best defense ability after terrain, hit points and fortification status are considered, will defend."

! From here (also anecdotal) -

"You can't.The strongest defender is chosen. So pikes defend against knights, maces against pikes etc."

Ozy, is it clear that you are writing here about Civ 4 and not about Civ 3 ?

The setting of Civ 4 described here in my eyes is worse to the setting in Civ 3, as it leads to the very bad real stacks of doom, where it is the best tactics to place all kinds of different units in the same tile to always have the best defender against an attack. The existing setting of Civ 3 in my eyes is much better. The setting of Civ 4 is based on the different defense values that units can have against different attacking units (stone-paper-scissors method) - but what could be a better setting, in reality is completely negated by the stack of doom tactics. The current system of fighting against such stacks in Civ 3 in my eyes is far superior, as here the attacking unit can pick out units of such a stack by the stealth attack settings.

If Firaxis would have taken this simple principle into account, they would not have run into that dilemma with the stacks of doom in Civ 4, that they tried to fix by abolishing stacks in general in Civ 5 and Civ 6. The 1 unit per tile setting in Civ 5 and 6 in my eyes contributes to the decline of the civ series - and it is based on the wrong settings of stack combat in Civ 4.

 

[vmxa]

Civinator, I agree the one unit per tile is a major draw back, but the endless adding of unnecessary things to civ5/6 is what killed it for me. If you have no civ experience and try to play civ 6, it is very daunting.

 

[Alekseyev_]

Reading the post about the city screen resources gave me an idea. Would it be possible to have technologies also obsolete resources? So that for example with some modern military tech, resources such as horses or camels could become obsolete, no longer being shown in the city screen, enabling units, or being available for trade anymore. Likewise, a luxury such as incense might get obsolete with modern media, whereas a new, building-created resource such as entertainment products gets available. And so on.

 

[Flintlock]

Here's what it looks like when you pack the luxuries more tightly into the box:

This is with the height of each row set to 16 pixels instead of the normal 23 pixels. Some icons are missing because this is a simple test where I converted all bonus resources to luxuries without bothering to fill in icons for them.

Eleven luxuries fit neatly into the box, some icons overlap a bit but it looks fine IMO. There's no need to fit any more than that since cities are limited to eleven luxuries anyway. Any more beyond that won't contribute happiness and won't appear on the interface. I'm guessing that limit is already known but I had never heard of it before I saw it in the code. Before anyone asks, removing that limit would be annoyingly difficult since there is a statically allocated array that stores how much happiness you get with a marketplace for N luxury resources and only goes up to N=11. Again it's not possible to expand the array so I'd have to figure something else out. Anyway, for now simply packing the rows in tighter solves the problem of luxuries overflowing the box.

Have you had a chance to see about buildings adding yields to the city through resources? I know you have about a million items on your list, but I am at the point we're I'm setting up buildings and tech trees and it would be a great help if I could plan this out ahead of time.

I'll look into adding yields from generated resources next and try to get it done sooner rather than later. It's something I've wanted to do for a while anyway. I do have a ton of things on my list and every time I check the thread I get distracted by something new. Not that I mind, for example it was a fun little diversion looking into how luxuries are drawn on the city screen and how their happiness is added to cities.

By the way, another thing I've wanted to do for a while is add a little icon on resource generating improvements indicating what resource they're generating. I'd like to fit it somewhere next to the commerce and culture icons in the improvements list. Ideally I could fit food, shields, and more commerce icons in there too for resources that are adding yields, but I'm not sure those will fit.

So this question is addressed to Flintlock, I also have experimented with the item of "virtual" resources. I did not note any additions in food and production by virtual resources and my guess is, that there must be a citizen who is working on that resource on the map to directly influence those factors in a city - and this (at present) is not possible, as a resource that is provided to a city by a building is only virtual and not on the map. I did not look for happiness provided by virtual luxury resources, as in my mods and scenarios at present there is no need for them.

The fact that generated resources are not on worked tiles shouldn't be a problem long term. My plan is to modify the functions that loop over all tiles worked by a city to gather tile yields so they also include yields from certain generated resources as well. If that's not possible for some reason, I could instead modify the yield from the city center tile to include the extra yields. The reason I don't like that second option is it might be confusing to players where the extra yields are coming from, but if needed I'm confident that approach would work. Happiness from generated luxuries should definitely already work.

Getting past the 256 improvement limit would certainly be a turning point for all modders. Since you said the array can't be expanded, my no doubt uneducated idea would be to add a second array with one array just for improvements and the other for small wonders and Wonders. However, I suppose your idea of storing the additional data elsewhere is far more feasible. I can only ask, what are the options or limitations for storing data elsewhere? Or is it something you consider solvable with reasonable effort and therefore doable in the foreseeable future?

The problem with separating out the wonders and regular improvements is they're all in the same list in the scenario data and the arrays of built improvements in cities are parallel to that list. In other words, if you want to know if the 50th building (in the list) is physically present in a city, you'd check the 50th bit in its array. Changing that would just add more complications. It would be easier to keep the bits for the first 256 buildings in the original arrays then create new ones for the 257th and onward buildings.

The hard parts about making that work are, first, modifying the code that accesses the original arrays to know about the extra arrays so it can use them instead when needed and, second, storing the extra arrays into the save file. I'm not sure what that second issue would entail. Ideally it's possible to just tack arbitrary bytes onto the end of save files without breaking them, and I believe that's the case. Otherwise it would be necessary to stuff the additional data into gaps in the original save data, and that may not be easy and there may not be enough space.

Finally, I'd like to go back to my big first point. Since you didn't write anything on it, I don't know if I made myself and my examples clear enough or if my suggestions for additional options for resources generation by buildings were silly, unfeasible or too difficult to implement. I think just having the option for a building to generate resources depending on the government, for example: a Palace generating a Democracy strategic resource in Democracy and a Republic strategic resource in Republic, would incredibly expand the government's potential uses. Similarly with the ability for a building to stop producing resource without becoming obsolete, or conversely, to start producing resource only since the invention of a certain technology.

Those kind of things are feasible but my concern is they would add too much complexity to the game rules to be worth it. Tying resource generation to government should be okay, but for example tying it to the size of the city I think would confuse players. Similarly for resource generation stopping at a certain technology, I can't think of any other case where buildings change their characteristics based on technology other than becoming obsolete. If the goal of these changes is to work around the improvement limit, I'd rather address that directly. If removing the improv limit turns out to be impossible then I'd be more interested its workarounds.

Reading the post about the city screen resources gave me an idea. Would it be possible to have technologies also obsolete resources?

This might be doable since the checks that are already there for resource revealing techs could be modified to also un-reveal resources also based on tech. But maybe not though since those checks are partially inlined from what I remember so I could replace the call to Leader::has_tech but the rest would pose a challenge.

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

That is interesting with the luxuries box. I had ten luxuries set up much like Civinator's picture above, but I've always wondered about what the maximum effective luxuries would be. That's cool that you found it in the code. Eleven would be great, it means I got one more spot to play with. A brewery or distillery that requires grain and produces liquor...?

I really appreciate you taking a look at the generated resources. I think this will open a lot of opportunities. With buildings generating resources, being requirements for units, and potentially providing yields I'm not even stressing the 256 limit. Having the icons would be great as well. I know Predator's been experimenting with perfume, which is probably going to be a must for improvement bonuses that the AI is not programmed to evaluate. Although as you get into moving graphics placement around I think that's another rabbit hole you could get sucked into.

One thing that's cool is how the building-produced resources make it easier to tell what requirements are missing right from the city screen. You can see this in practice in the Overlord mod. I was never crazy about how the strategic resources get put in that box when there's too many, but for a twenty-year-old game it's understandable. I really liked the way they did strategic resources in Civ 5, where they were very minimalist but visible at all times. I'm not requesting this, by the way, just observing! But it's clear that there are limitations in Civ 3 vs modern games when it comes to interactive interfaces. For example, if the building requires a resource and the resource is disconnected, there is no indication other than reduced totals.

 

[Ozymandias]

Ozy, is it clear that you are writing here about Civ 4 and not about Civ 3 ?

The setting of Civ 4 described here in my eyes is worse to the setting in Civ 3, as it leads to the very bad real stacks of doom, where it is the best tactics to place all kinds of different units in the same tile to always have the best defender against an attack. The existing setting of Civ 3 in my eyes is much better. The setting of Civ 4 is based on the different defense values that units can have against different attacking units (stone-paper-scissors method) - but what could be a better setting, in reality is completely negated by the stack of doom tactics. The current system of fighting against such stacks in Civ 3 in my eyes is far superior, as here the attacking unit can pick out units of such a stack by the stealth attack settings.

If Firaxis would have taken this simple principle into account, they would not have run into that dilemma with the stacks of doom in Civ 4, that they tried to fix by abolishing stacks in general in Civ 5 and Civ 6. The 1 unit per tile setting in Civ 5 and 6 in my eyes contributes to the decline of the civ series - and it is based on the wrong settings of stack combat in Civ 4.

Ouch! The 1st is Civ3, the second ...

 

[timerover51]

That is interesting with the luxuries box. I had ten luxuries set up much like Civinator's picture above, but I've always wondered about what the maximum effective luxuries would be. That's cool that you found it in the code. Eleven would be great, it means I got one more spot to play with. A brewery or distillery that requires grain and produces liquor...?

Theov already has a brewery in his mod, located here. https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/expanding-civ3-a-theov-mod.559222/

I have set it to require wheat to be built, and once built it produces 2 Happy Faces and +50% tax income. If you could set it to produce a resource like Beer, you would get quite a lot of use from it. The wheat does not need to be located within the city radius. Theov also has a winery which does require Wines to be in the city radius. It you wanted you could set those to produce Brandy as a luxury resource.

Note to Self: Remember the limit of 11 on luxury resources. As you can have a total of 32 Strategic and Luxury resources in the unmodded game, that allows for a total of 21 Strategic resources in a game.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

The setting of Civ 4 described here in my eyes is worse to the setting in Civ 3, as it leads to the very bad real stacks of doom, where it is the best tactics to place all kinds of different units in the same tile to always have the best defender against an attack. The existing setting of Civ 3 in my eyes is much better. The setting of Civ 4 is based on the different defense values that units can have against different attacking units (stone-paper-scissors method) - but what could be a better setting, in reality is completely negated by the stack of doom tactics. The current system of fighting against such stacks in Civ 3 in my eyes is far superior, as here the attacking unit can pick out units of such a stack by the stealth attack settings.

If Firaxis would have taken this simple principle into account, they would not have run into that dilemma with the stacks of doom in Civ 4, that they tried to fix by abolishing stacks in general in Civ 5 and Civ 6. The 1 unit per tile setting in Civ 5 and 6 in my eyes contributes to the decline of the civ series - and it is based on the wrong settings of stack combat in Civ 4.

As a series vet since all the way back in '91, it took me literal years for Civ4 combat to finally click. The Civ franchise as a whole has always struggled with its wargaming influences: Sid says combat was intended to be frontal, but this was never properly reconciled with infinite stacking. Civ4 stacks basically operate as division-level formations à la Civ3 Armies, and had there been an upper cap on units per tile to prevent the doomstacking, they might have worked better. (Vincentz's Infinite Projects actually implements a UPT limit that scales by era, forcing "flatter" armies without the "carpet of doom" of the Civ5+ generation.)

SoD meta aside, there are parts of it I feel would be worth back-porting into older games (air combat especially feels much less hit-or-miss, and the one zone where they did prevent doomstacking): selective Stealth Attack combined with vs-unit bonuses would mean things like TOW infantry providing hard-counter to tanks without superseding general defensive units.

Reading the post about the city screen resources gave me an idea. Would it be possible to have technologies also obsolete resources? So that for example with some modern military tech, resources such as horses or camels could become obsolete, no longer being shown in the city screen, enabling units, or being available for trade anymore. Likewise, a luxury such as incense might get obsolete with modern media, whereas a new, building-created resource such as entertainment products gets available. And so on.

Just like Civ4!

 

[Sakharov]

As a series vet since all the way back in '91, it took me literal years for Civ4 combat to finally click. The Civ franchise as a whole has always struggled with its wargaming influences: Sid says combat was intended to be frontal, but this was never properly reconciled with infinite stacking. Civ4 stacks basically operate as division-level formations à la Civ3 Armies, and had there been an upper cap on units per tile to prevent the doomstacking, they might have worked better. (Vincentz's Infinite Projects actually implements a UPT limit that scales by era, forcing "flatter" armies without the "carpet of doom" of the Civ5+ generation.)

SoD meta aside, there are parts of it I feel would be worth back-porting into older games (air combat especially feels much less hit-or-miss, and the one zone where they did prevent doomstacking): selective Stealth Attack combined with vs-unit bonuses would mean things like TOW infantry providing hard-counter to tanks without superseding general defensive units.


Just like Civ4!

You just gave me a brilliant idea! I'll give TOW Infantry stealth attack ability, but only against armored units (Tank, Panzer, Modern Armor and maybe Mech Infantry?). It also aims to equalize slow and fast units: tanks would have better mobility, but modern foot units would have better defense and some special abilities.
But there's some issue. Let's say our TOW Infantry is standing on some tile, and there are two enemy stacks on adjacent tiles: one contains some tanks and some infantry, the other one - only infantry. If we attack the first one, then we would get window suggesting to choose target; we would be able only to attack tanks unless no one left. If we attack the second stack, it would be just like regular attack without stealth ability, we will just attack infantry with highest HP.
Maybe it's supposed to work this way, stealth units should hunt their targets first.

 

[tjs282]

TOWs are primarily defensive, per their stats. So making them the Stealth targets for the Tanks etc. would be more on point...

 

[Sakharov]

TOWs are primarily defensive, per their stats. So making them the Stealth targets for the Tanks etc. would be more on point...

That's why I made them offensive. In stock game it costs equal to Modern Armor, but has twice less attack value. I changed it A/D to 18/12 and raised Modern Armor cost to 180 shields and lowered defense to 12.
With stealth attack TOW Infantry can easily take down enemy tanks, and their speed is not such a problem if fighting or your own territory cause in Modern Era railroads are anywhere. Such a counter-offensive unit.
What do you think about similar approach for earlier units? In Civ3 it's impossible to add multipliers vs specific units but setting specific stealth attack targets makes a sense. For example, some offensive "Pikeman" that can attack only cavalry units. I gonna figure out how AI would handle this.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

You just gave me a brilliant idea! I'll give TOW Infantry stealth attack ability, but only against armored units (Tank, Panzer, Modern Armor and maybe Mech Infantry?). It also aims to equalize slow and fast units: tanks would have better mobility, but modern foot units would have better defense and some special abilities.
But there's some issue. Let's say our TOW Infantry is standing on some tile, and there are two enemy stacks on adjacent tiles: one contains some tanks and some infantry, the other one - only infantry. If we attack the first one, then we would get window suggesting to choose target; we would be able only to attack tanks unless no one left. If we attack the second stack, it would be just like regular attack without stealth ability, we will just attack infantry with highest HP.
Maybe it's supposed to work this way, stealth units should hunt their targets first.

Funnily enough I'm doing the exact same thing with a personal project, inspired by a Civ2 scenario that rebalanced HP/FP between vehicles and foot soldiers for more tactical play. If we're approaching TOW infantry from their role IRL, prioritizing armour over general infantry is entirely appropriate: outside of Rimmy's ArmA Fusterclucks™, who's shooting AP rockets at the grunts?

TOWs are primarily defensive, per their stats. So making them the Stealth targets for the Tanks etc. would be more on point...

Interestingly enough, this scheme would mimic Civ4 by forcing attackers to engage their hard counter(s) over and above other units.

 

[tjs282]

Interestingly enough, this scheme would mimic Civ4 by forcing attackers to engage their hard counter(s) over and above other units.

Yup