Can the air mission range be increased?

[Ripley1]

Anyone find out yet how to increase the air range to more than 8? (without being infinate) to say 12 or 16 or something? I did figure out how to make stuff infinate.. in the editor add the "ICBM" setting. If you have the unit selected and say for a helicopter to airdrop a marine from North America to Asia you can..moving the map over to asia and hold "T" where you want to drop him.. It works.. for transports atleast so far I tried. I dont know if the AI will pick up on it.. it should?
Still havent figured out how to make the standard range more than 8.
Atleast the infinate range will make air missions in Europe for a WWII scenario more realistic..for bombers atleast, yet its still off. (Allied bombers from England couldnt reach North Africa)

 

[sgrig]

I tried increasing the air unit mission range using hex editing of the bic file, and although at first the game recognises the unit and when you click the bomb mission the the grid corresponding to the new range appears, but when you click on something to bomb, the game crashes

So although the bic file format would allow greater ranges, (the size of the field is 4 bytes, so theoretically you could have a value of up to 256^4-1 which is by far greater than any map size ), but it seems that there is a hard-coded limit in the civilization3.exe, somewhere in the code for the combat system, which is a shame. I hope that Firaxis are going to fix this in the next patch. Currently on a huge map, bombers are practically useless (even with range 8).

Suppose on a huge map 256 squares are at most equivalent to 40,000 km on earth (the circumference of the Earth at the equator), so in this case 8 squares range 1250 km (if we work out the distance at moderate latitudes this figure will be even lower) - the range of WW2 medium bombers, but in game this range is allocated to a strategic Stealth Bomber, which has a range of upto 10 greater.

So I hope Dan Magaha reads this, understands the comical side of this issue and will convey the message to the rest of the Firaxis team to correct this!

 

[Umask077]

This is definitly a hard coded limit and im not exactly sure why they would do it. I tried editing the bic with the same results. I havent been able to get the ICBM trick to work with recon missions (although I havent tried air drops either). Ive been tinkering with a spy satalite type unit and would love to give it the full map range. Basicly just recon+radar mission type thing.

There no logic to why the movement cap of 8 is there that I can see. (Im not omnipotent yet). Id love to see it fixed or at the very least explained (Id just like to know if there is a good reason).

The other thing id like to see is radar ranges. More then just one additional square. An aegis cruiser on the sea can use his radar much more effectivly then radar artillery on the ground. Radar is still affected by line of sight.