Gift Units?

[LastShenanigan]

Sorry to start a new thread if this has already been answered. I did some searching and came up with nil results. Is there no way to gift units to another players Civ? It didn't really occur to me as an issue until I was reading strategies in the civilopedia and noticed one of them suggested gifting units to civs who are at war with Infernals. Is there a tiny button I'm missing somewhere? Thanks in advanced to anyone who can help with this.

 

[Emptiness]

Units can't be gifted in FfH2. If that 'pedia mentions it that's old advice, which should be removed.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

it was removed due to exploits. An example would be summoning skeletons and gifting them each turn. Soon your ally would be swarming with skeletons. This was a major issue in multiplayer.

 

[LastShenanigan]

Ah I see, well that's too bad. Playing with my girlfriend gifting units would've saved me the time of marching them over to her territory to help her out. Might be useful to have it as a game setting so it can be toggled on or off. Thanks for the info folks.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

Ah I see, well that's too bad. Playing with my girlfriend gifting units would've saved me the time of marching them over to her territory to help her out. Might be useful to have it as a game setting so it can be toggled on or off. Thanks for the info folks.

Yea I agree with you but that would be , sadly this is a lost cause. If you know how to edit the .dll files you could reactivate it... IIRC it is just set to off - its the recompiling the dll that can be a major uggg.

 

[Luckmann]

Does it even require DLL-editing? I thought it was just some minor edit somewhere.
But yes, I realize it's beating on a dead horse, but I'd still love to see an option for it somewhere. In major multiplayer games, people would simply not turn it on.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Enabling unit gifting does require editing the SDK and recompiling the DLL, but only one line of code needs to be changed.


You could make a spell that uses python to have the same effect as re-enabling gifting but without any need to touch the DLL, but that would slow the game down somewhat.

 

[Bill Bisco]

it was removed due to exploits. An example would be summoning skeletons and gifting them each turn. Soon your ally would be swarming with skeletons. This was a major issue in multiplayer.

If Kael designed to remove exploits the game would be a lot different. Frankly, summoning skeletons was already fixed by Fall Further to a degree. Removing an entire useful game feature in the name of balance when a game is horribly unbalanced is a terrible way to design a game.

I mean seriously, doing more work to prevent a feature's abuse is infinitely better than removing an entire useful feature.

 

[Kael]

If Kael designed to remove exploits the game would be a lot different. Frankly, summoning skeletons was already fixed by Fall Further to a degree. Removing an entire useful game feature in the name of balance when a game is horribly unbalanced is a terrible way to design a game.

I mean seriously, doing more work to prevent a feature's abuse is infinitely better than removing an entire useful feature.

Unfortunately balanced or unbalanced isn't a simple boolean state. It is a wide spectrum of better and worse. And gifting units allows much larger exploits than skeletons.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Ah I see, well that's too bad. Playing with my girlfriend gifting units would've saved me the time of marching them over to her territory to help her out. Might be useful to have it as a game setting so it can be toggled on or off. Thanks for the info folks.

Iirc, you have to be in the ally's territory to gift units in Civ 4, so it wouldn't save you any time there.

 

[Luckmann]

Just to mention one bug that someone mentioned before that is more serious that infinite skeletons; Every time a spellcaster was gifted they could choose a new free spell, as if they just came into existance.

Gift back and forth and you could soon have all the spells in existance.

 

[civ_king]

just to mention one bug that someone mentioned before that is more serious that infinite skeletons; every time a spellcaster was gifted they could choose a new free spell, as if they just came into existance.

Gift back and forth and you could soon have all the spells in existance.

exactly!

 

[Kael]

There are a few exploits. The worst one is my mind is being able to circumvent the national unit limits. You are limited to 4 paladins. But if you gift them to your ally you can build an infinite amount. Meanwhile your ally can be building infinite immortals and gifting them to you.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

I know this is on the bottom of any list but is it not possible to put a function in the civunitifo.xml (with the relevant .dll change) that would only allow certain units to be giftable? Much like the conscript function only allows certain units. Exploitable units would be blocked. Limit such functions to base units such as axemen and archers...

 

[Kael]

I know this is on the bottom of any list but is it not possible to put a function in the civunitifo.xml (with the relevant .dll change) that would only allow certain units to be giftable? Much like the conscript function only allows certain units. Exploitable units would be blocked. Limit such functions to base units such as axemen and archers...

Yeap, very possible. Of course that introduces its own issues, the primary one being that it will be confusing for players to figure out which unit can and can't be gifted. We would start getting error reports about being unable to gift a certain unit in a given situation, etc. Would we want a mechanic that isnt evenly applied.

It isn't a question of not knowing how to block the exploits. Just when everything is considered the simpliest and best solution (though I can understand why people who like gifting disagree) was to disable gifting entirely.

 

[UncleJJ]

Would it be possible to check whether the recipient had reached his national limit for the unit and not allow a gift in that case? So if he had exceeded his skeleton limit (= number of adepts and mages with Death 1) or had 4 immortals then those gifts would be blocked. On the otherhand you could gift an unlimited number of axemen or chariots.

 

[Emptiness]

Player A has Tower of Necromancy and several Combat V, Spell Extension II, Death I summoners (fairly easy to produce using Vampires). Player B is churning out masses of Death I Adepts (perhaps even 2x masses with Clan Warrens). Player A gifts wave after wave of 3-move Strong Skeletons with Empower V to player B. Player B destroys everyone.

If you wanted to block each exploit individually you'd have to keep revising the blocks each time someone came up with a new one. Blocking all unit gifting stops them all at once. Even in base civ, unit gifting is exploity; I could understand blocking it in base civ as well.

 

[UncleJJ]

Player A has Tower of Necromancy and several Combat V, Spell Extension II, Death I summoners (fairly easy to produce using Vampires). Player B is churning out masses of Death I Adepts (perhaps even 2x masses with Clan Warrens). Player A gifts wave after wave of 3-move Strong Skeletons with Empower V to player B. Player B destroys everyone.

I don't see how this would be an exploit, if gifting were allowed. How is it different from Player A simply donating the vampires and Player B generating the skeletons himself (if he had his own Tower of Necromancy)? The limitations I suggest stop the exploit of not needing the skeleton limits. Those adepts and the skeletons are going to cost maintenance for Player B. It is a very powerful move but that is the nature of gifting, at least potentially when 2 players co-operate intelligently. But a simple stack of 50 champions and 20 catapults is similarly powerful and could be gifted to overwhelm an opponent (when added to Player B's existing army)

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

Player A has Tower of Necromancy and several Combat V, Spell Extension II, Death I summoners (fairly easy to produce using Vampires). Player B is churning out masses of Death I Adepts (perhaps even 2x masses with Clan Warrens). Player A gifts wave after wave of 3-move Strong Skeletons with Empower V to player B. Player B destroys everyone.

If you wanted to block each exploit individually you'd have to keep revising the blocks each time someone came up with a new one. Blocking all unit gifting stops them all at once. Even in base civ, unit gifting is exploity; I could understand blocking it in base civ as well.

Not quite what I was saying - its a matter of stopping all units with an .xml tag, not nit picking each exploit that can be found. Say perhaps <bGiftable>0</bGiftable> unit cannot be gifted vs <bGiftable>1</bGiftable> can be gifted. Set all to a default of <bGiftable>0</bGiftable> and set only a few base units i.e. Archer, Longbowmen, Warriors, Axemen, Scouts, Hunters, Rangers, etc. Basically non "special" base units. Basic units that get a free promo would have an issue here so adepts would have to stay defaulted as blocked.

(mind you I do very little .dll editing and would prefer to avoid at all cost, so though I am making it sound easy to do, it very well may be more trouble than it is worth and as I mention before, this is pretty much a dead horse so I will not beat the rotted flesh anymore )

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Yeah, that sounds like a good way to do it.

The units I most often want to gift are workers, to my vassals (colonies) mostly.