Horses / Jeeps / Stables / Motor Pools

[donquixote235]

Hi,

I'd like to get the community's opinion on an idea I've had running around for quite some time. First, I'd like to add two new promotions - "Horsemanship" (adds +1 movement rate, requires Horses, available with Animal Husbandry) and "Driver" (adds +2 movement rate, replaces Horsemanship, requires Oil, available with Combustion).

Second, I'd like to add two new buildings - Stables (available with Animal Husbandry, requires Horses) and Motor Pool (available with Combustion, requires Oil). If you have these buildings present in a civ, then any new melee unit that city creates automatically has either the Horsemanship or the Driver skill (since it has a ready supply of horses or jeeps).

Note that these modifications don't mean that the unit is actually mounted - the unit is only using these imaginary mounts for transportation, not for combat... specially trained units like Horse Archers or Knights are needed for mounted combat. I mainly want to attempt to include it to simulate the fact that when horses or cars become available, people probably aren't going to continue walking everywhere when they could always ride/drive.

An alternative idea is to create a Horse/Jeep/Truck unit, which is essentially a land-based cargo unit. It doesn't actually participate in combat, but it has a movement speed of 2 (Horse) or 4 (Jeep/Truck) and can hold 1, 2, or 4 units in it.

 

[donquixote235]

Oh, on the second option (land-based cargo units) I actually had that idea during Civ 3, and tried implementing it... it worked great, except for the fact that the AI had no concept of using it. It caused imbalance because all my units were able to fly across the map while the AI's units still trudged along at 1 square per turn.

 

[Scytale]

Man I love your ideea about the cargo unit. I think maybe the mechanized infantry could be modified to carry a number of infantry units such as marines. Untill we get the graphics for a truck or something similar. What do you think? How can this be done?

 

[donquixote235]

Well, I managed to implement a "Light Riding Horse" unit, but only after bending some rules.

The big problem comes when you try to determine what kind of cargo a unit can take. There are two types of cargo fields in Civ4UnitInfos.xml - Special units and Domain units. Special unit types apply to a particular class - for example, all scouts/missionaries/explorers are "SPECIALUNIT_PEOPLE" special units. That's why some cargo units (e.g. Caravels) can only carry missionaries and such, but never warriors or tanks. The other type, Domain, applies to whether a unit is land-based or sea-based or air-based. So for example a galley can carry all of DOMAIN_LAND units - in other words, a galley can't carry another galley.

The way I got the horse unit to work was to make all foot-based units (whether they're warriors or settlers or missionaries or crossbowmen or whatever) into "SPECIALUNIT_PEOPLE", which allows the horse to add them to its cargo. However this could potentially unbalance the game (I haven't tried, so I don't know) since as I said earlier there are some units that will only load certain other units, and this change may cause them to break. I don't see it having a huge negative impact, but like I said I haven't tested it, so I'm unsure.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let me tell you how they worked. I created a warrior and loaded him into my Light Riding Horse, and started to check out the terrain. All civs apparently started with a light rider, and I saw one of them get attacked by a lion. Since I gave the light rider absolutely no power, it was immediately destroyed. I then moved my warrior-loaded horse next to the lion, and tried to provoke it into attacking me. Since I had a unit with hit points, when the lion attacked the warrior automatically hopped to the defense of the horse, and managed to defeat the lion soundly. So apparently they work as far as combat is concerned.

I still don't know if the AI will wind up using them however... I need to play a game through and see if horses start to litter the terrain, and if so, if there are any troops in them. If the AI doesn't actually use the units then we get back into the problem with balance, and I'll probably have to scrap the idea (unless the SDK allows me to modify this in some way).

If anybody is interested, I've put the altered xml files up at http://www.mcnair.nu/civ4/horses.zip - drop them in your CustomAssets folder, under XML/Units, and start a quick game. The graphic is the same as the Mech Inf unit, so they'd be easily recognizable.

 

[donquixote235]

Well, although the horse unit was very successful for me (it allowed me to transport some swordsmen to the frontline in very fast fashion) it seems like none of the other Civs are utilizing it... so unless my sample game was just a fluke, it's probably not feasible to put them in the game. I'll probably go back to my original idea of creating the horsemanship and driving promotions.

 

[totg_kabu]

I've already added stables to my mod, but it adds the horse resource to the city with no bonuses. But I like the idea of transport units.

Check for all the references to transport ship, or civilization info - there should be an aiweight or similar somewhere that will increace or decreace usage (Just guessing based on how the rest of the game is set up, I've not looked at units too closely just buildings.)

 

[PiTiFUL]

+2 movement I think is too much, +1 should be max. One idea I thought of was to add jeep and humv as upgrades to explorers, jeep would have +1 move and humv would have +1 move and +1 LOS. The explorers look pretty silly in industrial/modern era.

 

[donquixote235]

Well, the +2 wouldn't be in addition to the prior +1, it would instead be in place of ... assuming we could make one promotion replace another one. Perhaps I can make one obsolete when Combustion is discovered, but I'll have to check before I can say for sure.