Limited quantity units

[Iron Beagle]

Is there any way to limit the quantity of a particular type of unit that a civlization can have at one time?

In my case, I want to add a special forces unit to the game, but I don't want the players to be able to build dozens and dozens of them. I've noticed that this is the case with the "army" unit, but giving non-army units the army flag might have unforseen consequences.

 

[Grand Cadfael]

You could make it so you needed so many citys per unit of that type like they do with armies

 

[Steve Thompson]

How do you do that Grand Cadfael? I don't remember that in the editor, just a "cities needed to support an army" thing which would only apply to armies anyway, right?

 

[WildWeazel]

The only way to really limit the number is to make the unit spawn from a building. (Spec Ops Training small wonder in this case)

 

[GRM7584]

The 'cities needed per army' is in the General Settings tab. The "army" flag is one of the selectables in individual units. Unfortunately, selecting the army flag for a unit 'grays out' the attack and defense. Armies can only be armies in Civ 3, it seems.

 

[Grand Cadfael]

oops sorry

 

[Camber]

Depending on the scenario, you can also have the unit be unbuildable, but upgrade from a unit that you start the game with. Look at the Shogun unit in the Sengoku scenario. You can never build more of them, but you keep upgrading it throughout the game. I imagine if you wanted each civ to only have 8 (example) special forces units, you could give everyone 8 or the precursor units, and hope they kept them around long enough do that they could later upgrade them to special forces.

Another way to limit them, though it would not limit the numbers to a predictable sum: Make the unit require a resource that has an extrememly high disappearance rate, such as 20 or even 5. This would make it hard for civs to keep the resource long enough to mass-produce the unit. To further limit the numbers, you could make the resource able to reappear on terrain that was impassable. For example, you might have the resource on Grassland and Mountains, with Mountains impassable. Sometimes it would reappear on Grassland, but then it would get connected to a road and would disappear again. Eventually, after a randomly determined length of time, all of the sources would be relocated on impassable terrain.

 

[WildWeazel]

Don't resources still sometimes relocate if they aren't being used?

 

[GRM7584]

Likewise, the Shogun unit only operates because of the King flag. That was one of several ideas regarding the operation of Ringwraiths in the LoTM. It's not entirely unfeasible for a scenario.
Edit: I think weaselop is right, I believe I have seen resources relocate even when not connected.

 

[Camber]

I can't confirm that. AFAIK, a resource has to have a road going to/through it to qualify for relocation. After that, the likelihood of it moving is based on the random number generator and the disappearance probability in the editor.