Military Academy? Is it possible this time around?

[Basarin]

Hello,

Long-time lurker, and occasional AAR poster when my computer doesnt' decide to send my files to the great data dump in the sky (is the reason why I haven't resumed/restarted my old Korea AAR for Civ IV). I used to play a lot of Col back in the day too, and one of the things I loved to do was to establish a military academy. Its only purpose was to train veterans, and that was it. Find myself a nice food producing plot of land, import my tools and wood, and then make myself a colonial version of Sparta. It was great for when the REF came knocking.

However, I try the same thing here, and it doesnt' seem to work; no matter what, I can have graduates of anything BUT the veteran soldier in the settlement! Did they decide to take out this feature? Or am I missing something? I don't want to have to place all my hopes on a bunch of von Steuben's when the WoI rolls around!

Thanks in advance!

 

[Gliese 581]

Yes that feature was removed, only buying veteran troops or having your units fight wars will give experienced troops now (or aquiring military FFs).

 

[Basarin]

Man, that bites. I really liked the idea that in Col1 you could create a settlement that cranked out nothing but Continental Army volunteers. Your own version of West Point's precursor, if you will.

Ah well. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[BobTheBull]

Open UnitInfos.xml and find veteran; scroll down until you find the tag iTeacherWeight and set it to a number (2 seems to work well). Now you can train veterans in any school/college/university. Set up a univ in a city with enough excess food to keep feeding 3 cols and fill it up; be sure you have one veteran working in the settlement, it doesn't matter where. You can then crank out one veteran turn.

 

[Smak]

The cheapest way to get veteran soldiers is requesting military aid through diplomacy to your king. Unless you get lucky and one is waiting for you at the docks, that is of course the cheapest but not reliable.

Spain starts with one vet soldier so i would begin there.

 

[lovepuppy]

this is a neophyte answer, cuz I barely understand how to do it in Civ4, much less if it is possible in CivC,

but you could hanlde it through the events workings, kinda like the work-arounds for zeus's temple, similarly you could have the 1-time academy be built only by a 'hero' unit created by events (or gifted by ff would be easiest)

and if I am completely off the map, I'm sure osmeone will be happy to correct me.

 

[player1 fanatic]

The cheapest way to get veteran soldiers is requesting military aid through diplomacy to your king. Unless you get lucky and one is waiting for you at the docks, that is of course the cheapest but not reliable

It's also the best way to get destroyed later in war of independence.

For every solder (or cannon) you buy from king with discount, same amount of "virtual" liberty bells is added for calculating king forces.

It does not pay off, at all.

 

[Midgetskydiver]

Open UnitInfos.xml and find veteran; scroll down until you find the tag iTeacherWeight and set it to a number (2 seems to work well). Now you can train veterans in any school/college/university. Set up a univ in a city with enough excess food to keep feeding 3 cols and fill it up; be sure you have one veteran working in the settlement, it doesn't matter where. You can then crank out one veteran turn.

Can someone describe to me how to do this step-by-step? I couldn't find the file "unitinfos.xml". Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

 

[HolyHandGrenade]

Can someone describe to me how to do this step-by-step? I couldn't find the file "unitinfos.xml". Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

- navigate to
"installation directory of colonization"\Assets\XML\Units

- open with notepad:
CIV4UnitInfos.xml

- find "UNIT_VETERAN" (Ctrl-F)
- find "iTeacherWeight" (Ctrl-F)
- change the "0" to "2"
- save and exit

I myself haven't used it, so I am not sure if it really "works well". But nevertheless good luck

EDIT: Never forget to make a backup of the file you are going to change. Otherwise you have to reinstall the whole game if your modifications fail.

 

[BobTheBull]

Yeah, HolyHandGrenade has that exactly right. One more thing, though. When your VS graduates he will have profession colonist (see, he was a civilian when he went to school). After graduation, change profession to soldier, which will cost you 50 guns (he has to be inducted into the army and equipped). Then you will have a VS. I have made several, although haven't had the chance to test them, yet.

 

[joelwest]

- navigate to
"installation directory of colonization"\Assets\XML\Units

- open with notepad:
CIV4UnitInfos.xml

- find "UNIT_VETERAN" (Ctrl-F)
- find "<iTeacherWeight" (Ctrl-F)
- change the "0" to "2"
- save and exit

I myself haven't used it, so I am not sure if it really "works well". But nevertheless good luck

EDIT: Never forget to make a backup of the file you are going to change. Otherwise you have to reinstall the whole game if your modifications fail.

I was curious about this xml file so I opened it and looked at the values of this for the other units

this is my results in the spoiler below-

Spoiler :

in UnitInfos.xml file for
NativeLearnTime, StudentWeight, TeacherWeight
3, 1000, 0 colonist
4, 500, 0 indentured servant (much faster at learning from natives than from school) (either send to natives or make part of militia)
7, 100, 0 petty criminal (skip native training and school) (make part of militia)
3, 100, 0 converted native (learns as fast from his fellow natives as a colonist, skip school) (send to natives)

(for specialists specialty must be cleared before sending to natives or school, function as settlement specific teachers)
-1, 0, 4 miner, lumberjack, tobacco planter, cotton planter, sugar planter, farmer, trapper, & fisherman
-1, 0, 3 blacksmith, carpenter, fur trader, silver miner, rancher, pioneer, & (seasoned) scout
-1, 0, 2 gunsmith, rum distiller, weaver, tobacconist, (firebrand) preacher, (elder) statesman, & (Jesuit) missionary
-1, 0, 0 veteran (soldier), "regular" (King's invading soldier?), native ("Indian"), cannon, artillery, caravel, merchantman, privateer, galleon, frigate, ship of the line, man o'war, wagon train, horses, & great general

the Civilopedia does not warn you about different training times for various specialists, so for my own modded version I am going to set all to set all non zero TeacherWeight's to 4 and change veteran soldier from zero to 4

according to another modder setting all these units to TeacherWeight = 4 means only a schoolhouse needs to be built for them to able to train colonitsts

Spoiler :

from http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7336630&postcount=2

<iTeacherWeight>2</iTeacherWeight>

the Numbers are:

2 = University
3 = College
4 = Schoolhouse

The higher the TeacherWeight, the lower the school you need.

if a veteran soldier can be bought at the docks his skill is just as learnable as that of any of the other land based units. since cannons are worthless militarily, I may leave them set to zero, but others may use the same logic for vet soldiers that if they are on the docks, that ought to be able to train the colonists in the New World

on cannons

Spoiler :

to complete that thought the cannon as shipped cannot found a city although it is a land unit available on the docks of Europe. since the vet soldier can found a city as shipped, why not the cannon?

to fix this go into the same file and change

<bFound>0</bFound> to

<bFound>1</bFound>

however more extensive changes are needed for the game to see the cannon as a working unit after the city is founded