Player specific units

[ZergMazter]

I've managed to incorporate player specific units in my game without using auto-production. Why player specific, and how is it different from civ specific?

-Civ specific: Both human and AI players will have access to this unit when the specific civilization is played.

-Player specific: Both human and AI players will have access to this unit regardless of the civilization being played.

Why is it useful?

An example of many:

The AI is not very smart to understand complex concepts. Imagine you want workers to have the option to upgrade to some kind of militia in times of need, becoming soldiers and leaving their previous life styles behind. The human player knows they don't have to militarize their workers unless their survival depended on it, but the AI will immediately upgrade to militia and lose all of it's workers in the process.

To help out the AI we want to split the players worker unit chain into 'human workers' and 'AI workers'

I'm gonna use a similar technique I talked about in my thread on how to capture unavailable units:

1- Create 2 techs, and name them 'Human units' and 'AI units'

2- Don't give them an age, and click the 'do not trade' box.

3- Under scenario properties-players, give the human tech to humans, and AI to AI.

4- Create an armed unit that only human workers will upgrade to and link it to the 'Human units' tech, and flag it under unit abilities as 'king'. Why king? because as I discussed in my previous thread, doing this will hide the unit chain meaning workers will no longer be build-able. The king flag restores the chain, while keeping the upgrade hidden as an alternate choice, while still keeping it player specific.

5- Since we are not talking about civ specific here we are gonna have to do the exact same thing for the AI. Create an armed worker upgrade for the AI and link it to the 'AI units' tech, and flag it under unit abilities as 'King'. Make the AI worker upgrade option actually a worker that unlike the human worker, it's able to work and fight as needed, then return to work when done fighting. (you'll need Quintillus editor for that mixed strategy)

Done!

What is going on here? The human unit once upgraded stays a militia forever, and the AI unit can do both simultaneously. This helps make up for AI stupidity, instead of losing all of their workers to upgrades instantly, they will just get another worker with fighting capabilities.

Humans will be using the unit as intended, only upgrading to militia in an emergency, and we will be helping the AI to be using the unit as intended while at the same time helping them not break their game.

The same thing can be applied to so many different scenarios including manipulating the AI to load missiles into a missile cruiser, using flags that the human would surely exploit, but having split the unit chains allows it to be fair on both sides.

The only disadvantage to this is that it will mess up every civ's starting techs, but I've found that the trade is worthwhile if you create an alternate way of starting a game using flavors to manipulate the different AI civ groups to research different techs on the 1st and 2nd tier of the first age. From then this could grow into a hugely different mod, allowing you to apply concepts that couldn't have been done before because of the failing AI, and all without cheating.

 

[Kirejara]

Nice idea!

But I have a possible flaw in it.

I have in my game for both the Corvette and Frigate a final upgrade to Steam Corvette and Steam Frigate with Steampower.

Initialy I had both upgrade units marked as King as I did not want them to be build from scratch (just in real life there old sailships received a new lend of life by adding a steam engine).

However this did not work as planed, as the city governor switched Corvettes and Frigates under construction during the interturns into the king upgrade.

So I have removed the king mark from both upgrade units, as it did not work and the finished ships were also labeled with the rulers name.

 

[Blue Monkey]

The only disadvantage to this is that it will mess up every civ's starting techs, ...

The techs to create this unit won't be in the "required" tree for advancement to next era. Other than that is there something else "messed up" about the starting techs?

 

[ZergMazter]

@Kirejara

Yes every time the player discovers a new tech the king flag is flawed to do that, and switch to that unbuildable unit. Luckily workers take 1-3 turns hehe, so it won't be very often that this will happen. This is the main reason why I dislike kings. It would have been awesome, but the game is too silly. It wont hurt the AI as the original plan was to make them build that unit first hand, but to prevent issues I made it a 2 tier process. They'll still have their worker count and stop building. On the human side well it's more of an annoyance. You can give those militia the 'join city' if you really didnt need one, but the game forced it on u, and then go back to building a regular worker.

I forgot to mention the king swap only happens if the turn interval happens at the same time anyone was trying to build a unit related to the 'kinged' chain

@Blue_Monkey:

When you go under scenario-scenario_properties-players, and you un-select the 'civilization defaults' box on the right, and under the 'Human player' box, then you are also disabling the free techs given to any civs under the 'civilization' tab in the editor, but on the other hand it allows you to assign starting techs to civs. This is why it messed up starting techs. It clears them out and you'll need to use a different approach as any techs you assign will not be civ specific, but player specific. That's why it's a good idea to use flavors to manipulate different cultural groups into researching different techs, making up for the lack of starting techs in the game.

A minor inconvenience for a major pay off as you'll be free to use previously unusable concepts without having the AI cheat, or the human exploit.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Thanks for the detailed explanations. Appreciate the time you've invested in exploring the options.

 

[nick0515]

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting idea!