Yes! You should be able to capture the Cannon (sometimes) and the People that use it. This shouldn't relate to each other. All four possible capture/no-capture outcomes should be possible.
And we need a tag on robots that prevents them to get captured (I tested the Scout Mech).
BTW: Why are some Mechs robots while others are "Species (Human")?
Mechs are human driven vehicles while Robots are purely AI.
Sorry but why shouldn't robots get captured?
Read below.
Yeah capturing siege engines and boats is very powerful. While its logical to have a crew for them to provide captures I wonder if its over powered to get both a captive AND a siege engine or boat.
Perhaps you can only do one. You can either get captives OR get a siege engine, but not both. Then again it would add some spice if you were lucky enough to get it all.
Also in the boats case what if you capture them at sea and have no cargo space to carry them?
I THINK you may be able to do both but it depends on how DH setup his captives mechanism. As for boats... due to complexity of cargo I think we assume all naval battles fail to capture the crew or carried units - those are assumed to die at sea though we also assume captured boats to be something we can then man once hijacked. Assumes we have extra crew that can do this.
There is a tag in UnitInfos specially for specifying what the unit becomes when captured.
If you make any units capturable that weren't before, I think they will need to get values in this tag.
That tag operates on a different mechanism. See comments below.
Ah, good to know!
I think basically every unit that has a human attached to it (so all manned siege units tanks, wheeled etc units) should become captetives. We can make up a new Captetive Type for Robot. But this would also require new specialists.
Capturing robots and reprogramming them... interesting concept. Maybe best to restrict this to another mechanism entirely.
This conversation shows us where our understanding of capturing stands.
There's more than one capture mechanism:
1) When a unit is designating it's capture type it's possible to capture that unit and when it is it will be converted to the type designated in the xml. This works off of its own dynamic and the 'capture chance' we're talking about here does not currently work into this mechanism at all. I've been meaning to check but I think it may be that DH checks for this tag to be used on the unit and if it is, it's not valid for capturing according to the capture mechanism we've been discussing here.
2) There's a very specific mechanism in python for capturing naval and siege units. Again, this differs from the dynamic we're discussing. I believe it operates off the capture tag on the unit too though. I'm not so sure how these work entirely.
3) When units have 0 power AND a designated capture type, there's no chance - it's an automatic capture and conversion of that unit to the type designated.
4) Then there's the mechanism we're discussing that turns units into 'captives' of whatever type - Neanderthal, Military, Civilian etc... This dynamic is based on the percentage chance to capture and the capture resistance of the unit. It always produces types of captives as noted and does not work off the Captive tag on the victim unit at all.
If we make robots capturable under this mechanism, we'd be turning an artificial hunk of metal and programming into a person. Pinocchio would be jealous. If we have Catapults being both capturable under the siege and Captive mechanism that may be rational as we've caught not only the mechanism but the crew as well.
Otherwise units that operate on the other mechanisms are probably Not Applicable for use under this one so their chances of resisting capture or capturing are irrelevant. At some point I'll try to figure out how to best hide these compiled values on units where it doesn't make a difference and replace this display with a note stating how capturing does work for them (in brief like : When defeated may be captured.)
Next cycle I can take a look at all the capture mechanisms and see if perhaps we'd like to blend them all into a master version that takes all the different versions into account. Til then, proceed forth with this knowledge.
I'm sure DH could offer a lot more about the other captive mechanisms and about how he programmed this one specifically. My role in this was to make these new tags and build the ability for these new tags to compile and interact with his Captives mechanism. He then had to plug them into his formula.