Warlords: Can't upgrade SAM Infantry

[weregamer]

The Civ4 1.61 patch finally fixed SAM Infantry not upgrading to Motorized, but Warlords is not letting me do this. It's not too hard to fix the XML file but it's annoying because I spend my workday making computers do what I want, at home I just want to play the game.

(If I do go in and fix that, are there any other upgrade path problems to fix as well? I can put the fixes out as a replacement XML file for folks if there are many.)

 

[MrCynical]

The change to SAM infantry (and also marines) so that they upgrade to mech infantry under patch 1.61 was regarded as a bad mistake by most people, for the simple reason that once you'd invented mechs, you couldn't build marines or SAMs. However this broke the cardinal rule than a unit musn't be obsoleted (and hence its production blocked) by a unit that is not superior to it under all circumstances. SAMs are superior to mechs against air units. Marines are superior when performing amphibious attacks, and hence there were many complaints about the above change, and it was reversed for Warlords.

 

[weregamer]

Ah. I see. I can see the argument - in fact I was baffled by the Marine->MechInf upgrade already.

Is there a similar reason why Catapults don't upgrade to Trebuchets? I was comparing them capability-per-capability and they seemed awfully similar...

 

[MrCynical]

Well, a catapult has a base strength of 5. A trebuchet only has a base strength of 4, with a 100% bonus against cities. If for example you want to attack a stack of units outside a city, the catapult is therefore better than the trebuchet.