Ranged attacks in Units.txt

[SoulFisher]

In Units.txt, does anyone know the difference between the following lines?

ZB_RANGE_ATTACK 0

BATTLEFIELD_RANGE 0

BATTLEFIELD_RADIUS 0

Thanks.

Sure has been quiet in here recently . . . .

[TheBirdMan]

Have seen this been discussed before - can't remember when.

I'll try to find it.

But as far as I remember, the battlefield things are loose ends from the programmers. Things they wanted but never finished.

The attack range has something to do with where the units are placed in a battle with stacked units (again as far as I remember).

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by SoulFisher
ZB_RANGE_ATTACK 0

That's the ranged attack strength of the unit I think...

BATTLEFIELD_RANGE 0

BATTLEFIELD_RADIUS 0

Dunno. Maybe the range is its postition in the battle view. Take a look at some units, and see what pattern starts to emerge.

[J Bytheway]

ZB_RANGE_ATTACK is the strength of a unit used when doing bombardment, active air defense and in-battlefield fighting from any row except the front line.

BATTLEFIELD_RANGE appears to be:
0 for cities and non-combat ground units
1 for normal units, some unconventional warfare units, naval units, space units and non-combat air units
2 for ground units which can fight from the second row
3 for combat air units

With the following exceptions:
Battleships, plasma destroyers have 3
A couple of the cities have 3 (but most have 0 - did you know that there were 5 city units?)

I think that this is realted in some way to the positioning on the battlefield, but it's not at all obvious. Perhaps it was abandoned during development and the game now consults other things like whether or not the unit has an ATTACK or a ZB_RANGE_ATTACK.

BATTLEFIELD_RADIUS is 0 for most cities and caravans but 1 for everything else - I think this just tells the gmae whether the unit will be fighting at all.

[SoulFisher]

TheBirdMan:
I'm currently reading through all the posts to this forum dating back to July 1999. Hopefully I'll find those posts about ranges you mentioned.

Immortal Wombat & J Bytheway:
Very probable.

All:
Thanks for your help. Armed with this information, I can conduct experiments in my games.