Modding Helicopters (Gunships)

[Falconius]

I want to change a few things about gunships in the game. First, I wanted to remove the river-crossing penalty, since they fly rather than wade like regular ground units. Marines start with the Amphibious Promo, which negates the river-crossing penalty. Just need to give copters the same trait. That one's easy. (Edit: in fact, I already did it).

Giving them the ability to cross lakes might be trickier. All units are designated as air, land or sea in the xml files. Air units (fighters & bombers) behave totally differently than copters. So the copter is not an air or sea unit, and ends up as a land unit.

I would like to be able to allow copters to cross lakes, but this would seem to make it a hybrid, not quite land, not quite sea, but a combo of both. Any one have any suggestions as to how this could be done? Can a unit be both land and sea, without totally crashing out the game?

[Nevs23]

I've tried the same... but the only way i found was a "dirty" solution and not really usefull.

If you remove "DOMAIN_LAND" an error message will appear if you start your civ but the Helicopters get the ability to cross water.

As i said... "dirty".

[Mylon]

What if helicopters are given the marine/acquatic trait for free? It only affects attacking across rivers and attacking from a transport, and since they can be on water tiles anyway...

[Sessil3]

Helicopters can't be loaded on a transport. Could be you could mod that though.

[Mace]

Originally posted by Sessil3
Helicopters can't be loaded on a transport. Could be you could mod that though.

I could swear I loaded some gunships onto a transport the other day and shipped them to another continent.

[SirOsis]

They can be loaded. I had the AI drop off a few and pillage me bad.

[Falconius]

Originally posted by Mylon
What if helicopters are given the marine/acquatic trait for free? It only affects attacking across rivers and attacking from a transport, and since they can be on water tiles anyway...

I already gave them the amphibious trait (I'm assuming that's what you mean by "marine/aquatic"). It works well in my games now.

As for them being on water tiles... you say they can be, but not in vanilla Civ 4. I know you have your own mod posted, so maybe you changed this? I'd like to know how. This is what I am looking to mod. I'm annoyed that they cannot fly over a fresh-water lake 1 tile wide.

[GeoModder]

Well, I did test it, and I can definitely load them in a transport and bring them to another continent...

[Falconius]

Tried to make gunships able to fly over fresh-water and coastal, but not ocean spaces in the ini by giving copters both domains, land and sea, and making "ocean" impassible (so they can't fly across ocean and explore other continents). But got error messages when loading game: it objects to the double domain. Bummer...