Is it possible to transport a caravan in the sky?

[tobyr]

I would like to enhance the buteo experience, and make it more reasonable for buteo to colonize the skyworld, by giving them a caravan-type unit that can only be used in the sky. However:
- if it is an air unit, the game does not treat it as a caravan (cannot establish trade route, build wonders)
- if it is a ground unit, I can't figure out how to create a unit than can transport it through the sky.

Any suggestions?

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[William Keenan]

In order to tender the caravans through the sky, I suggest some variant of the following:

Air Ship, nil, 2, 5.,0, 4a,4d, 3h,1f, 6, 2, 4, nil, 000000000010001

[tobyr]

William,
It looks to me like you are suggesting a ground unit for trade in the clouds. That unit cannot get off of a cloud, so there is no way to make it really useful unless something else carries it.

Carrying is what I'm trying right now, but I'm worried it may not work out real well.

I changed the great eagle so that it could carry something, and it can bring the trade unit from one cloud to another. The problem is that the great eagle is primarily an attack unit, so its trips will cause unhappiness in Althing and Greatlaw.

To compensate, I also allow the eagle to dive down directly from the sky to the undersea realm (Eagles don't act like that, but other attack birds do.) I also allow the "egg" (the trade unit) undersea.

The buteo can therefore attack weak merfolk units, but also trade with them.

I intended the eagle to be able to dive undersea carrying the egg, but the game will not allow me to do that, because (I think) the eagle is allowed on the surface world but the egg is not. (I added a seventh native transport: 1,3 especially for the eagle and the egg.)

I'll report more on this when I have tested it for a while. Please note that my goal is to make it more reasonable for the buteo to exist mostly in the cloud world, since (at deity level), they have a very hard time holding their cities on the surface world.

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[William Keenan]

quote: Carrying is what I'm trying right now, but I'm worried it may not work out real well.

That is what the Airship is for. Note that it is a domain 2 unit with a role of 4 (sea transport), that is to say it is not a flying unit(domain 1). The nice thing about this is that the AI will acctually know how to use this unit.