A problem regarding unique units and upgrades.

[Provost Harrison]

Well at least I know this applies to the French. Their unique unit is the musketeer which is an offense-upgraded musketman, and thus fits in the defensive lineage after pikemen but before riflemen. Now when gunpowder becomes available, I would like to be able to upgrade all my pikemen or spearmen kicking around to musketeers. But it does not allow me to upgrade to musketmen, meaning that to upgrade any of these units, I either have to disband and rebuild or wait for rifleman and directly upgrade.

Is this a bug with UUs, or just the French UU in particular. Firaxis, could you reply?

[Darkknight]

I don't know if it would be called a bug but I posted it in the bug list.

[Dan Magaha FIRAXIS]

AFAIK it's a limitation of the way unit upgrades and CSU's are done. It may also be a design choice, I don't know, but I don't think there's a good way to handle it in the editor.

If you fire up the editor, you will see that each unit can be set to upgrade to another unit type. Also you'll note that CSU's are implemented by creating two different units, and for the CSU, it's set to be available to one civ only. The unit that everyone else gets it set to be available to everyone except the civ with the CSU. Thus, musketmen are available to everyone except France, while Musketeers are available only to france.

So the problem here is that you can't set two units to be the "upgrade to" unit, and the editor doesn't really know that the musketeer is a replacement for the musketman, so you can't do it that way, either. Not sure there's an easy solution to this one, unfortunately...

Dan

[Sarxis]

Just go into the editor and enable musketman for the French. That way you can build both musketman and musketeers.

I don't know how the AI will handle it though.

Hmm, now that I think about it, this should be an option anyhow, because what if you want to use the musketman/musketeer unit when its available, but don't want to 'use up' your Golden Age?

[Provost Harrison]

But the same problem would apply to all the other special units though, so this is quite a problem for all sides involved...