Unit Updater Questions

[Maquiladora]

Is there any way to make upgrading your own units selective? Rather than just at the point of the obsolete advance. For example, moving the old unit onto a city with a certain building and upgrading it ala Civ3.

And, is there a limit to how many upgrades you can script? Or more directly, does it slow down anything to have saaay 27 different upgrades?

[Maquiladora]

I noticed in Cradle, that has about 36 unit ungrades so im guessing speed isnt a problem.

[centrifuge]

I remember talk about this, a few months ago. I'm all for this idea as well, the requirement of a "barracks" some gold and PW, sounds good to me. The problem is if the AI can do it. IIRC, (correct me if I'm wrong) the AI in Civ3 doesn't use it. Perhaps it wouldn't be that big of deal as long as the AI keeps pumping out units on a regular basis.

[Pedrunn]

In the code the AI automaticly have all of its units upgraded. so the AI isnt a problem.
I think the problem is how to trigger the code. The code now is triggered when you get an advance.
You idea from civ3 seems a nice one.
Anyway, Peter Triggs is a better person to talk about it.

[HuangShang]

i like the idea too

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Pedrunn
In the code the AI automaticly have all of its units upgraded. so the AI isnt a problem.
I think the problem is how to trigger the code. The code now is triggered when you get an advance.
You idea from civ3 seems a nice one.
Anyway, Peter Triggs is a better person to talk about it.

I think that triggering it roughly same way would work fine from a game play aspect. The current code, only allows an upgrade once, after the initial advance is discovered. I'm SLIC handicapped, but it seems that it should be possible to offer the option of upgrade anytime that an advance is discovered. This won't allow for an upgrade on demand, as in Civ3, but will allow for more upgrades than are currently available.

An alterrnate route is to offer it every third turn (for example) and have the requirement of having a unit in a city with an improvement that is there strictly for the purpose of upgrading. Hey here's an idea, lets call that improvement a barracks

[Hermann the Lombard]

I have considered adding "2nd try" upgrade opportunities, and in fact I have done so occasionally when I "lost" an upgrade by trading for the tech, or most recently because if two unit types upgrade at the same advance, you can only select upgrades for one of the two types (only one pass through the unit list).

Hexagonian doesn't like 2nd chances here because he wants the human player to have to plan ahead to have the right gold at the right time.

[HuangShang]

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
I have considered adding "2nd try" upgrade opportunities, and in fact I have done so occasionally when I "lost" an upgrade by trading for the tech, or most recently because if two unit types upgrade at the same advance, you can only select upgrades for one of the two types (only one pass through the unit list).

Hexagonian doesn't like 2nd chances here because he wants the human player to have to plan ahead to have the right gold at the right time.

so... how did you do it... i mean add '"2nd try" upgrade opportunities'

thanx

[Hermann the Lombard]

I edited the SLIC (the extent of my SLIC editing, to date). The first time I had missed several upgrades by trading for the techs, before I realized that scotched the upgrades. Afraid of screwing something up, I created my own little mod, complete with Modswapper entry. For the actual editing, I merely substituted later techs for the enabling techs that I had "lost."

The only tricky part was figuring out which files I needed to edit to create the mod and to isolate my changes so they wouldn't affect anything else (providing I remember the Ritual of Reloadslic, of course). There were 3 text files and 2 slic files, some in default\gamedata and some in english\gamedata. If for some reason you wanted to see the changes, I have a zip file with the five files. Baby steps in THIS forum!!

The most recent time, I edited the updater SLIC to simply swap the entries for Archer and Composite Archer, so that now the Archer upgrades first, then the Composite Archer. I had enough cash to upgrade all my archer units, then I was able to upgrade Comp.Archers selectively.

[Peter Triggs]

I'm not ignoring you guys. I've got some debugging to do but keep your fingers crossed and I might have something for you in a couple of days.

BTW, sneaky move, Hermann.

[Maquiladora]

Hi Peter, thanks for looking into this.

I have another small query. You made a script a few weeks ago to remove the unproductive tiles and replace them with other tiles when the game generated a map, i tried to d/l the attachment from the original thread but its not available anymore, could you post it here if you still have it? or somewhere i can find it...

[Pedrunn]

cool! I cant wait to see this!

[Peter Triggs]

Originally posted by Maquiladora:
Is there any way to make upgrading your own units selective? Rather than just at the point of the obsolete advance. For example, moving the old unit onto a city with a certain building and upgrading it ala Civ3.

That's an interesting idea. It might be possible, but I'm really not sure. What occurs to me is that you could add a new order, "Update", with it's own button, and then when you pressed the button you'd have a whole bunch of checks to see if the unit was in a city that had the Barracks and it's owner had the advance that enabled an update. That's a bit complicated and nobody's tried anything like it. It would mean writing new code that's essentially completely separate from the existing Updater system.

About the map thing: What mod are you playing?

Pedrunn,

Don't get too excited, I'm just working on fixing up the existing Updater code.

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
About the map thing: What mod are you playing?

Not using it for any mod(yet). Im interested in excluding/replacing some terrain for my maps, specifically glacier, desert hill and desert mountain. Im going to convert the others i dont want to something new.

[Pedrunn]

Ooops