Max Unit cost 18?

[Palaiologos]

At the editor help it advises against having units with more than 18 as their production cost.

Where could that matter?

I've done some experiments myself and i found nothing "bugy" with either their building time or the shields they give when disbanded.


So, where is the catch?

[Elok]

Above eighteen, they can sometimes be bought for negative gold. Actually, the cutoff line seems to be 180 shields specifically, not 18 lines, in my experience. The borg cubes in Kobayashi's ST:BAQ cost like seventeen rows and 196 shields; you could still buy them negative sometimes. In my version, at least; Kobayashi and/or Microprose may have fixed their respective bugs.

[Palaiologos]

Unit cost 18=180 shields.
I didn't mean 18 lines.

So what happens when you pay them negative ammounts?
You actually earn a profit?


And BTW what is the maximum number of units permited before the too many units pop up appears?

[Elok]

Dunno about the max unit number; I've never gone that far. But yes, essentially, what you get is the townspeople offering a choice between getting it later and getting it now and earning a few thousand dollars to boot. Not a tough choice, right? And since the AI seems to view rush costs as a matter of urgency, not gold, it's also an unfair advantage to the human player, in addition to being ludicrous.

[Boco]

A year ago, FMK explored something closely related to this in "New Discovery? Costless Units!"

Remember this image?


In the thread:

Paul, Xin, this does indeed happen once a unit costs over 180 shields in FW. I think Microprose mentioned this in the manual, but they managed to fix the bug under MGE.
A classic example of this is playing as the Spanish in Jay Bee's War of Cuba. The weird thing about this is that there appears to be no discernable pattern to when you can buy a unit for a negative amount of money. For example, one turn a unit could cost you 220 shields and to buy it would give you money - the next turn it might have gone down to 215 shields and it'll cost you an absolute fortune to rush-buy. It's weird.

our_man

You're absolutely right. My friend who owned FW could get several thousand gold a turn by simply rushbuilding Cyborgs on USA 2010, whilst MGE-owning me couldn't get it to work.
And yes, the FW manual warns against setting build costs higher than 180 shields.

Paul Hanson

AFAIK, no one has figured out the math with this. Rush-building gives 'unpredictable' results.

[DarthVeda]

It is either 2047 or 2048 Units before you get too many units warning. Needless to say, that is a lot.

[Panda]

Actually 18 lines is correct, because the number of shields per line is configurable.

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by Elok
Above eighteen, they can sometimes be bought for negative gold. Actually, the cutoff line seems to be 180 shields specifically, not 18 lines, in my experience. The borg cubes in Kobayashi's ST:BAQ cost like seventeen rows and 196 shields; you could still buy them negative sometimes. In my version, at least; Kobayashi and/or Microprose may have fixed their respective bugs.

I remember that one - it wasn't the cubes which caused the problem (since it wasn't a human race) but some of the more costly city improvements. You could buy them negative if you rushed them really early (And no micropose has not fixed the problem). As I recall, if it cost more than a certain amount (some number over $20,000) to rush a build, the counter overflows into the negative region.

Please have a go at version 3 just released. It is much much more of a challenge.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=93069