Nukes falling from the sky, what's up with that?

[Tellius]

Hi,

For AOMIII, I thought it would be fun to have two nukes (like in civ2), the normal one, and a hydrogen ICBM with unimited range, a bigger bang and an accompanying new explosion graphic. This would give a brief period of paranoia in the game, the player would rush to build anti-ballistic missile imps in his cities, at the same time sending spies to other empires, trying to find enemy cities that don't yet have these defences. The tech spillage in AOM would garantee that the AI has these fearsome weapons roughly at the same time the human player does.

I already made an ICBM, based on the original one, with its own graphic and values. But it seems more difficult than I anticipated to make this beauty have unlimited range...

When a do a trial, 3 out of 5 ICBM's that I put on the map with the cheat editor do indeed fly to whatever destination I designate, covering huge distances. But there are always some that don't even manage to fly out of my empire's air space, they just fall out of the sky as if they have already run out of fuel.

Does anyone know why some of the nukes work just fine and otheres seem to run out of fuel even faster than the plain vanilla nuke?

It can't be the values, I think the last one I tried had movement of 50000 and 99000 fuel!

Greetz

Tellius

[Maquiladora]

Did you try removing the "NoFuelThenCrash" flag from the units.txt entry?

[Tellius]

Hi,

"Did you try removing the "NoFuelThenCrash" flag from the units.txt entry?"

I'll give that a go right now.

Even if that'll do the trick, I still think it's funny that the nukes as I have them now, sometimes work, and sometimes not, it's puzzling.

Greetz

Tellius

[Tellius]

Hi,

Unfortunately, removing the NoFuelThanCrash tag did NOT do the trick, even worse, in my last test case, ALL my nukes fell from the sky. To clarify, I put several nukes on the map with the cheat editor, during a phase in the game when medieval units are still roaming the battle fields, so it is impossible that active air defense might have gotten the nukes.

On top of that, I never really know what files to alter - should it be AOM_units.txt, AOM_units500AD.txt, AOM_SH_unitx.txt or even another file alltogether??? Up until now, I just altered them all, but I'd love to know where to look up these things, there must be some txt file that governs these things (this illustrates perfectly my complete ignorance in these matters, I am only decently good with graphics).

Maybe removing the fuel tag alltogether might help? Is that even possible for an air unit? Or should I make it a land unit with no fuel? A pretty silly side effect of that would be the fact that a nuke can no longer traverse oceans, but if that's the only way to create nukes with unlimited range, I'm ok with that.

Thanks for any advice!

Tellius

[Maquiladora]

You can find all the current files used by Ages of Man in gamefile.txt (not AOM*_gamefile.txt) in ctp2_data\default\gamedata. IIRC gamefile.txt is written each time you choose an option in modswapper.

I don't know why yours crashed, but maybe you didn't set fuel to 0 too? Also there might be some limit to how high movement can be in units.txt, but you only need to set it as big as the biggest map. Even then it shouldn't ever need that much movement. You could also use SLIC to make the unit never lose movement, but it could cause confusion for the AI if it's not told how to use them properly.

UNIT_NUKE {
   Description DESCRIPTION_UNIT_NUKE
   DefaultIcon ICON_UNIT_NUKE
   DefaultSprite SPRITE_NUKE
   Category UNIT_CATEGORY_AERIAL
   Attack 1000
   Defense 10
   ZBRangeAttack 0
   Firepower 1
   Armor 1
   MaxHP 10
   ShieldCost 4000
   PowerPoints 4000
   ShieldHunger 50
   GoldHunger 50
   FoodHunger 0
   MaxMovePoints 2000
   VisionRange 2
   EnableAdvance ADVANCE_NUCLEAR_POWER
   ActiveDefenseRange 0
   LossMoveToDmgNone
   [b]##NoFuelThenCrash
   MaxFuel 0 ##2000[/b]
   IgnoreZOC
   NoZoc
   CanBeachAssault
   CantCaptureCity
   SingleUse
   IsSpecialForces
   Explodes
   SoundSelect1 SOUND_SELECT1_NUKE
   SoundSelect2 SOUND_SELECT2_NUKE
   SoundMove SOUND_MOVE_NUKE
   SoundAcknowledge SOUND_ACKNOWLEDGE_NUKE
   SoundCantMove SOUND_CANTMOVE_NUKE
   SoundAttack SOUND_ATTACK_NUKE
   SoundWork SOUND_WORK_NUKE
   SoundVictory SOUND_VICTORY_NUKE
   SoundDeath SOUND_DEATH_NUKE

   CanAttack: Air
   CanAttack: Land
   CanAttack: Mountain
   CanAttack: Sea
   CanAttack: ShallowWater
   CanSee: Standard
   MovementType: Air
   Size: Small
   VisionClass: Standard

   NuclearAttack {
      Sound SOUND_ID_NUCLEAR_ATTACK
      Effect SPECEFFECT_NUCLEAR_ATTACK
   }
}

You can see the only two lines I changed, anything after "#" is ignored. This allows the nuke to move without losing fuel. I'll leave you to test how high movement can go though.

BTW I've had some strange happenings with placing air units, saving the game, changing fuel in units.txt, then reloading the save. So I would avoid that.