Global Dominance

[Hepps]

@prastle Well here are a few more units I have gotten more or less completed...

Just to let your imagination mull over what they shall do.

[theredbaron]

@Hepps Never fear. I think my imagination is up to the task

[CrazyG]

@Cernel
I'll go ahead and share my secret.

You need the unit to be able to move onto both land and sea, so you make it an airunit. You purchase it and place it on land like any other air unit.

Then you give it carrierCost=0, which lets it land in empty sea zones as if there was a carrier there. So on the next you move your hull into the sea zone and it should land just fine (isKamikaze could work as well but this seems cleaner). Then you buy the battleship, and it should consume the hull just like it would consume a sea unit version.

In version 1.8 I had an XML with this working, life got in the way before I could share it though.

[Hepps]

@CrazyG You the man! That would have taken me an eternity to figure out if I even ever managed to do it at all.

[Hepps]

@CrazyG It's just a crying shame I can only up-vote your post once. That deserves something like 30 up-votes based on its value to me!

[CrazyG]

@Hepps
well thanks, I'm glad to help. Its a cool trick for other stuff too

What I'm dying to know is have you figured out trains?

[theredbaron]

@Hepps I'll second this one. Sutur2 on in his new WWI map has used them as simple land transports, and I don't mind that entirely, but a system with infrastructure as you had proposed would be ideal to represent that portion of the war, how the Allies often bombed infrastructure in areas as a prelude to an attack to prevent reinforcement.

@CrazyG You had a system with triggers to this affect in a former thread, no? I think it may have had something to do with triggering terrain effects, if I remember correctly.

[Cernel]

@CrazyG I've never considered that carrierCost=0 would allow to land in empty sea zones; I guessed it would just allowed infinite on a single carrier.

Still, this may be considered a hack, and continuous support for such a behaviour in the future would be dubious; still, if you want the game fully supported, you have the issue that this plane is still able to move to your nearby land territory, as well as moving by sea and re-entering another land territory, both things you probably don't want (you can impede it with a tons of canals).

[theredbaron]

It may be beneficial to ask the devs to keep this feature as it poses no harm to existing maps. This may be a prime example of a bug becoming a feature.

@redrum Is this reasonable?

[CrazyG]

@Cernel
I would just make it a 0 movement, which recieves +1 movement from factories/harbors whatever. Once you put it into a sea zone its stuck, so there isn't much reason to put it there unless you intend to finish building it that turn

I discovered the 0 carrier cost thing a long time ago (I think it was version 1.4) so hopefully it isn't changed in the future

@theredbaron
Yes but that system has shown to have a lot of problems and its probably why I never got to releasing that ww1 map.

I was trying to avoid having trains themselves on the map, to reduce micromanagment and simplify things a bit. But Ive found I really didn't like the resulting feel that i got

[theredbaron]

If all else fails, and since this map is going to need user enforced rules anyways, we could ask the players to make sure that each territory on the route has functional infrastructure. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

[Cernel]

@CrazyG You cannot normally select 0 movement units, regardless of the movement bonus they are getting, but there is a property for making them selectable, but this is not really good, because, then, all those immobile units you don't want to select become selectable, as well, and this is a bit annoying. And there is still the issue that you can move the air hull to a territory nearby (unless you add up some canals or territory effects negating hulls). However, you can get around the first issue by hacking the air hull into a movement 1 unit that gives -1 to itself and receives +1 from harbour.

[redrum]

@CrazyG said in Global Dominance:

@Cernel
I'll go ahead and share my secret.

You need the unit to be able to move onto both land and sea, so you make it an airunit. You purchase it and place it on land like any other air unit.

Then you give it carrierCost=0, which lets it land in empty sea zones as if there was a carrier there. So on the next you move your hull into the sea zone and it should land just fine (isKamikaze could work as well but this seems cleaner). Then you buy the battleship, and it should consume the hull just like it would consume a sea unit version.

In version 1.8 I had an XML with this working, life got in the way before I could share it though.

That is pretty creative and interesting. I wasn't aware that "carrierCost=0" allows air units to land in empty sea zones with carriers. I would definitely consider this somewhat of an edge case that is really just an outcome of how the current code was written.

I think the question here is what should "carrierCost=0" really mean and be used for? Should it allow air units to land in sea zones with no carrier? Or should it require a carrier but just take up no carrier capacity? Or something I'm not even thinking of? Whatever we come to a consensus on should probably be added to the Pact of Steel 2 comments so its spelled out somewhere.

PS. It would be great for some of the awesome map makers to take ownership of that Pact of Steel 2 XML to help me keep it up to date as many of you know the game XML better than I do.

[CrazyG]

#redrum
If you change this, I hope you would make the current function available as another feature. Its a very cool feature with interesting applications.

I personally don't see any reason to change it. If you wanted a unit require a carrier to land but not take space you could just give it a carrierCost of 1 and give the carrierCapacity to 1,000

[Hepps]

@CrazyG I agree. The transition from land to sea has been a challenge to address. So this option is a heaven sent blessing.

[redrum]

@CrazyG Good point on being able to use massive carrierCapacity and small carrierCost for having units that require little carrier space. I'm fine with leaving the functionality as it works today but would like to document this somewhere so its more explicit not just something that happens to work.

[CrazyG]

@redrum
lets add a comment about it to PoS 2 XML? That should do it

[Frostion]

@redrum @CrazyG
I hope that you are not considering removing the ability to have an air unit use carrierCost 0? Even on maps with carriers with like carrierCapacity 3 and fighter squadrons with carrierCost 1, it would be nice to be able to have some special units land on the carrier with a carrierCost 0. Like if it symbolizes a single fighter, like a hero, a Jedi or maybe an air balloon or whatever

[redrum]

@Frostion We aren't removing/changing any functionality just clarifying how things currently work.

@CrazyG Yeah, I think adding it to the Pact of Steel 2 XML would be good.

[Cernel]

@Frostion said in Global Dominance:

@redrum @CrazyG
I hope that you are not considering removing the ability to have an air unit use carrierCost 0? Even on maps with carriers with like carrierCapacity 3 and fighter squadrons with carrierCost 1, it would be nice to be able to have some special units land on the carrier with a carrierCost 0. Like if it symbolizes a single fighter, like a hero, a Jedi or maybe an air balloon or whatever

I think you are misunderstanding the matter. The matter is exactly that carrier cost 0 DOES NOT work that way you think. There are not "some special units land on the carrier with a carrierCost 0": they just don't need to land on any carriers at all, let alone taking space on them.
If carrier cost 0 would mean that you can land on a carrier, but taking no space on it (just like it correctly happens with transport cost 0 for sea transports), then, the behaviour would be that you still need carriers to land in that sea zone, just you would not take up any space on them.
How it actually works, instead, is that carrier cost 0 allows you to land on any sea zones, no matter if any carriers is there.
So, what redrum is saying is that 2 alternative behaviours are at stake:

1. The current behaviour that carrier cost 0 allows you to land on any sea zones, not requiring any carriers (carrier cost 0 means that you don't need carriers to land on sea).

2. The arguably most intuitive behaviour (and that would the same as how transports work) that you always need carriers to land, but carrier cost 0 would allow you to land infinite on any carriers, not taking up any space (carrier cost 0 means that you will take no space on the carriers you still need to land on).

So, to make an example, the question is: what is a carrier cost 0 air unit?:

1. A seaplane, able to land on the sea.

2. A very small aeroplane, taking virtually no space on any carriers it may land on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaplane

(the seaplanes were very marginal in WW2, because the stuff needed to be able to land on sea compromises the ability of the aeroplane so dramatically that they are so inferior to other land-aeroplanes that nobody would want to use seaplanes for sea warfare, instead of aeroplanes and carriers; also, landing on the sea is not that easy, depending on the condition of the sea itself, and you still need some support service for refueling (which can be provided by submarines); still, units of seaplanes may be represented, in a very detailed map like Global Dominance; they would just need to be some more costly and very weak in combat...)

So, what you want to do, @Frostion , would not be enforced with the current engine as, in your example, "Like if it symbolizes a single fighter, like a hero, a Jedi or maybe an air balloon or whatever", that fighter/hero would be just able to land on the sea itself, not landing on carriers for free, as you are interpreting it.

An argument in favour of 1, would be that having 1 still allows the players to know the rules and self restrict themselves following 2 (the mapmaker would just need to write in notes that some units can land on sea, but you must take care to only end movement where you have a carrier).

This is exactly what I was saying. I was warning the mapmakers around here that want to use this probably unintended behaviour that they might incur in the problem that, at any point in the future, a developer would see the current behaviour as just a bug, and change the engine so to restrict air to only land on carriers, even when taking no space on the carriers they land on.

My vote would be either leaving all as it is, since some mapmakers appears interested and the "seaplane" behaviour cannot be considered surely a bug or, better, having cost 0 still requiring a carrier to land, but adding a special property like "isSeaPlane" then, when true, allows that air unit to land in any sea zones and disallow it to land on any carriers; this would also solve the problem that, I'm guessing, cost 0 might land on empty sea zones, but might still land on actual carriers, if they are there, and, then, those carriers might be allied ones, moving it as cargo, during their turns.

Also, I want to clarify that I've never noticed nor experimented with any air units having carrier cost 0; so, here I'm just trusting what @CrazyG is saying.