I have moved what was originally on this post to the second post and this post will contain current information about the map.

-Will contain map information when I get around to writing it.

Version History
0.2 - 1/1/21
* Added farms and gold mines. Decreased the PU of the territory theyre on to compensate.
* Added some events relating to conquest. E.g. taking control of all of Stromgarde.
* Added TUV values to neutral units. This should make the AI more likely to attack with them instead of believing theyre a 20~ PU value unit.
* Cursed power decreases enemy power instead of increasing it.

0.1 - 11/12/20
* Map release

I wanted to make a post regarding the direction units and combat etc will go. I was inspired by LotR Battle for Arda's system of various supports and territory effects so this map will use something similar.

PS im bad at presenting information like this.

Battle Supprt

Units will have a unit type(s) governing what support they receive:

• Front
• Back
• Cavarly (Cavarly are also Front)
• Caster (Caster are also Back)
• Air
• Siege
• Fortification

Battle support

• Charge - Cavarly has a chance to hit a front unit before combat begins
• Retaliation - Unit has a chance to hit a cavarly unit before combat begins
• Anti air - Ranged unit has a chance to hit a air unit before combat begins
• Magic - Unit has a chance to hit a caster unit each combat round
• Flank - Unit has a chance to hit a back unit each combat round
• Leadership - Unit gives +support to friendly units
• Curse - Unit gives -support to enemy front units
• Sieging - Siege units have a chance to hit a fortification each combat round
• Defenses - Fortification gives +support to friendly back units

Terrain Support

Units will have a movement type that effects the support they recieve from terrain

• Infantry
• Ranged
• Mounted
• Flying

They will mostly be paired to unit type (e.g. Front units are Infantry).

The following terrain types are those that will be present in the test map (a couple more like snow will be present elsewhere)

• Open
• Hillside
• Forest
• Settlement
• Mountain

My initial draft with how they interact with each other is below. (Attack/Defense)

Units

Their are 7 base units and 3 (or 4 if made by another unit) extra units per player.
The base units will mostly be the same with some differences.
The extra units will be player specific and they will differeniate each player from one another. I have conceptualised them but not properly drafted them yet.
The die value is going to be 10.

The base unit statline that all players will have is below: (I dont know how to convey this any better so I apologise if its hard to follow)

As a text example:

• Heavy Infantry - 9 PU / 5 attack / 4 defense / Front battle support / Infantry terrain effect
  Support 1 is Retaliation / rolls 0 attacking and 3 defending against retaliation targets/
  Support 2 is Leadership / gives 1 support to 1 unit when attacking/defending

For different players, I intend for their to be 3 stats that are weaker (red on the graphs) and 7 that are boosted (green on the graph)

Base units for the Scourge:

As a text example for whats different for the Scourge:

• Light infantry- 5 PU -> 4
• Heavy infantry- 4 defense -> 5
• Ranger- 2 Anti air defense -> 3
• Cavarly- 3 attack -> 2 / 3 charge attack -> 2 / have curse support for 1 when attacking/defending
• Caster- instead of leadership, curse support for 1 to 2 units when attacking/defending
• Air- 3 attack -> 2

Base units for the Scarlet Crusade

Looking at these it can be seen that Scourge Cavarly and Caster units work abit different, and Scarlet Heavy infantry and Casters are stronger then their counterparts.

I expected the base values to chance as I test them since this is only a first draft.

That was abit long winded but I think that sets the tone for the direction I want to take units and battles on the map.

No default terrain? I guess so since it seems those terrains are omnicomprensive. If so, I don't think there is much of a point not having a non default terrain. For easy of use, the most common type of terrain may be taken as default. You can still define it as a terrain, if you want, leaving it without any actual impact (in this case, it would be better if it is not offered in the battlecalculator).

Im not much of a fan of default terrain because even in the most common type (likely something like a open field or a plain) their are advantages and disadvantages to different units, e.g. cavarly can move easier and flying units can spot enemy units easier but conversely theyre spotted easy in a open sky as well.

And then if that terrain is taken as a base, all the other terrain have values relative to that one and then it gets a bit awkard deciding "how much better is x at attacking in a mountain instead of a plain?"

Also, forest or woodland? Woodland would be technically the better term from traditional British usage, where forest just means wildland, and may be not wooded at all. Theorically, deserts are forests, but I'm under the impression this is not the current usage. I personally like forest better than woodland as a term, if they would be currently synonym (are they?). This is what wikipedia says:

After thinking about it more, I agree forest is a better term. When I was thinking of what to call it, I was thinking of the areas with trees in WoW Classic and due to scaling issues most of them arnt really forests.

This doesn't seem an easy system to understand, and playing with anything is always much harder than understanding it, so I would suggest to try to do what feasible to simplify it, but it is totally your choice, and I'm not against complexity, in principle, if it serves the purpose of being truer to the setting (if I would actually play a map that I feel I cannot even try to optimize strategically that is a totally different matter, but we do have a few people that are undaunted by complexity and may gladly take all the complexity you are willingly to throw at them).

I wanted to make it similar to the Battle for Arda: Middle Earth map, with different terrain types and special attacks, but that map is much more asymmetric and alot of factions dont have e.g. a unit with "flanking" that can attack archers and so I wanted to make it more symmetric but yeah I think I can simplify it in some areas and I have some ideas on how to do that now.

I have a working, almost finished map of the east plaguelands now, its just missing: flags, map decorations to show which zones in the city are adjacent to zones outside the city, custom unit placement in each territory and most importantly notes.

After playing it for abit I have some ideas how to give each unit a better identity and simplify things.

These are the unit models for each faction, the images are taken from blizzards warcraft 3 or various free custom models:

And this is the current map for Lordaeron.

I still need to finish some territories, and redraw and add in Ghost Lands + Quel'Thalas. It comes in at 210~ territories, 10~ are impassable small bits of river or lakes and such. At the end that would be 250-260~ without any sea zones.

Since thats alot im worried atm that the whole Eastern Kingdoms + all the sea zones will be way to large but Khaz Modan and Azeroth are both smaller then Lordaeron, with 6 zones + 7 zones vs Lordaerons 9 zones and theyre all pretty big ones. Khaz Modan also has tons of mountains. Even if it gets too big I can see lots of territories to cut and make bigger so I dont think it will be that much of an issue.

@Hepps Yeah thats what it looks like and what I initially thought but I double-triple checked and didnt find anything.
But you did just give me the idea of searching for "" in the file and I found a unit placed with no territory.
I probably wouldnt have thought of searching for that if I didnt read your comment tho, so thank you alot.

Editing this here for what was originally in post 1.

I would like to announce the beginning of this project that I have been working on the past few days, Warcraft: Lordaeron Wars.

Introduction

It was inspired by both my love for the large macro rts maps in Warcraft 3 which use various warcraft continents and time periods as their base, and the joy that I've had recently playing against the TripleA ai on the various fantasy maps here.

The setting will be some amalgamation of the Eastern Kingdoms during and after the Third War, before the setting of WoW happens.

Initially I wanted to do a full map similar to what Frostion is currently working on and including Northrend, but while I found I could do the Eastern Kingdoms in a reasonable number of territories, their were only several territories for each wow region whereas I wanted to do much more. The other reason I chose to focus on just 1 continent was that both of the other two continents are rather bland when compared with the Eastern Kingdoms in terms of race diversity, settlements and conflicts.

Gameplay

The final playable map I hope will include the whole Eastern Kingdoms using their pre-cataclysm states.

Their will be territory effects but some these will do the same thing, just renamed for flavour (Snow, marsh, beach)

The following 12 races are those that I intend to place in the final map:

• Scourge (Scourge, Cult of the Damned)
• Scarlet Crusade
• Blood Elves
• Amani Trolls (Zul'Amen, Hinterland trolls)
• Forsaken
• Dalaran Remnants (Dalaran, Southshore and Stromgarde)
• Orcish Horde (Revantusk Trolls, Kargath, Grom'gol Base Camp, Stonard)
• Dwarves (Ironforge Clan, Wildhammer Clan)
• Dark Iron Dwarves
• Dark Horde (Blackrock spire forces, Dragonmaw Clan)
• Stormwind
• Gurubashi Trolls (Zul'Grub, Temple of Atal'Hakkar), although this could be merged into 1 troll player

All factions will use mostly the same unit roster, with some various differences and some unique units for flavour.

For example, the Scarlet Crusade infantry will have higher attack then average, flavour wise this is due to their fanatasim; and the Scourge caster will provide a penalty to enemy infantry, flavour wise this is a banshee using a curse spell.

In terms of unique units, the idea I have for the Scourge is a necromancer that after a battle involving it is concluded, it takes the TUV of enemy units defeated and divides the number to convert it into very bad but free skeleton units.

Although I have envisioned some events regarding units or territories being captured, I am not sure on how large a scope I should do these yet.

Roadmap

Due to this being my first mod, I wish to first make a small test map of the Western Plaguelands for my use and then move on to complete the Lordaeron area before doing the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms. This would let me get a handle on things and to also at the minimum release a playable map of the Lordaeron area. Hence I have decided to split this project into 3 phases:

Phase 1

• Unit and flag icons for Scourge and Scarlet
• Decide on die value, unit stats and balancing for base units and their Scourge and Scarlet counterparts
• Territory PU values
• Territory effect values
• Complete and get a playable xml

Phase 2

• Finish Lordaeron to get a playable game map, and perhaps keep it as a standalone map in the mod for someone to play a smaller map

Phase 3

• Finish the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms with every player included

---

I am currently in the process of making a test map for the Western Plaguelands, which will serve as a mostly 1v1 area for the Scourge and Scarlet Crusade which will help be get a better idea on balancing the game.

This is the current map I am using for the Western Plaguelands:

Due to the importance of Stratholme (and also Blackrock Mountain furthur down the line) I wished to create a seperate connected zone for it.

In my initial making of the Eastern Kingdom map, I intended to use a road system where the map roads would provide access to large swaths of each region but I found that this just bloated the number of territories in each region with the road themselves and furthur bloated each region by having to divide up the map in such a way that made both the location features (e.g. towns and towers) and the roads meaningful, hence I abandoned doing this.

Their are currently 15 territories in Stratholme and 28 passable territories in the plagueland. Although this single region comes in at a huge 43 territories, from my initial border making this was easily the largest singular region on the whole map, and it also includes the city of Stratholme in it which will be 2 of a kind with blackrock mountain. Hence although I have yet to make a finalised version of the full Eastern Kingdoms map, I am not particularly worried at this time that the playable area will be to huge.

I would also like to mention that this method works for sea units as well, if you want different shipyards to make different naval units.

I initially thought it wouldnt because they are adjacent to factories in land territories, and the XOB option browser says this for them: "All units in the list are required to be present in the territory in order to place the attachTo unit there." but it does seem to work exactly the same as land units which is nice.

@Zaroph Looks cool. I'm guessing you've already talked to Frostion given that you are making a related map and seem to be adopting a similar graphic style.

Thank you and I havent but this map style is done with combing all the in-game maps in 1 big continous strip so I think its the most straightforward thing to use.

@Zaroph Very exciting! I welcome any parallel development of another Warcraft map. This can really motivate me in regards to speeding up the development of my own map

I really like this map's contrast to my map in development, as my map is “zoomed out” to the biggest scale possible of the Warcraft world. My map will actually be a bit thin in regards to regional differences, story and lore. It will have a lot of randomness and will be a big scale 4 vs 4 player map. Its seems that Warcraft: Lordaeron Wars could be a good counterpart. It seems much more zoomed in on an area of the world and the factions and races that actually resides there. Plus there could be some “real” lore and history represented in Lordaeron Wars. If this works out well, there will be a potential more similar maps

Thank you im glad to hear it could help motivate you. I think any events will be the last thing I focus so that theirs a playable map without them. I also saw the code in Greyhawk Wars being much more full with event related code so that would slow down making the actual map first.

In regard to lore and such, I would like to do some passive events such as if the Scourge hold Scholomance the necromancy school, their is a chance for them to get Necromancers that spawn there representing a batch of students graduating.

Since Warcraft lore is full of noteworthy and powerful individual characters I would also like to represent them with bigger events. They would give the player something to work towards as a mini-objective (like PU objectives but for units), and for the ai it could be chance based so that they would get a power boost and be more threatening to the player.

I would really like to have shown you a playable version of my map, so that you could get ideas and stuff. But my map still needs tweaking and some features are not done yet. Very many errors still keeps popping up. But then again, I would also like to see what you come up with by your own so that maybe I can get inspired

There wont be anything as intricate as your hero, item and back pack system since thats beyond my capability to code and I dont think the rest would really inspire you Unless I could get a flying Naxxramas unit with territories out of bounds on the map to work.

I will gladly help you out with some of the map making stuff if you need it (and if I have time, as I am often occupied buy real life stuff for many days in a row). In regards to stuff like graphical style, sounds and music, it would be cool if like the Warcraft maps would share some resemblance and players could feel some consistency, even though the maps have totally different focuses. If you are very into the lore of Warcraft, then you can probably help me out with some soon needed flavor and lore texts for my map, when I need to implement it?

Thank you for the offer. Im following the structure of other map xml's and the example xml so I think I am fine in that regard and anything basic since theirs examples of every little thing in them for me to look at. If anything comes up that I struggle with I'll be sure to post and ask thanks.

In regards to the sounds, I've always played with sounds off so I've never really thought about them.
In regards to graphics, the resource that I was going to use was wowheads model viewer for a clean image of units e.g. a ghoul, and then stick it in a border with a letter representing its role. The inspiration for that came from your dragon wars since its a nice visual cue to tell what it was.

Since I havent started the graphics and I wasnt going to do sound since I completely forgot about it, I wouldnt be opposed to collaborating to make them more consistent with each other for the reason you said.

I would love to help you with any lore stuff but im most familar with pre-cataclysm lore from playing wow and almost all the relevant maps I play on warcraft 3 that bombard me with lore are pre-cata as well, so if thats relevant I would like to help.

My idea is to add in a way of highlighting various terrain types on the map.

Similar to how territories are highlighted based on ownership, the colour could be specified or ommitted from the map.properties file and their would be a simple in game way of selecting which terrain you want highlighted.

This would obviously have varying degrees of usefulness depending on the map (not so much in base axi&allies) but it could potentially be useful to some players and theres terrain map modes in other strategy games.

Thanks for responding. These issues were plaguing me from finishing up my map but I see how to fix them now.

Alternatively, you can draw a line between the borders of the zone within an other zone and the other zone (this will avoid overlapping), but this is substantially a graphic hack that arguably looks bad (and it is usually hidden by the map's details, which is an other hack, and one that works only as long as the details are not switched off by the user).

I think I prefer this to naming as its less noticable then a territory name, and I can do it in my case by hiding the lines behind the bridges.

@Lothorn said in middle earth:

I mean, I have a few thoughts about it, dont know if u agree, but the ranger unit from the elves is too strong, thats why one of my main focus as evil is to suffocate the elves as quick as possible.

I identified this as being the main problem for evil as well so Im glad someone else agrees. The stats for the cost is it makes it extremely strong and the elves end up spamming it and this almost always caused me to lose the game with evil.

The other problem I identified was the discrepancy in strength between Gondors units and Mordors unit. Gondors units have more stats then the southern evil factions for the same cost. The southern evil factions also typically have stats heavily skewed towards offense like 2/1 or 3/1, whereas since Gondor have more stats theyre 2/2 or 2/3. This last bit is important since it makes evil almost certainly lose when theyre on the defense.

The last "problem" I guess so to speak, is that the rivers on the map are pretty useless. Theyre not used to strategically seperate areas since every zone can connect to another one across the river. One part this affects is that Isengard cant expand west because theirs to many places to defend from across the river and with the 2 movement units of good in the area.

How my games typically played out were as follows:

• Rhun is stalemated in the north since they cant defeat either Dale or Dwarves and theyre also right next to each other to reinforce.
• Mirkwood is stalemated because Elf Rangers in either North Mirkwood or High Mirkwood stalemate the whole northern area with their movement range and they simultaneously threaten Rhun, Orcs and Mordor in Dol Goldur.
• The Orcs have to park their army in Eregion because if they dont theyll lose either Moria or North Caves by splitting their forces. But theyll eventually lose to the Elves or Freefolk attacking and then since the flood gates are open, Evil have basically lost
• Gondor front I think was always the weakest part in my game plans when I played but with the comments I said above, I think the only way evil can win it is if Khand or Haradrim are used purely as can openers for Mordor. I did like the naval options but I found that their was never any good pay off.

I did end up making a small mod that changed alot of unit stats and connections between zones but I didnt document the changes and I dont think it played better.

Over the past week I added the rest of the map and the first version is a beautiful mess.

Unfortunately my 4gb memory computer struggles to run it in any meaningful time so I will probably wait awhile before working on it again since I am looking for a new graphics card for a new pc that isnt overpriced.

@Greg-Anderson
The game was initially unplayable due to unit name mistakes, though they can easily be corrected. I also modified certain units from each main faction to give each of them a more unique feel.

Which unit names had mistakes? My own folder works but it might be slightly different to the one on github.

Here are the unit changes I made for each faction. Most factions have two units with major (two) modifications and two units with minor (one) modifications.

Scourge
Caster (2/10 AA Att) (-1 Power to 3)
Battleship (+1 Att) (+1 Def)
(Production) +1 Air Unit (Each Turn)
Tower (2x5 Def)

Scarlet Crusade
Cavalry (+1 Def) (4/10 Charge Att)
Siege (5/10 AA Att) (+1 Att)
Light Infantry (-1 PU)
Battleship (+1 Transport)

Trolls
Heavy Infantry (+1 Att) (+1 Leadership to 2)
(Production) +2 Light Infantry Units (Each Turn)
Frigate (+1 Def)
Caster (+1 Att)

Dalaran
Light Infantry (2/10 AA Def) (+1 Def)
Tower (3x4 Def) (Produce 2 Units)
Ranged (3/10 AA Def)
Cavalry (+1 Att)

Forsaken
Air (+1 Att) (+1 Def)
Transport (+1 Def) (+1 Transport)
Heavy Infantry (+1 Def)
Siege (-1 PU)

Blood Elves
Ranged (+1 Def) (-1 PU)
Frigate (+1 Att) (-1 PU)
Air (4/10 AA Att)
Transport (+1 Att)

I’m looking forward to playing the map some more.

I was wanting to differeniate factions but I wasnt sure as to what degree to do it to. Ill probably differeniate the base units similarly to this when I get around to it.

I finally got motivation to finish off the first version of this map for download. The thing that I really didnt want to do was writing the game notes out since after I did it, I didnt save it on notepad+ but for some reason it disappeared the next time I opened it so I had to do it all again.

Ill follow Frostions guide to upload it to the repository.

I cant seem to figure out how the various actions in the User Action window are ordered. It doesnt seem to be by PU cost, alphabetically or by order in the xml.

Its a real minor thing but its been bugging me since I would like to group certain user actions near each other and it triggers me.

@beelee
It seems that with the new update to 2.2, I could preview the issue again.
There is an issue with using 13066 to investigate for me because it doesnt seem to like the variablelist in maps and my map uses variables to make things easier.
@wc_sumpton
This worked exactly as I wanted so thank you so much.
I also didnt know about the console option since I havent touched the engine preferences in ages so thank you for informing me of that as well, it will be useful in the future if something like this happens again where I cant check the console via preview.

In my map, there is a player that controls Trolls and since there are so many different and varied trolls in the universe the map is in, I have split them up into tribes and the player will purchase a tribe to have them under there control at the game start.

Therefore I have 2 sets of triggers regarding this, 1 set that handles it for the player and another set which do it for the ai when a player isnt playing the faction. The ai triggers will randomly activate a major/medium/minor tribes for the ai player.

The triggers regarding the player work and theyre not an issue, however the set that I have for the ai produces an error.
Im having trouble fixing this error for 2 reasons:
The first is that the usual method of seeing the error, and then previewing it to see where it fails doesnt work for me in this situation since when I go to do it, it comes up with the below screenshot and the error mentioned is for a different map. I looked through the error and also the part of the xml where it happens in that map to see if its similar to mine but I dont see whats wrong in that either.

The second reason is that since its saying the userAttachment is the problem I've looked at it and I cant see whats wrong. Ive copied and pasted another userAttachment and just manually changed the names and values to see if perhaps ive missed a " or a ' or something minor, but even after doing that it still comes up with the error.

Heres the code below for the ai set and a description of what I intended it to do (after ironing out the kinks with timings etc) which anyone reading can probably ignore:

There is a condition set at the start of the game that affects all the following triggers by spawning a unit, but a human Troll player presses a user action to disable it by removing the unit via a trigger. The presence of the unit activates a trigger that spawns a second unit on a 50% chance, if its spawned it leads to one major Tribe being activated and if it doesnt spawn it leads to the other major Tribe being activated.

<!-- TrollTribes setup -->
<!-- AI selection triggers -->
<!-- Trolls Are AI -->
<attachment name="conditionattachmentTrollTribesIsAI" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.RulesAttachment" type="player">
<option name="directPresenceTerritories" value="Space" count="1"/>
<option name="unitPresence" value="trollai" count="1"/>
</attachment>
<attachment name="triggerAttachmentTrollTribesIsHuman" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.TriggerAttachment" type="player">
<option name="players" value="Neutral"/>
<option name="removeUnits" value="Space:trollai" count="5"/>
</attachment>
<attachment name="userActionAttachmentTrollTribesIsAHuman" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.UserActionAttachment" type="player">
<option name="conditions" value="conditionAttachmentTrollTribesFirstRound"/>
<option name="activateTrigger" value="triggerAttachmentTrollTribesIsHuman:1:false:false:false:false"/>
<option name="text" value="HumanPlayer"/>
<option name="chance" value="1:1"/>
</attachment>
<!-- Conditions checking if switches are present -->
<attachment name="conditionattachmentTrollMajorTrue" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.RulesAttachment" type="player">
<option name="directPresenceTerritories" value="Space" count="1"/>
<option name="unitPresence" value="trollmajorswitch" count="1"/>
<option name="players" value="Neutral"/>
</attachment>
<attachment name="conditionattachmentTrollMajorFalse" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.RulesAttachment" type="player">
<option name="directPresenceTerritories" value="Space" count="1"/>
<option name="unitPresence" value="trollmajorswitch" count="1"/>
<option name="players" value="Neutral"/>
<option name="invert" value="true"/>
</attachment>

<!-- Triggers placing the switches -->
<attachment name="triggerAttachmentTrollMajorPlacer" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.TriggerAttachment" type="player">
<option name="conditions" value="conditionattachmentTrollTribesIsAI:conditionAttachmentTrollTribesFirstRound"/>
<option name="conditionType" value="AND"/>
<option name="players" value="Neutral"/>
<option name="placement" value="Space:trollmajorswitch"/>
<option name="when" value="before:trolltribesTribeUserActions"/>
<option name="chance" value="3:6"/>
</attachment>

<!-- Triggers picking major, medium and minor tribes -->
<attachment name="triggerAttachmentTrollTribesMajorAmani" attachTo="TrollTribes" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.TriggerAttachment" type="player">
<option name="conditions" value="conditionattachmentTrollTribesIsAI:conditionattachmentTrollMajorTrue:conditionAttachmentTrollTribesFirstRound"/>
<option name="conditionType" value="AND"/>
<option name="when" value="after:trolltribesTribeUserActions"/>
<option name="activateTrigger" value="triggerAttachmentTrollTribesAmaniA:1:false:false:false:false"/>
<option name="activateTrigger" value="triggerAttachmentTrollTribesAmaniB:1:false:false:false:false"/>
</attachment>

If I try removing the userattachment, then the other thing that produces an error is the trigger at the very bottom "triggerAttachmentTrollTribesMajorAmani" and similarly, I dont see whats wrong with it and I cant investigate it due to the same problem with the popup saying there is already a bug report for this problem.

@Schulz
Frostions Warcraft Heroes has ~36? different players, 8 main and the rest are in the background so it should probably be ok in your case as well.

do you have any specific maps in mind where this would be particularly useful?

Any map that uses territory effects with combat like the large middle earth map. Terrain map modes in games are useful for a quick visual glance for planning out moves in games (certain tripleA maps and other games) where terrain influences combat.

@Zaroph You mean like the special colour currently given to all "impassable" territories, which makes you unable to see ownership colours completely (I'm assuming this behaviour exists only on the (wrong) assumption that all impassable territories are non-owned (that is, owned by the "Neutral" (null) player)).

How would you deal with the fact that, differently from ownership, you can have an unlimited number of effects per territory?

Yeah thats what I mean, like a simple example would be making all sea/water territories blue and all mountain territories some sort of dull grey or brown colour.
From what I see, if you have 2+ effects in a territory they will be ordered in the game according to the order youve specified in the xml. So I imagine the most simple way of doing it would be to just take the first effect and use that.

My idea is to add in a way of highlighting various terrain types on the map.

Similar to how territories are highlighted based on ownership, the colour could be specified or ommitted from the map.properties file and their would be a simple in game way of selecting which terrain you want highlighted.

This would obviously have varying degrees of usefulness depending on the map (not so much in base axi&allies) but it could potentially be useful to some players and theres terrain map modes in other strategy games.

@TorpedoA

Whats the properties of that unit which the AI used? Anything of interest?

Theres nothing I can see that would cause it in its properties because if it did then I as a player should also be able to do it but its current unitAttachment is below:

<attachment name="unitAttachment" attachTo="crusader" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.UnitAttachment" type="unitType">
<option name="transportCost" value="1" />
<option name="movement" value="1" />
<option name="attack" value="5" />
<option name="defense" value="4" />
<option name="targetsAA" value="$RetaliationTargeted$" />
<option name="typeAA" value="retaliation" />
<option name="offensiveAttackAA" value="0" />
<option name="attackAA" value="3" />
<option name="isAAforCombatOnly" value="true" />
<option name="mayOverStackAA" value="false" />
<option name="damageableAA" value="false" />
<option name="maxAAattacks" value="1" />
<option name="maxRoundsAA" value="1" />
<option name="requiresUnits" value="scarlet_barrack"/>
<option name="requiresUnits" value="crusade_outpost"/>
<option name="requiresUnits" value="dungeonpro"/>
</attachment>

Ill also put the canalAttachment here but it seemingly works for me as a player so I dont think this is the issue as well.

<attachment name="canalAttachmentSeradane - Overlook River" attachTo="Seradane" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.CanalAttachment" type="territory">
<option name="canalName" value="air passage between Seradane and Overlook River"/>
<option name="landTerritories" value="Stratholme"/>
<option name="excludedUnits" value="$AntiAirTargeted$"/>
</attachment>
<attachment name="canalAttachmentSeradane - Overlook River" attachTo="Overlook River" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.CanalAttachment" type="territory">
<option name="canalName" value="air passage between Seradane and Overlook River"/>
<option name="landTerritories" value="Stratholme"/>
<option name="excludedUnits" value="$AntiAirTargeted$"/>
</attachment>

Seems there is no defending unit in that problem territory. Could it be something about rules ? (its only a dumb guess)

I cant say this with 100% confidence since I may have mistaken it for a different territory but Ive seen the AI do it on a territory that has defending units (specifically on the territory underneath it called "Skull Rock") so I dont think its related to that.

<property name="Abandoned Territories May Be Taken Over Immediately" value="true" editable="true">

I have both values set to false.

Thats all for now what i can thought off, its really wierd that its only flawed for the AI.

Yeah I think this is really weird that its something the AI can do but I cant even when I replicate the situation.