Best to over-write old units or add new ones?

[econ21]

I'm thinking of doing a root and branch revision of the MTW units, ultimately replacing or tinkering with them all, but am new to modding. I want to start by working with the crusader_unit_prod11.txt file. I was wondering, is it best to start by tweaking existing units, kind of over-writing the originals or leave them be, and just add new ones?

I was thinking working around the shell of existing units might be easier than trying to start from scratch. The associated animations etc might be broadly ok with possible minor changes (eg say I want to give the FMAA spears not swords, I could alter the stats and worry about the animation later).

On the other hand, I could see that trying to change all units at once might lead to lots of bugs that are hard to track down. So leaving the old stuff in tact might allow the modded game to load with less chance of error, so that you could incrementally add new units and test them one-by-one for errors.

My main interest is in changing the stats and want to do as little possible on the animations.

Any advice for a complete newbie?

Thanks.

[Lord Krazy]

Well you can add 175 more units.
we have been, with others testing the
stability of adding this many units.
So far 69 units are available to
try and seem to work fine in principle.
While I have also run several tests with
175 and it seems to work ok.
The 175 comes into it as the deadpage
coords.txt only takes that many entries
But you can have more than identical unit in the
prod11 drawing from the same source files
and graphics.I hope I have not lost you.

So either option is open.
New ones or replace the old ones.
The thing about adding new ones is
you can still have the old ones.
That's why I started making new ones.

Adding new units one by one is reccomended
for the reasons you stated.

Don't forget to give them to me
to add to the collection. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

LK http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smokin.gif

[econ21]

Thanks, Lord Krazy, I was thinking the incremental approach was the safest way. I'm not sure how far I'll get with this, but if anything comes of it, I'll pass them on to you.