Is it possible to enable secondary weapon without al-clicking on some enemy?

Hello there.

I am just wondering whether it is possible to enable the secondary melee weapon with units without the need for alt-clicking upon some enemy.

For an example then if you are playing a fast online battle then it can be to troublesome in having to alt-click with many units or how their formation gets disrupted by attacking enemies. So I rather wanna let the units have their secondary weapon ready in holding the line without any trouble.

I mostly talking about units like alpine phalanx, helveti phalanx, and such with their melee secondary weapon.

Does the Rome total war engine allow some shortcut key so that the units can have their secondary weapon ready without the need for alt-clicking an enemy?

Is it possible to edit the units so their secondary weapon becomes the primary?

You do know its cheating to edit stuff in MP?

Not neccesarily if it only involves letting the secondary weapon be the primary and the primary weapon as the secondary.

Its not like you would give some peasant a Rhompaia weapon.

AFAIK it is not.
You would have to edit the edu and this would cause compatibility issues with other players IIRC.

XSamatan

But it would be nice if someone could answer this. I don't play MP, but even in SP that would help me a lot. I guess just switching the stats of the weapons in the EDU wouldn't do the job?

You would have to swap all stat_pri/stat_sec and stat_pri_attr/stat_sec_attr entries and be extra careful to include all lines. Even then I'm not sure if the animations will work without a change in their files too.
Honestly, I personally fail to understand why it is hard to give orders to units fast enough while using alt+click, RTW isn't a game in which you have to use that many keys.

XSamatan

That isn't the problem, but some units use spears and swords and you can't force them to use their primary weapon only to use the secondary. I would like it to swap the weapons so I can use alt+click to order the use of swords.

Editing stats in EDU does not cause incompatibility, if you swap the values of primary and secondary weapons things would look the same but have a different effect. This is why it is considered cheating.