Interrupting Multi-year unit production

In a recent thread I referred to awkwardness with the Byz in terms of the need to produce ships competing with the desire (ie I think they're needed but maybe they're not) to produce troops and the ensuing delay or cost difficulties in getting one of their other provinces, which start blank, up to keep+shipbuilder level.

I'm perhaps a tad paranoid about starting a ship in Constantinople and then suddenly needing a Byz Inf unit in a hurry, when no other province is ready for them yet.

Almost by accident, I discovered that it's possible to tinker about with the unit production queue without the partially-built status of a ship or Varangian Guard unit being 'forgotten' by the game. It can be shuffled in and out of the active slot and appears to remember how far it has got.

I didn't take this as far as pressing the 'End Turn' button having slotted a 1-year unit in front of the part-built ship, so I'd be glad for news of whether this actually works OK or not, with training of the ship resuming from the following turn.

Presumably the same thing can be done with buildings - eg you're part way through a 12-year castle build and you suddenly decide you want a horse farmer now-ish?

I've also discovered that you DO get all your money back if you totally cancel a partly constructed building but take care not to accidentally drop the icon back on the shopping list area whilst shuffling its position in the queue. My guess is that cancellation resets the clock and putting it back in the queue afterwards will, in effect, count as starting from scratch - the partial build status will not be remembered by the game.

Is there a 'lead baloon' smiley? :wry:

I tried with a building last night. It didn't seem to work (though maybe I did it wrong). I put another building in the queue and then moved the building in progress to the second spot. It didn't seem to keep my progress (though if you move it back to the front of the queue that turn your progress is kept).

Thanks for testing that for me, littlebtruck. I hope it didn't disrupt your campaign too much and I presume you could restore to a previous save?

Your last comment backs up what I observed before - that you can shuffle builds without it forgetting progress on the incomplete build - but I didn't take it as far as moving onward by however many turns would be required to complete the building inserted as an interruption and see the previous build resume from where it left off. If it does forget where you were, there's a risk of being billed in full all over again, so I will not attempt to test this for myself until such a time that I have money to burn...

The only other remaining thing to test would be to see if it makes any difference whether this is all done in one game session or if information is lost when you save, quit the game and then resume later, before the partial build has had its chance to restart. If not, then we will know the gamesave data structure lacks parameters to look after this sort of thing.

We already know that it can store queues of buildings, troop units and ships, including part-built ones but only when the part-builds are in the 'active' slot.