MTW Pocket Mod: Units, Buildings and Unit Stats

[caravel]

A problem has arisen however. The new Knights don't upgrade from one to the next and I have a few ideas as to why. This is a hardcoded fix that CA implimented in a particular patch IIRC, so it may be very restricted.

The EarlyRoyalKnights, HighRoyalKnights and LateRoyalKnights must be somehow hardcode linked to the Royal_Court building, and it's upgrades, if there are other dependencies, such as a spearmaker or horse breeder the RK per era upgrades don't function.

It is also possible that EarlyRoyalKnights, HighRoyalKnights and LateRoyalKnights can only be upgraded if they always have the same dependency or dependencies whatever the era, and regardless of what the dependency is.

Another possibility is that the Royal_Court, and it's upgrades, is a unique building (a hardcoded 'feature') that supports the upgrading of any unit that depends exclusively on this building, not units that have multiple dependencies such as the old (Feudal/Chivalric Knights), to the next unit in line (early/high/late specific units).

All of this needs to be tested later. If the above is true then things could get rather interesting, but somehow I doubt it is. The way to test all of this is as follows:

Remove all other dependencies, affectively causing all of the RK units to depend on the Royal_Court only (not any additional spearmakers, armourers or horse breeders), this effectively gives us what we had before in a scalable unit with some name changes, and see if that works, if it doesn't then the whole thing could depend on every unit using the same campaign battle map name "Royal Knights". This would be a bit of cheap and dirty, but not impossible.

If it did work then, as another test, other units e.g. peasants, urban militia and militia sergeants could be era restricted (early, high and late respectively) and changing their dependency to the Royal_Court. If they can be upgraded from era to era, then that explains it. The Royal_Court itself is the key and not the units.

A test for the "cheap and dirty" approach would be renaming e.g. "Peasants", "Urban Militia" and "Militia Sergeants" to "Royal Knights" (note: their english language file names and not the internal names) making them era restricted (early, high and late respectively) and changing their dependency to the Royal_Court. If they can be upgraded from era to era, then that explains it. (The cheap and dirty approach. I really doubt this is the case)

Well, well, sometimes the simplest solution is the one. Cheap and dirty it is! Simply renaming them in the English language "names.txt" file to "Royal Knights" has made the upgrades start functioning again. I also tested other building dependencies with the Royal_Court (for Ghulam Bodyguards) and it was the same. They were still upgradable. So it seems that the name is the key after all.

This leaves me with a situation. At present I now have the Bodyguard units restored to as they were in vanilla except they're scalable (still half the size of a standard cavalry unit). No other differences. Same dependencies, everything. The Chivalric, Knights, Royal Knights and Lancers are back in, though the modified tech tree still stands for them as it did for the RKs. The Royal_Courts dependency has been lowered one level, so Feudal Knights can be trained from the Royal_Court with their other dependencies, and so on. Lancers are still all factions and in addtion to the Royal_Court3 they still need their existing dependency structures also. To me this seems ok, though I'm not sure about the Royal Knights. I may raise their depencies to the same as the other full size Knights, but keep them as half size versions. Need some input on this one!

The County Militia Cavalry or Yeoman Cavalry (haven't decided on a name yet) I'm not sure about as yet. I'll need to work on that one. I may have to create a new unit for them using the Feudal Knights model and info pic and change the Feudal Knights info pic to be the same as the EarlyRoyalKnights. That's one of my later tasks.

The Viking changes are going to happen now. I may post screenshots in a while also if I'm able.

Ok I've edited the summary, unfortunately it's now getting too late so I'll have to do the actual names and descriptions editing tomorrow. All the changes, and testing, to the Knights took quite a while (I need to look at their support costs also).

Mas tardes.