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AGRICOLA
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Canadian bush & Florida
Feb 2003
time: 00:17
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I apologize most sincerely if I have failed to acknowledge the work of anyone who has already posted on any aspect of what follows. Unfortunately, my access to the net is presently too limited and too slow to carry out a proper search of the archives at the various CIV sites.
RECCE UNIT
The idea of a purely reconnaissance unit is the result of playing Captain Nemo’s SECOND FRONT. SF has a very nice jeep-mounted recce unit that can observe the enemy (investigate cities), bribe an enemy unit and skirmish (sabotage) with an enemy unit. I want to emphasize that what I'm suggesting is not original but rather a slight modification of Captain Nemo's recce unit.
Although I thought that the bribing and sabotage were unnecessary, I really liked having the ability to investigate enemy cities. In most recent scenarios a player is completely blind when attacking cities, a situation that strikes me as not particularly realistic. Also, I can well understand why designers shy away from including spies in their scens. The unit has a set of extremely unrealistic abilities.
However, a simple recce unit that has 2 square visibility and can only investigate cities and identify single enemy units might be a useful addition to a scen. The unit I’m proposing is pretty harmless as it cannot bribe, sabotage, steal, plant nukes, incite, capture cities or do anything else that might damage the opposition.
The attached RECCE.zip contains a modified save from an old East Wind, Rain game, altered GAME and RULES files, and a vanilla UNITS file where the spy icon has been replaced by the recce unit icon from Second Front. Simply extract the files into a new folder and load the game.
Seoul and some of the American cities in Siberia contain a number of recce units. In India there are a couple of units that cannot identify the units of a Democracy. Try them out.
Also, players not familiar with the concept of Military Cities might want to take a look at the “X” cities in the US. These allow the US, a Democracy, to have a large number of military units without any risk that bombers or units away from cities will cause unhappiness.
LOW LEVEL PRECISION BOMBER
The idea of a precision bomber that can destroy city improvements is based on the ability of a spy unit to carry out industrial sabotage. I thought it worthwhile to see if converting the spy to a pseudo “bomber” and renaming industrial sabotage as “bombing” might result in a unit that a player could use to attack city improvements, do photo reconnaissance and attack enemy units not in cities.
The good news is that a “low level precision bomber” can be created and a player can either specify the primary target or let the pilot use his judgement in attacking city improvements. It can attack, but not destroy, enemy units in the field. Photo recce is among its possible missions.
The bad news is that the bomber is still a ground unit masquerading as an aircraft and has the following limitations and problems.
1. Barracks are needed to build vet units and for quick repairs.
2. It cannot fly across water or land on carriers.
3. Only freighters can transport it.
4. Most of the time, the AI does not seem to know what to do with it. Only on a very few tests it has done a creditable job in destroying city improvements of a human controlled civ.
5. When it’s flying IFRR (I follow railroads), it has a rather amazing range.
6. It can be attacked by ground units.
My feeling is that it might have a role in MP games where it would introduce the possibility of damaging the productive capacity or the happiness improvements of enemy cities. In SP games, its contribution could well be limited to destroying city defences.
The attached BOMBER.zip (please see next post) contains a modified save from an old East Wind, Rain game, altered GAME and RULES files, and a vanilla UNITS file where the spy icon has been replaced by a bomber unit icon from curtsibling’s DICTATOR 3. Unfortunately, I could not find a more appropriate Mosquito-type icon in my scen files. As before, extract the files into a new folder and load the game.
Seoul contains a considerable number of Bomber X units that can be used on nearby Japanese and Russian cities and units.
 Attachment: recce.zip
This has been downloaded 9 time(s).
Last edited by AGRICOLA on 26-05-2004 at 23:42
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26-05-2004 23:31
can't you change the domain (land/air/sea) in the rules.txt file? i'm pretty sure i've seen flying spys somewhere. i should mention i use ToT 
. the 'pedia had some stuff about it being flatpacked for railroads and innsufficent navigation kit to fly over the sea
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