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AlexanderIII
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Canada
Aug 1999
time: 05:13
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So has anyone managed to solve the max number of sprite units allowed in SMAC(X)? Great graphics BusterMan, but will you be able to use all of them? The only thing I can see is to put all of them in there, your 'guerrilla faction'/mind worms too, only as they advance in morale the unit changes to a more advanced unit/another graphic -- i.e. twin propeller plane to a jet aircraft. So 'morale' would represent less morale as the time advancement in technology of the unit in question. But that still severly limits your choices.
And about caviar files: In order to reduce the chance of SMAC caviar-designed units popping up, a few things you could do is:
1) disable all chassis, weapons, armors and abilities by putting Disable under the respective tech collumns. Disabling them prevents them from being accessed by the Design Workshop;
2) rig #RULES of alpha.txt so that techs cannot be stolen;
3) create the maximum number of new units, all using your new sprites, in #UNITS, which is something like 50 I think. Assign chassis, weapons, abilities etc. combinations to your preset units (it eliminates creative unit design, but it's the only way not to disable the Design Workshop.) Instead of Chassis, Weapons, etc. to techs, assign designated units to techs. You may have the same unit in your #UNITS listed ten times over -- all with different ability/weapons/armor combinations depending on the tech;
4) Now here's the catch: for units with particular abilities/chassis, etc., when listing a particular unit with a tech, it can only have those capabilities the particular tech would have awarded AND ALL THE TECHS DIRECTLY BELOW THAT CONNECT TO IT. You should not have a unit have an ability at, say, a C5 tech that is normally given when having acheived the B6 tech, or a D3 tech that is not directly below the C5 tech in its local tree -- it would screw everything up as far as capabilities assigned to particular techs are concerned. Nor can you have tech stealing going on, because the awarding of units is entirely dependant on whether a tech below it in the local tree has been acheived. If you did allow tech stealing, a faction would not merely get a hold of a capability (armor, weapon, ability or chassis), they would get a new unit with a GROUP of abilities, some of which he would not have normally gained if unit components were activated. You see, when you design units like this, you are not awarding unit components/capabilities anymore, you are awarding a group of capabilities -- each new capability building one the ones previously established in lower techs. So one has to be very careful when placing such units in the tech tree.
Sometimes you may come across a unit combination that is simply a must, and one particular chasis/weapon/ability combination is not attainable from within the local tree -- i.e. if separate capabilities were enabled the player would not be able to build sucha unit having only researched all the techs leading up to that particular tech newly acheived. So what do you do? As a rule of thumb any such units I place two tech levels above the one I would originally have put it, that way I could be fairly certain that by the time a player researched the more advanced tech to acquire this unit, they would have by then acquired all the necessary techs to make this unit 'legal'.
For example, I want to create a unit called a 'battle beast', and assign it a custom graphic. I want it to have a Needlejet chassis with Photon Wall armor. only problem is these techs are never in each other's trees until they join up at Graviton Theory, from tech lv 7 to lv 13, by which time the unit's capabilities would be obsolete. So what I do is pick a tech two levels up and assign it to that tech and hope for the best. These kinds of hard decisions will have to be made in orderto acheive this.
All this, for what you may ask? All so that no caviar graphics ever pop up in the game.
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25-11-1999 09:45
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