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Old 08-15-07, 11:12 AM   #1
tater
Navy Seal
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: New Mexico, USA
Posts: 9,023
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Default [TEC] New Unit Types

In my continuing search for a way to make beach defense recon missions, I decided that making a "ship" coastal defense unit was the best choice (since the game will "lock" ships only). Second best would be an invisible ship. Anchor it in front of coast defenses, and you take a picture by locking the invisible ship.

So far, so good.

The problem? If you make an invisible ship or a coastal gun "ship" it must be set to a ship unit type---the new invisible/coastal gun unit will then show up at sea whenever a "GENERIC" call is made for that type. This is BAD. The invisible small coastal craft are no big deal, they don't show up anymore on radar/sonar, but it'd still pose a hazard, you might run into one. The coastal gun at sea... that's a problem, lol.

So I thought, can I just add a new type to Names.cfg as a definition, then use it to make new types.

You can.

I made a test class of ship, "Super Battleship" (Type16) and modded Yamato to be Type=16 instead of Type=11. She works fine. Only issue is that she doesn't show up in the recognition manual as a warship (I didn't check merchants, need to do that). (she certainly fired all her guns at me when I surfaced, lol)

Regardless of how the invisible ship thing turns out, this is very useful.

If it is possible to make a ship not appear in the rec manual, that alone is cool. Yamato was unknown for a while, no data at all. Akizuki was classed as DD UNK-1 by ONI. Very sketchy data.

Things we can do assuming this works with further testing:

1. Possibly make units not appear in the rec manual.

2. Subdivide classes to limit GENERIC pulls in a more controleld way:
Ie: Yamato becomes a Super BB, abd generic BB pulls no longer include Yamato. Yamato can then be a random pull where needed from "Super BB." The gunboats could become a new type, and we'd never see them at sea, ever, only puttering around chinese islands and ports...

3. Merchants might be "BP-cloned" into a new class or two in addition to their normal Types. I could see a "Fast Merchants" type. You could make random fast traffic where all ships can make at least 15 knots (or 19, whatever). We could isolate the huge liners from other transports to make the huge ones rare, and the other more common.

4. Maybe I can make a "special unit" type for things like invisble ships.
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