MOD: Units - Herdsman

[whoward69]

Herdmens are capable of relocating Cows, Sheep and Horses and building pastures.

"Lets's get the flock outta here!"

Move the Herdsman unit to a hex with cows, sheep or horses and use the "rustle" command to capture them. Move the Herdsman unit to a new hex and use the "relocate" command to drop-off the livestock. Herdsman can also build pastures. Rustling an existing pasture will remove it - so you can steal live-stock from your enemies!

You can find this mod on the Mod Hub under Units -> Ancient

For a variation of this mod, which allows the very early units to "mount-up" see http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread...-Mounted-Units

(For reasons unknown, for the turn that a pasture is destroyed, the horse resource is decreased twice - so if there were two horses, the total count will go down by 4, however, at the start of the next turn it will be correct. This may leave you with negative horses for one turn, so be careful reloacting horses within your borders if you are at war!)

[ArchaicWarrior]

What a great idea!! many early civilizations were based on herding & stealing flocks etc Although any soldier unit should be able to steal a herd.

[Darkhour]

awesome idea but can does the AI use them?

[whoward69]

Unfortunately the AI only has the concept of one generic, do everything, worker - which is a shame as it has such a multitude of troop types to choose from (attack, defend, ranged, fast-attack, air, naval, recon, etc), so it is incapable of specialising the workers (if you replace "worker" with miners, farmers, herdsmen, etc, it will only build the most expensive, highest tech one and therefore fail to develop all the other tiles), so until either this becomes a game about "civilisation" in general (as opposed to conquest by force) the AI won't be able to use any non-combat specialist units.

[killmeplease-tk]

i have an idea of more restricted version of the mod but understandable to AI

If pasture is pillaged, a Herd unit is created. It can build the Pasture improvement on grassland and plains tiles with no resources. Cow/sheep resource is removed when pasture is pillaged as well, and added when herd builds a pasture inside player’s borders.
So AIs would get herds from pillaging enemy's territory, move them onto their own territory and settle there.
What do you think about this

[whoward69]

The mechanics might work, but I doubt the AI would actually use them as there are no rules in the game engine to direct the AI to "go locate animals and bring them back"

The whole "non-combat unit" aspect of the AI is terrible - you can't even create specialist workers (eg Navvies) that the AI can understand and use - it just blindly builds the most expensive unit with no regard for functionality. "Civilisation" is a mis-nomer, "Despotic Warmonger" would be a better description. Even something as simple as "Population (refugees)" to build new cities from razed ones, the AI is incapable of using. And in the same vein, I have never seen the AI build a Conquistador and actually use them to found a new city - so the AI can't even use standard (DLC) units in a sensible way!

[whoward69]

Version 3 uploaded - fixes issue with the Horses/Cows/Sheep resource icon being left behind after the unit has "rustled"

[nycfalcon]

While using Faerun Mod Scenario v. 8 the game crashes when attempting to capture enemy herdsman. I don't know if it happens without Faerun mod.

Also while a rustled herd has been placed within city borders and pastures have been created, the stable building option is viewable but is not available (darkened).

[skodkim]

Hi Whoward69

First of all let me say that I am a big fan of your work.

In my last game I have used not only your fantastic UI stuff but also some of the buildings and units, including the Herdsmen. Its a shame that the AI can't use them but I guess there's really nothing to do about that at present. Another thing is that it seems really powerful. I mean the human player can (I guess) go anywhere on the map and move the resources to your own cities - even into the AIs cultural borders and "steal" resources (without a diplo penalty..?).

Therefore I purpose some kind of limitation to the mechanics. I'm not really sure what would work best (apart from self discipline...) but maybe it could be made so that you could only "capture" resources that were adjacent to or within your cultural borders? Another idea could be that it requires an amount of gold to move the resources.

Just my two pennies...

\Skodkim

[Adam st]

Cant find the mod, it sounds great, can You put it here or a proper link

Thanks

[whoward69]

All my mods are on the Steam Workshop

[rayz13]

civIII workers had the ability to build 'colonies' on resources , luxuries in neutral territory which i thought was great-any chance of that happening w/ Civ5 ? they had to be conected by roads too-even if in your borders,

[whoward69]

@nycfalcon - Having done some fairly extensive testing of both Herdsmen and Prospectors (they share common features) I'm just not getting any crashes when capturing units (either AI of mine or me capturing AI units - although the AI should not be building these units), so can only assume it's some incompatibility with the Faerun Mod Scenario