Another drive-by forum posting, by someone who doesn’t even have the game but watches videos of it on their 15-year-old laptop with a broken fan.
A game with 24600 kills and one conversion. Siege onagers featured heavily on the cool-color team with Bulgarians. I checked the tech trees for monks: Poles have all the important techs except Illumination; Mayans and Goths lack Redemption; Romans have Redemption and Block Printing, but lack Theocracy (only one monk in a group rests) and Sanctity. But if using monks were easy, there were still plenty of paladins from the Huns player that could have been converted.
Apparently, in other games the act of taking a group of units with powerful abilities and splitting them to separate targets is called “cloning”. In AoE2, with significant work this can be done with separate control groups. Otherwise, it’s hard to do: after clicking one monk or the entire group to start converting a unit, you can either do a big mouse movement to accurately click one or a few monks, and then another big mouse movement to move the cursor back to a unit to convert, or you can do a big mouse movement down to the bottom of the screen to quickly deselect one monk (the icon is slightly larger than a monk is, but the mouse movement is also a larger distance) and then another big movement back to an enemy unit.
I propose an easier method for “cloning”, which is basically patterned on my distant memories of playing Warcraft III custom scenarios with multiple heroes. Make a hotkey that switches command mode from the typical “commands go to all units in a group”, to a mode where one unit’s portrait is highlighted or something, and commands go only to that unit.
Then a separate hotkey: this could either be “switch back to normal mode”, or the first hotkey does that while the second hotkey moves the active focus to the next unit in the current selection. Players complain that Rathas are hard to use because you don’t know what their current state is, so if you want them to all fire arrows at a unit, you can’t just use a hotkey that you know and click on that unit: you have to look closely at the busy game screen to understand what’s going on, which is why some players install a mod that shows a sword or arrow icon above a Ratha’s head.
So it might be better for the first hotkey to both enable the cloning mode and then move focus to the next unit on subsequent presses, while the second hotkey switches back to regular group command mode.
If these cloning hotkeys (and UI changes to indicate focus) were implemented, then the process for cloning commands would be as follows:
1) Press cloning hotkey
2) Right-click on target unit
3) Press cloning hotkey
4) Move mouse cursor slightly to next target
5) Right-click on target unit
I even looked it up to make sure I was using the right word. Apparently, Starcraft doesn’t have the hotkeys I’m suggesting here, so you still have to move the mouse to the bottom of the UI to deselect units with each step.
A point I would like to emphasize is that monks are strong against expensive units, and weak against cheap units. Every civ has expensive units and cheap units, but a lot of the time the expensive units are also more cost-efficient, so they are the only units that get made. If expensive units also carry the risk of losing that unit to a conversion, cheaper units become more viable; the game becomes more complex; and finding the correct strategy becomes harder. Just spamming paladins in a 4v4 game because you happen to have access to fully-upgraded paladins could be the wrong strategy.
Also, units that are converted can be converted back. Light cavalry are a useful second unit to accompany war elephants, but so are monks.
Along with monks, cloning hotkeys could be useful for things like instructing a group of villagers to build several military production buildings or instructing siege weapons, like trebuchets or onagers, to fire at different targets.
Should these two cloning hotkeys be implemented?
- Yes
- No
- AUTO MONK, AUTO EVERYTHING
I might as well add in a second poll. If you’ve played AoE2 for a while, you may have encountered the bug where you convert an upgraded siege unit: a Capped Ram, Siege Ram, Onager, or Siege Onager, but at some point the unit suddenly converts into the basic form of the unit. A similar thing happens with monks (triggered by picking up a relic) and villagers (triggered by switching tasks), though it really only affects converted Spanish and Incan villagers.
The point is that converting a strong unit should feel cool, and it’s not cool for a unit to suddenly get weaker, or for it to gradually get weaker over time due to somehow staying alive for a long time while you get upgrades that affect other units, but not a converted unit.
So why not let converted units benefit from some upgrades? Technically, converted units are just units with special stats: I believe that if you use a scenario trigger that modifies a unit’s stats, like giving it +1 attack, it will no longer benefit from standard upgrades either.
So I suggest that every time time you research an upgrade, converted units can use the upgrade if it would not make their stats better than what they could get from their original civilization, and is also not better than what you could get yourself. Examples:
You are Huns and convert a Spanish knight with no upgrades. It can use all of your upgrades.
You are Koreans and convert a Malian Cavalier with Farimba (+5 attack) but no blacksmith upgrades. When you research blacksmith upgrades, it can use the armor upgrades but not the attack, because the normal maximum for attack for Koreans is +2.
You are Koreans and convert a Bulgarian Cavalier with Stirrups (+33% attack speed for mounted units) but no blacksmith upgrades. The converted unit retains Stirrups and benefits from all of your blacksmith upgrades, because the stats are no better than what Bulgarians can normally research.
You are Mongols and convert a Frankish Scout Cavalry with 54 HP. It keeps 54 HP after conversion. You get Bloodlines: the unit does not benefit, because Franks can’t get more than 54 HP on their Scout Cavalry. You upgrade to Light Cavalry: Franks would normally have 72 HP; Mongol bonus is +20% HP starting in Castle age, so even without Bloodlines your Light Cavalry would normally have at least 72 HP; so the 54 HP scout jumps to 72 HP Light Cavalry.
You are Spanish and convert a Frankish Scout Cavalry with 54 HP. You upgrade to Light Cavalry: the most fair thing would probably be for it to only have 60 HP, unless you research Bloodlines in which case it jumps to 72 HP (the minimum of your 80 and Franks’ 72).
You are Celts and convert a Frankish Cavalier with 144 HP. You research Paladin: the cavalier becomes a 160 HP paladin, even though Franks get 192 HP paladins.
You are Incas and convert a Spanish villager with Supremacy but not loom (so 65 HP, +2/+2 armor). You switch the villager’s tasks, which normally removes special stats: instead, the villager stays at 65 HP, but goes up to +3/+4 armor as long as your own villagers have at least that much (maximum of +4/+6 for Incas).
A converted unit shouldn’t instantly gain stats, since when units are visually different like your pikemen fighting enemy spearmen, it can be nice to see that units have been successfully converted. But it would gain all applicable upgrades when you research any upgrade that would normally affect a unit of its type, or you could trigger the upgrades by garrisoning the converted unit in a building.
Summary: you wouldn’t be able to convert a Frankish paladin to Lithuanians and end up with 212 HP and 14+8 attack, but you would be able to use upgrades that the original civ is able to research but just had not done so at the time of conversion.
Let converted units be affected by some upgrades in this way?
- Yes
- No
