We should have some nice units with the ability to swim. Of course, a Teutonic Knight is not the right candidate, but especially units from e.g. America would be a good fit. Why is a little brooklet a not passable barrier?
Would give the game more options, more strategies and more fun.
This could be a bonus for the Polynesian Unique Unit.
An Infantry/Archer that can swim but can’t attack while in the water.
It might brake the balance of some maps that rely on rivers limiting the angled of attack.
It’s the type of bonus that would situationally range between useless and absolutely OP. Very tricky to balance.
There also is the question of how to limit swimming distance, I myself have a fairly good endurance while swimming (PR : 6 km in a bit over 2h, obviously without any arms or armour) but it would still be quite insignificant over a full map. To reuse a quote about WW2, you can march from Moscow to Berlin, but you cannot swim from Hawaii to Tokyo.
You just make the unit swim in shallow water,so it dosent become totally op or useless.
Would that work, a unit that automatically switches between two forms, depending on the terrain it moves on?
In the game files of the original AoE, there is an unused sprite of a swimming Alligator.
In the AoE2-esque game America (2000/2001), the Sioux/Lakota units have the ability to swim.
Removing the terrain restrictions should do the trick.I remember in the pcm mod there was a unit who could walk over cliffs.We anyway have birds who fly over any terrain.
Or this could be 2 units stacked together similar to a villager one unit gets active on land other unit in water.This would be a better option as you can have the water unit have its own graphics without much issue.
I thought about a unique unit that can walk though forests, but not attack from within forests. It could be pretty interesting but again very map dependent. Being able to walk though forests is kinda pointless on Islands and borderline OP on black forests.
I remember Empire Earth had some units that could walk through forests but since everyone could make them it was not that much of an issue.
And potentially extremely annoying, hide to delay defeat
Those units would have to be explicitly excluded from the no defeat condition to prevent that.
You could make a very natural balance: Swimming speed. Thats also the one in real life. If you have a pretty good swimming technique, which professional fighters should have, you can swim “quasi” unlimited, only limited by time, as swimming is half the speed as walking. I once crossed a bigger lake, took me 3 hours. So naturally, if the units swim slow enough. You would almost never swim across long distance oceans, but only use it to cross small lakes / rivers.
or more realistically only a third of the speed of walking. You can easily walk 6kmh, but swimming is more like 2 kmh
Changing a unit’s terrain restrictions to get something like the “Flying Dutchman” of RoR is easy. But I wonder whether it’s currently possible with the engine to have a unit change to its other form (walking/swimming, technically two units) whenever it reaches certain terrain.
you could have it be manual. Changing the unit’s mode (ratha, immortals…) actually replace the unit. Have the change only happen on terrain that both allow land and sea (beach, shallows) and done.
