Ranged Building

Hello there, guys!

I wanted to give a worker the human ability to build, but make it ranged . In order to accompIish that, I gave the "Repair" ability a great range (500, as opposed to the original 50), and it worked when making the unit repair-build a building that has already started, but when you tell it to actually start the building, it has to touch said building in order to set it down. Is there any way to make this setting down ranged too?

Try Gameplay constants.

Hmmm, couldn't find anything related to that in gameplay constants. Anyways, a change in gameplay constants would affect all other workers as well, wouldn't it? I wanted that change to affect only one race's worker.

EDIT: Never mind the last part, I think that as long as the other workers have to come in contact with the building to actually start working on it, changing it globally wouldn't have any actual effect on these "regular" workers (I think).

Ahah. I have a feeling that this isn't just going to be an object editor field, unfortunately.

Yeah, most probably. I thought about making a dummy, invisible unit to summon when the worker is ordered to start building, then go to the site and set down the building. Alas, that would be too script-intensive for me, since all the "building spells" in the list would have to be dummies and all that stuff. A pity :/

Give the worked a ranged attack maybe? You are basing this from human powerbuilding, right?

Hmmmmm, I gave the unit a ranged attack (increased it's original attack range to 500, actually, since I was already planning on giving it a ranged attack), and it did nothing to the building being set down :/ And yep, I'm basing this from human powerbuilding!

I'm not so sure this is doable without the "item-build" set of Item abilities.

problem with those abilitites is that it gets autobuild :/

Yeah, but then could you catch it with triggers and arrest the autobuild?

i dont think you can stop the autobuild :/

couldn't you make it not build by it self, i mean, how long the building takes or what ever and just have the peasants speed it way up?

I thought about that too. Problem is, when you repair-build something, you are actually spending extra resources by speeding up the process, as if you were actually repairing a damaged building. That way, even if you put only one worker to build a self-building structure, it would cost more than the nominal price for it. Also, if you 1) gave the building a fast auto-building cast time; 2) gave it a reasonable auto-build cast time or 3) gave it an extremely long auto-build cast time, it would 1) be way better than undead building because it would be too fast; 2) be better than undead building because, in addition of auto-building you could repair-build the structure and 3) be WAY worse than undead building because you would NEED workers to work on it, and I think that extra workers only speed the building by a fracion (i.e.: 0.9 eternity would be very similar to 1 eternity).

Oh, of course, it's important to note that, although not initially planned, it is possible that I will make a new race and pit it agains the old races, so it should be more or less balanced with them.

yeah but if it's mini buildings it doesn't cost anything in the first place.

Hmmmm, good point. Is there a way to make spells cost resources (and show that in the tooltip)?