Domain Three Units

The 'hand of serendipity' helped 'Darth Spoot' uncover a tool to creating an entirely new unit type that offers significant prospects for scenario developers.

by Blackclove and Darth Spoot (March 1999)

What Is Domain 3?

It is possible, using Notepad, to edit rules.txt directly and create new units, et cetera. In Civ2, each unit has a domain, which is either ground, air, or sea. These correspond, respectively, to values of 0, 1 and 2 in the "domain" slot in rules.txt. Darth Spoot, a newcomer to the Apolyton community, recently reported that he accidentally inserted the value "3" in the domain slot with surprising results.

Rather than simply crashing, Civ2 actually created a new type of unit. In many ways it acts like a ground unit that is not forbidden to walk over the ocean. Like an air unit, they can pass over any type of terrain. However, unlike an air unit, they never run out of fuel and may attack many times in a given turn. Their only limitation seems to be that if over the ocean they cannot attack onto land, and vice versa.

This is a very interesting discovery and opens up the question of what will happen if you try other unusual values for various parameters.

Some facts about Domain 3 Units

• Like helicopters, they cannot open goodie huts
• Though they can be put on "sentry" they cannot be carried by either transports or aircraft carriers
• They can attack on land or on sea, including doing "shore bombardments"
• As they are not ground units, they cannot capture cities
• It automatically ignores Zones of Control
• It can't attack air units without the appropriate flag being set
• Unfortunately, it cannot carry ground units or air units
• They can paradrop if you set the appropriate flag, but not into the ocean

Andrew Livings adds: "They don't need to end their turn in a city, or airbase, or carrier. In fact they NEVER land. They move into cities, airbases and onto carriers and still carry on. Sound effects wise, they are land units. But like air units in that they can't be trade units, or diplomat units. They can settle. They can be attacked by any enemy unit (like helicopters). Their maximum MP is 42 (like air units). They can use the carrier flag to the extent that friendly air units will end their turn if they enter the same square."

Domain 4?

So, what about "Domain 4" units? Well, it turns out that all other values of domain appear to produce the equivalent of Domain 3 units. This is true even of negative values of domain.

Congrats to Darth Spoot for making this amazing discovery!