[BobingAbout]

This 1 is a bit more than just adding another side, it enables you to split sides into countries when you reach a certain point aswell.

if you want, you can combine meathods to have a seperate MCV per side aswell as having the sides split into countries when they reach a certain tech level.

OK, this is another 4th side meathod, this is a combination of my original 4th side meathod and Arg's 4th side meathod. again, this needs a lot of AI editing to get the AI to build the correct units, please read my 4th side through 4th MCV meathod for comparisons, you may also read arg's meathod, but i think most of it is build into this meathod. me and arg had long talks about these meathods many moons ago.

Again this will work in RA2 although it is written spacificly for YR

first thing to note is this is heavily based on arg's meathod, where you have a structure other than the construction yard determine which tech tree's you have. in Arg's meathond this structure is the powerplant.

This meathod combines all MCVs into a single MCV, aswell as going into all the problems you might find, aswell as solutions, and this meathod there is a solution for every problem.

first thing i did was to combine all MCVs and Construction yards, so, you need to find the tag "BaseUnit=" and change it so you have "BaseUnit=AMCV".
next step is to search for [AMCV], change the line "Owner=" to read "Owner=British,French,Germans,Americans,Alliance,R ussians,Confederation,Africans,Arabs,YuriCountry" and search for [GACNST] and make the same change to owner. next search for NACNST and YACNST, Delete the reference to them in the [BuildingTypes] list and the strctures themselves, also search for SMCV and PCV and delete those, aswell as the referance to them in the [VehicleTypes] list. note, do not delete the tags in the anims list because if you do you will mess up the game in some way. next thing to do is do a replace search, and replace all referances to NACNST and YACNST with GACNST. you could have made the single MCV and Const Yard any of the 3, but you must make sure that the AIBasePlanningSide tag is non-existant on the construction yard, in the original rules this tag isn't on the allied construction yard anyway.

Now test your rules, if all goes to plan you should now be able to play the game where all sides have the allied MCV and Construction yard, players will have access to all sides technology aswell as the AI building all its structures seemingly correctly. this is partially because of the "AIBasePlanningSide=" tags. if all works, on to the next stage.

you now need to create a basis for the 4th side, to do this you need to replace an existing country with another country for the new side. the AI base planning side needs to remain the same unless you also change the original side the country is tied to. you'll need to read my tutorial on how to do that. but for now lets presume you change British for your 4th side, as in my other 4th side tutorial, the AIBasePlanningSide for british is 0, and needs to remain 0, change all buildings "Owner=" tags for allied structures to "Owner=,French,Germans,Americans,Alliance" in the case of replacing British and your new sides structures also change the "Owner=" tag to "Owner=British". now everything should still be ok with the AI on Buildings only, but you should still be stuck with all (now 4) tech trees.

now you need to decide what will be the Tech Tree decider. you can use anything you want, such as starting out with a Basic Battle Lab costing not much at all, but the problem is the AI will ALWAYS build a powerplant first. so logic dictates we make the tech tree decider the powerplant as in Arg's meathod. to do this you need to make the power plants buildable only by the countries allowed to have it, EG sides allowed to have it.

first step in this is to add to the prerequisites of all buildings, the powerplant, and since you doing this you might aswell also remove all referances to POWER, and this is a good thing because we will be needing to use this to fix 1 of the problems. next step is restricting the tech tree's you can build, now a good thing is you can do this more than once, at any stage in the tech tree making all countires in a side have different units once they reach a certain level of technology. you will need to play with the "Owner=", "RequiredHouses=" and possibly "ForbiddenHouses=" tags. simply make "RequiredHouses=" the same as "Owner=" where these are the countires that are allowed to build the tech tree, in the case of powerplant, it should be the whole side.

you might want to also do this on a country level once sides reach Battle Lab level, where every country has a unique battle lab giving unique units afterwards, giving a whole new perspective on the country spacific units lists, 1 problem there is the fact that its easy to split the tech tree up, but not so easy to join ends again, at battle lab point is 1 of the easiest points since you can set the prerequisite to any battle lab and your sides warfactory for example, but then you are restricting your units to the whole side, rather than 2 countries of the side and not the others, unless you make the war factories split aswell. so you are playing around with prerequisites a lot, the perfect example here is the super weapons, you would limit these per side rather than per country simply because of the limited number of them. remember "PrerequisiteOverride=" means if you own any of the buildings or units in this list, you can build the item whereas "Prerequisite=" means you have to own everything in this list to be able to build it.

Problems:

One: You will get the free units for the original sides not the new side ones. The paradroped units and sold/destroyed buildings infantry will als0 be the original sides ones.

Two: Only allies can build the MCV bacause thats what we used as a template.

Three: The AI still builds units from the original side, and badly. As long as the Owner tag displays the correct countries in the "Owner=" tag the AI will build buildings correctly, but the "AIBasePlanningSide=" must remain as the original. That's 0 for Allies, 1 for Soviets and 2 for Yuri, don't forget that you are emulating the 4th side so for the 4th side this is set to the house the country came from I.E. british would be set as 0 even though it is not allied any more.

Solutions:

One: Paradrop and units from sold/destroyed buildings for the new side will be the same as the ones an the side you took it from, so the best way to solve this problem is to make a generic unit and make all units from sold/destroyed buildings and paratroopers this generic unit. E.G., we made a unit called a paratrooper, and paradrops contain him and also all sold/destroyed buildings have him as the free unit rather than the sides unit.
you can easily fix the free units by changing the owner tags so only the countries that you want to get them free are on the list, you must have atleast 1 infantrytype and 1 vehicletype on the list.

Two: the first part is simple, change GAWEAP to FACTORY to require any war factory rather than just allieds. the second part is a clever trick, because we are making the power plant what you need to build a structure you no longer need the POWER tag to specify Power plants because if you don't have 1 you can build your tech tree. so find the tag "PrerequisitePower=" and remove the power plants from it, instead use this as repair pads and grinder, or the second building you need for the MCV for all aditianal sides/countries. now change GADEPT on the MCV Prerequisite tag to POWER. now it should read "Prerequisite=FACTORY,POWER" and all sides should be able to build the MCV when you add all warfactories to the "PrerequisiteFactory=" tag and all secondary building required to build the MCV to the "PrerequisitePower=" tag, remember, POWER means any structure on the PrerequisitePower list so don't go adding 2 buildings for your MCV requirements for the same country, because it means 1 or the other aswell as any war factory.

Three: So far you can build all units and buildings for the side you are on. If you capture a power plant for an enemy house you can build theirs as well. The AI will only build the correct buildings. For them to build the correct units as well, you need to edit the AI, so I'm not going into much detail as it involves AI editing. See my new sides AI tutorial for more details as this is tricky...


Opinions?

[Renegade]

Sounds complex, although I think the system behind it is quite logical and easy. Talk about marketing...

Anyway, good tutorial for the newbs; I'd call "make it sticky", but...well...you know...

[CodeCat]

If people test it and it works, you should PM a moderator to make it sticky.

[Hunt7s]

Well dont Rob You have done it again. lol, another brill pice of info for people :P

JK (oh well looks like we wont be one of the only mods out there to have a 4th side by the time people get going though these tutorials lol)JK

[Renegade]

I've had a fourth side for months...it's quite common these days...kinda like a fashion trend or something...:lol:

[premier89]

I going to have a fifth side, but I'll replace all the countries. Thanks for this, it'll help a lot.

I'm a fashion victim. :lol:

[Hunt7s]

were still unique then, as we have the 2 versions. Yuri or CDA, then we will have the CDA 4th side (America and Uk as one so take up the uk space.)
So really we arent, but we are, lol. strange aint it.

[BobingAbout]

We've got 3 problems, first off, me and hunty can't finnally agree on anything.

we want all 4 sides to have missions, the 4th side meathod currently implemented by me has been set up to work with a mission of any of the 4 sides.

i want to go ahead and stick the 4th side in there, but hunty doesn't want me to mess with the countries in skirmish modes. we need a bit of help in the decisions. thats why i just stuck in the extra game modes for mode B(CDA replaces yuri) and 4th side experemental mode. in hunties opinion we have 3 mods, and a menu EXE that you run before loading the game which replaces the rules files to change these. and for AI sakes, i agree, but it would be a lot easier if we could think up a meathod that you could do entirely ingame, where the AI works all round. and the only way i can think of, is to have the 4 sides by default, and no other game modes that mess with the sides, and only mess with the mission files, and lets face it, you won't be doing that too often.

[BobingAbout]

so far i have tested, well, upto the midway point where i tell you to test it.

i have also done some misc testing in the descovery of methods, so basicly the only things i havn't tested are the POWER for MCV second prerequisite and PrerequisiteOverride= itself. in theory POWER should work and prequisite overide i recon not. so can someone test the prequisite overide itself bit for me? make the battle labs side specific or something, then go capture an enamies battle lab...

[Daedalus]

Im still using the normal 4th side method. (I know you have the credits for it but i researched that myself too, so its also my tech).
The bad part i see is that there seems no seperate MCV/CY and i dont like that.
So it might be usefull, but not for my plans.