Strange Things in Egypt

After the new patch I found out that I am able to recruit Fusiliers of the Line and Dromedary Cav right of the bat (along with Dragoons, Grenadiers, and other European units) in the Egyptian campaign. Is it a feeble CA attempt to make the campaign easier for the French, which makes taking Cyprus and the Bedouins useless (Are we really that stupid?), or it's just my computer get wacked up and allow me to finish the VH campaign with massive amounts of chasseurs?

Are you using a saved game from a previous NTW version? It's usually a good idea to restart a campaign after a major TW patch (like the Peninsular patch). Reason is that a lot of campaign restrictions are encoded into savegame files, and an upgraded game version will often change stuff around. They don't get applied to legacy saved game files, so you get really weird behavior.

I can confirm on a new campaign that what the OP says is true.

Heh, what do you know, that's definitely true -- just verified it myself. I did some investigation into the scripting files, and it appears CA made a mistake in the campaign scripting for the new patch. Anyone know how to file a bug report with CA?

Technical details:

In the old episodicscripting.lua file (which controls the initial exclusions of units and buildings) from data.pack, it has an initial exclusion line for units that specifically listed four units: Art_Horse_French_6_lber, Cav_Miss_French_Dromedary_Cavalry, Inf_Gren_Grenadiers, Inf_Line_French_Fusiliers. In the game, after completing the Cyprus and Bedouin missions, triggers are fired that re-enable these units.

In patch4.pack (the Peninsular Campaign patch), it installs a new episodicscripting.lua file that overrides the old one. Because the Peninsular Campaign added a bunch of buildings, the scripter has to manually specify that old campaigns should exclude the new units and buildings. In their hurry to exclude the huge list of Peninsular buildings, they seem to have overwritten the old unit exclusion list, because now that exclusion field is empty. Therefore, all units are available at the start. Meanwhile, the campaign script is still set to trigger an unlock of these units -- not realizing they're already unlocked by default.

It's an easy one-line fix for a modder or CA. I can't imagine this behavior is intended, because the campaign scripts still has the unlock triggers.

So all I have to do is delete the file in pack 4?

You don't want to do that. If you deleted the new episodicscripting.lua, you'd lose the building/unit exclusions for the Peninsular Campaign, which would cause even weirder behavior.

What you need to do is rewrite the ["Unit"] line for the Nap_Egy (or whatever the key for the Egyptian campaign was) part in the new lua file. Look in the original data.pack for the correct ["Unit"] line and copy it over the empty line in the new file, and you should be able to fix that properly.