Mass Fire Drill and Other Shenanigans
I have recently dabbled in the dark arts of editing Empire: Total War after having become fed up with the way infantry fire rather ineffectively use their weapons. Something about immersiveness and what not.
The default manner in which infantry fire until research unlocks is the, "fire_volley" system: In which only the first rank of a unit bother to fire while the rest, until they take the place of any first rank casualties, simply stand there twiddling their thumbs or something equally useless while soaking up a good amount of lead instead of returning it in kind. Until they have their initial fire drill replaced with rank_fire or a form of platoon fire (if they are even that lucky), gun battles stay unimpressive. However, I found that the American Minutemen (irritatingly designated as euro_militia_infantry_minutemen in the .pack files) are an exception to this. They seem to conduct some sort of, "volunteer fire drill" in which they open up from all ranks and then continue to shoot as individuals. This lets them chew up standard militia units and even withstand drilled line infantry in addition to being very fun to watch. It was certainly surprising for me to find those plucky Patriots routing British Line Infantry during the War for Independence campaign and deviate from typical volley fire, militia mediocrity. And to think I thought anything but the modern Swiss militia were only good at running away!
After some serious searching of TWCenter, several posters had said that this form of operation was mass_fire. After some cursory editing, however, I found this was not the case. Not only does the euro_militia_infantry_minutemen entry have no corresponding drill at all in the unit_to_unit_abilities_junctions table, adding mass_fire to it made things worse. What mass_fire actually does is that it has everyone attempt to fire at the same time from a decidedly poor line of site. A good half of the units may not fire depending on the angle of the enemy. What's even worse is that if a singular infantryman happens upon a misfire, he will not attempt to fire again until the rest of his unit has finished their loading cycle! This was not the case with the Minutemen's default non-drill, wherein they would always attempt to fire again after each misfire regardless of the unit quite like the first rank unit in fire_volley.
My question is: How to I make the Minuteman style non-drill firing style the default mode of firing until their replacement by platoon or rank firing drills? I have only just begun using DBEditor, and I don't quite know if (or how) I should delete the offending fire_volley entries altogether or replace them via a more benign entry and see if that works. Any help would be appreciated, and I will probably upload the results for those who still want vanilla gameplay with a youth prolonging Botox injection.
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Originally Posted by ♔hammeredalways♔
