"Infiltrators": They're attack is 2X faster and deadly, they self-heal, they cannot be converted, they beat all other infantries except Teut. Knight.
Oh damn it! they replaced it with a "Bandit" in AoF! nice idea... not!

There's a unit called "OTLW" (or something like that) known as an Outlaw, a Gaia-only Archer that acts as a predator.

There's also "Ice patches" and few usefull eye-candy objects.

Also an unactive packed Trebuchet called "PTWC" which explains why they had the "packed town center" feature as seen in the attributes.

Some "TWALL" which are ugly walls. Sea gates/towers (the tower has some pixels overlapping).

ect...

Ultimately, you should download the demonstration maps from the Blacksmith that contain heaps of those hidden units.

AOHH: the infiltrator should've been restored a few patches ago? It's still named bandit, but the stats should be the same as the old infiltrator.

To clarify, Cysion is probably talking about the HD Edition. These 'hidden' units were already present in the original version of the game.

I remember also in the last mission of El Cid, where El Cid is dead, you must defeat Yusuf and the Black Guardian. Yusuf on the other side of the sea has a couple of towers (i think they weere called tower of despair and tower of desolation) which they're not encountered anywhere. They also have the same design as the Cursed Tower.

I believe those are Cursed Towers with a name change trigger attached.

Exactly. If you look at the strings for AoC, you will find them there (same thing with units like Hun Commander in Attila 1 and Lonely Hermit in Vinlandsaga- this is why the name shows instead of a % symbol when you hover over the icon).

Wouldn't it be easier to extract the scenario from the campaign and look at the triggerwork?

Yup, fair point

How do you go about entering a string number into the Change Name box?

http://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/aokcgi/display.cgi?action=ct&f=4,41975,0,30

Thanks!!

What is the units AGAL and BGAL (or something like that) useful for. They're classed as boarding boats and convert ships.

I thought the Bandit (after it was changed) remained a Gaia-only unit? Maybe I missed the change... My bad.

AGAL/BGAL: Those ships can convert other ships (I cannot remember if they can convert land units).

OMTB (Off-Map Trading Boat) is a nice ship you can use for eye-candy.

The movable relic is also cool, but if you kill it, it will wander everywhere around the map like a glitch.

The OMTBO was originally designed by ES as part of a mechanic where players could build a trade boat that would sail off the edge of the map and reappear later with a high trade profit, but they scrapped the idea after it proved too unstable.

I find that the boarding galley units are really good for diversifying naval battles. In my Lepanto scenario, I'll be giving the player some of those, as broadsiding and boarding enemy ships has been an integral part of naval warfare since Antiquity. Plus a naval battle consisting of a galley war would be pretty lame

Too bad non of the new versions of the game AOFE/AOF HD did not include these ships as generic units.

AOHH: according to the data it should be available to everyone again. But if you experience it otherwise, I'll have to take another look again...

I found these and read about some of them in the blacksmith (known by some years ago).
PMANC
POREX
RCSWD
RFSWD
VMDL
port
oremn
OMTBO
STRBO

There was mention of an AOE trireme and church 4? What is the name of the relic? PWTC is a building and doesn't do anything. And I see what you mean about TWAL.

-PMANG (iirc it's with a G, not a C) stands for packed mangonel. It's basically a mangonel that packs and unpacks like a trebuchet.

-POREX is a leftover from early development of AoK when ES was going to have [Iron] Ore as a 5th resource in the game. Since there is no villager unit graphic for picking it up, tasking a villager to it will make the villager invisible. This has several utilitarian uses, for example in The Way of The Warrior by Great Emperor, where at one point a villager uses POREX to facilitate a cutscene where he appears to be swimming across water to blindside a guard.

-RCSWD and RFSWD (and RCARC) are units with M@A, LCav, and Cav Archer gfx from ES's testing phase, I believe. They have inordinate amounts of armor and only take one point of damage from any other unit, which can make them useful for cutscenes where you want a couple armies duking it out for a while with nobody dying. Most notably, Berserker Jerker used 2 RCSWD units in his Sabato Returns campaign, where the player obtains 2 nigh-invincible "Wraith Scouts" when playing in evil mode.

-VMDL (stands for villager male Dave Lewis) is the super-fast cheat unit that you get from typing "i love the monkey head" and can only place building foundations. His voice (and possibly nakedness, if you read the Ask Sandy threads) is an inside joke by ES on their fellow coworker.

-Port is a building that is identical to a dock for most civs (or identical with the exception of a few rugs for Middle Eastern civs), though larger and does not train units. For Central European and Meso civs, the graphic is completely different and a very cool piece of eyecandy. Ports can only be placed on the left beach of a landmass, unless you use mapcopy or the free placement feature from UserPatch or AoE2HD.

-OREMN was also designed for the Ore resource, though afaik it just acts as a normal gold mine. I seem to think that that color of resource your villager carries when mining it is different, but don't count me on that.

-For OMTBO, see my above post.

-STRBO stands for "STRange BOat", and when still has the gfx of the AoE1 Junk, but when moving has the gfx of a flat-bottomed rowboat. If you set a looping task trigger on them with no location or patrol them, they will stay either still or moving with the rowboat gfx. In my Lepanto scenario, I use several of these on patrol to emulate Venetian gondolas.

-The AoE Trireme is a dead unit from the early dev stages of AoK. It isn't selectable and just vanishes after a couple minutes.

-Church 4 is the same size as the Cathedral. It really has no function except for modders, who will replace the current graphic with a cool-looking Castle/Church/Wonder.

-The Relic Cart is a moving unit with Relic gfx that acts like a sheep in the way it changes ownership, but is not killable (except with triggers) or garrisonable into a monastery. When moving, it is the color of the player that owns it. It is used in several scenarios for various reasons, such as The King's Best Men by Ingo van Thiel, where it represents a floating bottle with a message.

-PWTC is a packed Town Center that doesn't do much except crash the game 50% of the time that it is packed/unpacked. I think it was meant to be a mobile TC.

-TWAL (stands for Tall WALL) is an object whose utility seems to be much debated. I personally find it really cool, but the wall towers have an incredibly annoyin and ugly and black shadow that should be covered up unless you perhaps want to create the illusion of a cave. Many people have also, when using the TWAL, used triggers to remove the wall towers and create towers or stone/fortified walls in their place, which has a cool effect but only really works for the Western and Central European civs. Also note that in The Forgotten Expansion to AoE2HD, the TWAL has been cleaned up, the annoying shadow removed, and has been renamed to "City Wall" and is available in the normal editor.


If you have any more questions about hidden units, then ask and I should be able to fill you in

Thank you very much for that Cysion!

The PMANG is quite funny when it attacks something, and sometimes it will be stuck if it attacks for too long, and its graphic also seems to disappear.

There is also:
- Pile of Food (forage bushes)
- Pile of Gold
- Pile of Wood (tree stumps)
- Pile of Stone
- POREX (villagers that mine from Iron (5th resource) become invisible because the Iron Miner graphic does not exist).

The 6th resource was Trade-Goods which the Off-Map Trade Boat uses.

There was also a boat that when it moved, its graphic was simply an empty wooden boat.

Those Ranger units (RCSWD, RFSWD, ect...) have strange amounts of armor and their attack is thus weak.

That Port is ugly; it has pixels overlapping.

-The Relic Cart is a moving unit with Relic gfx that acts like a sheep in the way it changes ownership, but is not killable (except with triggers) or garrisonable into a monastery. When moving, it is the color of the player that owns it. It is used in several scenarios for various reasons, such as The King's Best Men by Ingo van Thiel, where it represents a floating bottle with a message.

It is impossible to remove/kill a Relic Cart with triggers. It reappears at the edge of the map.

Yes. The best thing you can do for 'remove' it is hidding behind some GAIA objects or teleporting it to some place (killing several times).

I still can't find "church 4" or the trireme. PWTC doesn't have an unpack button that I can see OR a death button.

Are you using the data file for AoK, AoC, AoFE, AoE2HD, or AoF?

I find that the boarding galley units are really good for diversifying naval battles. In my Lepanto scenario, I'll be giving the player some of those

Wait...the boarding galley's conversion mechanic actually works?!

sure it does it works perfectly.ideal for a pirate ship

The "church 4" building appears as CHRC4 or something like that in AGE if you don't open the language files; it is called "Cathedral" instead.

The mobile town center was the developers' early idea for raiding civilizations (Mongols, Vikings) that didn't make it past the alpha stage. Like renewable resources, off-map trading, gatehouses (garrisonable gates), etc., those were removed.

too bad they removed those interesting features

I think that many of them are actually still activate-able in the data, but perhaps somewhat broken. For example, there is a "slaver" mode that was meant for the camel light cavalry unit.

AoC using AGE3 to access data.

Refer to DerWerewolf's above post for the church4. The trireme is super-hard to find- it has one of those odd names in the data that most dead units have.

what was gatehouses (garrisonable gates) suppose to do?fire out from the gate?

I believe so. I'm pretty sure that a broken remainder of that feature is the cause of the duplicate gatepost bug that plagues scenario designers to this day.

I also think that flags on the gates were only added after that idea was scrapped, as otherwise they would indicate garrisoned gateposts.

I believe so. I'm pretty sure that a broken remainder of that feature is the cause of the duplicate gatepost bug that plagues scenario designers to this day.

This have a solution, actually.
After you put some gates in your scenario, and their shadows start 'getting darker', just use move object on the flag parts, to pick the duplicates and delete. Then, after you doing that several times after playtesting, the gates stop multiplicating themselves (for some reason...).

Yes, that solution is not news to me- it's how I fixed that issue during the development of the AoF campaigns over the past couple years (as well as in my translations of Last Bastion and Outlawed campaigns from AgeArena). The issue is that they actually continue to duplicate themselves every few times you test and save the scenario, or map copy something over the gateposts.

The issue only occurs by itself on gates lying in the NW/SE direction, positioned like this slash: \ However, if you use map copy or free placement in UP or HD/AoF, then it will occur in all gate directions. This issue also occurs with all directions of Sea Gates/Palisade Gates (depending on if you play vanilla or AoFE or AoF).

Actually, it seems that we might have a fix for the issue in HD and AoF (as well as self-destructing gates after an ownership change), but I'll give more info once I can supply the specs.