Don't forget FLAGX!

i guess most of those units were experimental projects in the development phase, and being dropped on the way?

my comments:
ABGAL monk ship should have a monk on its bowe

BERSERK i can imagine they intended this to be a viking unique dark age or feudal unit. This because typical Viking raids were in the "dark age". The name Berserker also comes from that time (about 800-900 AD).
In the castle age the Vikings units were generally called Huskarl. I guess they changed this setup in the development. (sadly)

SCENIC castle: that is a great thing! It should have its own graphics so you can tell the difference. Is it unique to all civs or does it have just 1 graphic?

CHURCH 4: another unfinished thing? We dont hve trouble filling this slot don't we? We already have pyramids, the dome of the rock, a french cathedral, so maybe something Asian or Mesoamerican? Borobudur, Beijing forbidden city, Ankhor Wat?

SHIPWRECK: it looks like the start of a real Imperial Galleon. It isn't similar to the ones we have, or am i wrong?

PORT: it is a logical thing to have. Like a TC in the water, where you can garrison your fishers and do some advanced ship upgrades. In my opinion to many units are allocated to the dock. You should not need 2 pages in the icons panel. The dock should be just making fisher, transport and galley line. and maybe fire ship. All other ships go from the port.
It should have a fire beacon tower tough. One the fires arrows.

So FLAGX is basically a maprevealer. Does it disappear over time?

No, it's lika a flag without graphics

Does anyone know what OLD-ACADEMY is used for?

OLD-ACADEMY
seems like a leftover from AOE 1, there is also a OLD-GATOR name included as far i remember, what can mean the old aligator from AOE 1.

[This message has been edited by Monika_A (edited 04-07-2015 @ 00:59 AM).]

Someone should port the graphics from aoe1 to aok so the OLD-Academy can have a proper look.

MrMew, Check this:
http://www.docdroid.net/wpgp/unit-ids-aoc.pdf.html
Maybe it it helpfull for you, or not

[This message has been edited by Kallehagen (edited 04-07-2015 @ 12:01 PM).]

Thanks kallehagen, that is very helpful. Whoever wrote it should consider uploading It to the blacksmith if they haven't done so already.
I think I'll add a cheat unit category even though it will only be populated by two units.

@Steelion
I don't think porting AoE I graphics would work as OLD-ACADEMY and OLD-GATOR are classed as dead units.

[This message has been edited by MrMew (edited 04-09-2015 @ 03:55 AM).]

I remember the days when we all first discovered these and had a field day working out what they were for.

There is still literally tons of stuff you haven't covered, with lots of discussion. I can't search for specific posts, but there's been loads of discussion about hidden units and their purposes.

For instance, to make it a bit more clearer: ABGAL is "Advanced Boarding Galley", an upgraded version of BDGAL. Although it hasn't got much difference in stats, it's definitely the intention. BDGAL and ABGAL were intended to be "Monk-boats" that would simulate boarding enemy ships.

The "Advanced Heavy Crossbowman" was probably intended to be a higher tier of skirmirsher. I'm also pretty sure the "Berserk" was an early Huskarl. I could be wrong though.

The "Infiltrator" was intended to be a "spy" unit, where it'd appear as a different player color depending on who viewed it.

The "OMTBO" was supposed to be an upgraded Trade Cog.

There's tons more.

Actually the OMTBO (Off Map Trade BOat) wasn't an upgraded trade cog but something different : a boat that could go out of the map and reappear a while after with tons of trade goods. They scrapped the idea but if you have the alpha version of the game the OMTBO will do that if you send him out of the map and come back to your dock when reappearing, but won't deliver anything.

Does the "A" in ABGAL stand for "armored" or "advanced"? I honestly don't remember. My guess is that they were scrapped because trying to convert a unit from one tile away is literally all but impossible. Try researching redemption and converting an idle AI ram or packed treb with a monk

Yeah, the OMTBO was an interesting idea. Trade units that don't require an ally to trade with would have made 1v1 matchups much different, I think.

There's tons of crazy stuff that never made it into the game. I remember Sandy talking about slaver units, packing/unpacking TCs, "raider" civs, and more.

If I recall right, the A is for armored.

Yeah tons of cool stuff didn't make it into the game. But the raider/slaver unit, the packing town center for the raider civs these are fully fonctionnal with a minimum of modding, just data editing is enough no need to touch the exe.

[This message has been edited by TriRem (edited 07-09-2015 @ 04:14 PM).]

Actually the OMTBO (Off Map Trade BOat) wasn't an upgraded trade cog but something different : a boat that could go out of the map and reappear a while after with tons of trade goods. They scrapped the idea but if you have the alpha version of the game the OMTBO will do that if you send him out of the map and come back to your dock when reappearing, but won't deliver anything.

I never knew there was a working version of this unit sounds really cool if it actually worked

We should really do a Mod or something with working versions of these special units.people have already made some of these units workable already slaver packing tc etc.

Interesting. I wonder if the STRBO was something similar?

Making a mod with working versions, or rather "restored" versions would be rather fun.

[This message has been edited by BF_Tanks (edited 07-09-2015 @ 09:59 AM).]

Was there any way to make the Boarding Galleys useful?

Maybe give them 1 range and convert faster than a monk?

Theoretically they could still work against Fire Ships. That, however, brings us to the much-bemoaned issue of broken water warfare that makes Fire Ships and Demo Ships only viable in very limited situations. Mass galleys will always rule the sea in the current state of the game.

I will take a look at my alpha version where all the names are detailed but STBO (S? TRade BOat) was an upgrade for the trade cog.

Actually boarding boat would be pretty weak against fire ships because of their huge attack bonus against ships. What you could do is give them a high speed and pierce armor, and reduce their convert rate (it's different resource from the monks called boarding rate so there is no problems).

Quoted from HockeySam:

My guess is that they were scrapped because trying to convert a unit from one tile away is literally all but impossible. Try researching redemption and converting an idle AI ram or packed treb with a monk

Actually, at that time, ES found a way to solve that, and this solution was the actual reason that it was scrapped (if I'm not mistaken, a former ES employee mentioned that): Ships would become immobile while being boarded. And this is what happens! Just unhide the boarding galley and play around with it!

[This message has been edited by danielpereira (edited 07-09-2015 @ 04:32 PM).]

Wow, in that case I really wish they hadn't scrapped it. That would have been quite a cool feature!

The "Advanced Heavy Crossbowman" was probably intended to be a higher tier of skirmirsher. I'm also pretty sure the "Berserk" was an early Huskarl. I could be wrong though.

The berserk could have been another dark/feudal age unit since its partly aoe axeman,In aoe the axe man was a different unit from the sword line appearing in the second age.Any specific reason to think the hidden xbowman is a skirmisher?

RFARC- 571 RFSWD- 573 RCARC- 577 RCSWD- 575 any other ideas on these units other than early testing units?

Any specific reason to think the hidden xbowman is a skirmisher?

Look at the internal names- The Skirmisher is XBOWM, the Elite Skirmisher is HXBOW, and the advanced heavy crossbowman is AHXBW.

As for the RCARC and such, I was under the impression that they were raider units. Mostly because of how AGE named the classes, but the cavalry units do have the kidnap ability.

I also feel those guys can be raiders and it wont be very unrealistic to make raiders kidnap villagers also.

Look at the internal names- The Skirmisher is XBOWM, the Elite Skirmisher is HXBOW, and the advanced heavy crossbowman is AHXBW.

Cant it be the other way around,rather than an upgrade to the skirmishers it could have been the last upgrade for the xbow line and current xbow units will be upgraded archers much like Aoe.

[This message has been edited by Mahazona (edited 07-09-2015 @ 10:54 PM).]

So far for the R units I've heard that they are raiders, rebels and rangers.

Look at the internal names- The Skirmisher is XBOWM, the Elite Skirmisher is HXBOW, and the advanced heavy crossbowman is AHXBW.

When you look at the internal name you realize that at first they wanted to have the skirmisher line to be an crossbow line, and I guess the archer line would stayed archers.

[This message has been edited by TriRem (edited 07-10-2015 @ 01:54 AM).]

I was enabling some units for my PTC in the AoFE mod. What's the story behind Poenari Castle, the unit that replaces church_4 I believe?

@HockeySam: It was probably scrapped because of balancing issues. If it's making the unit it's boarding imobile, what's to stop a player making a fleet of them and making anyone elses fleet useless because he just boards everything and they are dead in the water until converted?

I was enabling some units for my PTC in the AoFE mod. What's the story behind Poenari Castle, the unit that replaces church_4 I believe?

Graphic is a alpha/beta building so I guess they just used that to fill a slot.Also the fortress is also based on a hidden castle with no firing ability but a big garrison and some other units based of unused slots.

@BF_Tanks : it is not that unbalanced because the ship is not totally immobile when board, it just freezes 1-2 seconds before being able to flee or attack. I think they could have kept them in the game it might have worked (they would have been terrible against cannon galleons !)

@MrMew : you should all take a look at the unused techs they reveal so much about the original ideas. For example you have one that upgrades onagers to trebs, another that upgrades trade carts to CARAVAN, and I should check it but maybe there's one that changes trade cogs to OMTBO... To go back to the poenari castle, there is a tech to upgrade your castle into a hidden building called cathedral I believe, maybe it's this unit they replaced with the poenari castle.

Quoted from MrMew:

I was enabling some units for my PTC in the AoFE mod. What's the story behind Poenari Castle, the unit that replaces church_4 I believe?

You've clearly never played the Dracula campaign in AoF

Poenari was Vlad Dracula's dreaded mountain fortress (the one mentioned in the popular story about where he forced the disloyal Boyars to labor on rebuilding it). In AoF, it uses a nice Castle graphic that Jorgito made. Essentially, it behaves like a Castle but can't train units. You have to defend it in the 4th scenario, and can find it in the 5th scenario and trigger an easter egg of sorts if you bring Dracula there.

Quoted from Tanks:

@HockeySam: It was probably scrapped because of balancing issues. If it's making the unit it's boarding imobile, what's to stop a player making a fleet of them and making anyone elses fleet useless because he just boards everything and they are dead in the water until converted?

Good point - it depends on how it's balanced, really. One could make the boarding ship have a rather high cost so they're hard to mass early or tinker with the stats. It would probably befall the same sad fate as the other ships, though - that once you hit a critical mass of the galley-line, nothing can stop mass galleys except more galleys.

I'm working on water warfare for a couple different mods right now (Wheel of Time first, and the lessons from there will inform later projects).

What are your suggestions for fixing water warfare?

I wrote up a massive post, but didn't want to clutter up MrMew's topic with an unrelated discussion, so I converted it into a University article that everyone can use for future reference. You can find it here

So I finally finished the Hidden Units Reloaded Article.

@TriRem
Those unused techs sound interesting, perhaps I'll take a look sometime.

Had a quick look at the researches in AGE3 and found a few oddities.

ID- Name
131- Shadow Trade Wksp Age Two
156- Lance Cav (make avail)
184- Wall 2 (make avail)- Yeah this research is used and does enable walls, however if you look at the tech, 184, it also enables sea gates
258- Shadow Saw Mill 1
282- Mine has been built
356- C-Bonus, 1/2 Price Techs- A civ bonus yet has no civ assigned to it and the tech associated with it is empty.
426- Petard (make avail)- The research's location for this is the barracks.
427- Genitour (make avail)