Introduction
please be aware: might contain horrible english grammer and spelling

This trick is based on 'The Double Negative Effect: Units with Negative IDs' trick that is shown in an article by Nixck. And will be featured in my upcomming scenario 'Minato and the Imperial Regalia RPG' (still need some testing on that).

As far as i know, this trick only works in HD and it has it’s downsides which i will discuss later.

In order for this trick to work, you need to have Trigger Studio’s. Now to lay the groundwork for the skill system, we are going to do the following tricks in sequence:
1.Make units garrison inside other units
2.Creating units with double negative IDs
3.Making units invisible
4.Make arrows patrol
5.Set up triggers to detect the arrows

For the purpose of this article I will pick William Wallace as the hero unit, to give you that true tutorial feeling.


Doing all the tricks

1. Now we are going to open up the scenario in trigger studio and do our first step: Making units garrison inside other units. In this case, they will be garrisoned inside William Wallace. Each unit garrisoned will become a unique skill. You can garrison as much as you like, but for this tutorial I will limit it to 3 units ( so 3 skills).

Here i created the 3 units, a two-handed swordsman, a huskarl and a berserker, you can do this by simply adding them from the unit list on the right.



Now change the garrison value on all 3 of these to the value corresponding to the ID of the hero unit, which in my case is 5 (see in the next screenshot). Also while we are at it, change the ID value of the 3 units to something uniquely negative, i chose for -10,-20 and -30 here.
Once it is done click on the re-sorting and it should look like this:



Checking in-game it will now look like this:



2. Next up, we are going to make the 3 units have double negative IDs with 3 arrows. The arrows should be unique and to prevent issues with the rest of your scenario, they should NOT be appearing anywhere during the play through. Here i chose for proj, sea tower flaming, proj, longboat F and proj, HAR F as i don’t plan on any of these being used in the scenario. An easy trick is to just use any flaming (F) projectile and then just disable Chemistry.



After adding the projectile units, change their IDs to the same negative number as you did with the 3 ( or more) units from before, so in my case -10, -20 and -30 respectively and then re-sort again. Now it should look like this :



If you now go in game, you will notice that clicking the garrisoned unit, will no longer unload it, but instead you will notice a little arrow being unloaded. It will teleport around a little if you spam the ‘’unit’’ you want to unload.

3. Obviously , we don’t want anyone to see those arrow. So next up is to make them invisible. I do this my giving the arrow a very large frame, i simply try to put a number with a 1 followed by a lot of zero’s until it won’t let me make it larger, now hitting the save will default the frame to -31072. Also i change the rotation to 4/4pi. You want to do this with all the arrows. Than it should look like this:



4. Now that this is all done, we are going to set up a looping trigger that will automatically patrol all of the selected arrow types to a specific location on the map. The fact that the arrows arrive at this specific spot will later be used to start/cancel skills. For this tutorial I chose this location that i marked with the flag and i use this trigger to make the arrows get there:







5. Finally, we can make the following triggers to have proper skills in-game:



I won’t go into much detail on what exactly these trigger do. But basically, they just detect the arrow on the map, give you the corresponding effect you want, and then later detect the arrow being at the flag. In fact, at the start of the scenario, we want the arrows to already be at the flag, to prevent the skill from launching right away. So we change the arrow location to the location of the flag, in my case it is this location:



Now you want to repeat all of this for each skill you intent to make!

Downsides of this system
While designing scenario’s with this system in place, I came across a couple of downsides that you have to keep in mind when making scenario’s:

1.Triggers with changing ownership and teleporting objects over an area
When using those triggers, do NOT use these over an area that also has the hero unit in them. Instead, just use select the hero unit separately. Otherwise it actually also teleports or changes the ownership of the garrisoned units!

2.Population space and garrisoning
The units that are garrisoned inside the hero actually contribute to the total population space, which is something to keep in mind. Also when you garrison the hero unit inside something else, like a transport ship for example. It will account for all the units being garrisoned. So in this example, where we had 3 skills. The hero unit will account for 1+3=4 units being garrisoned. Furthermore, if the player saves while the hero is garrisoned inside something, and then reloads. The ‘’skills’’ will keep being stuck inside. Something which can be game breaking!

3.The system is very fragile
Since most of the triggers are set up inside trigger studio’s, the can easily be disrupted. For example, just looking at a trigger involving any of the arrows in the in-game editor, will already mess up the trigger. Also any wrong use of the double negative IDs can instantly crash the scenario.

Final words

When used correctly, this system will give a very unique aspect to your scenario. But I can be hard to implement in the right way. Also it is somewhat limited in what I can do in an unmodded game, since there are only 3 effects that change the numbers on your hero (change attack, change armor , change health). So I would encourage anyone who is interested in this, to go beyond what I did. Maybe try to use the advanced genie editor to get unique visuals or effects, or maybe make some ‘’units’’ with icons that actually reflect the skills.