Have you ever wanted to tell your AI's 20 foragers to gather sheep instead? How about telling your AI's scout to kill that 1 HP enemy villager 2 tiles away? Have you ever wanted to coordinate your AI's ragtag mob of raiders into disciplined groups of soldiers who attack only specific buildings at your command? If so, Direct Unit Control is your dream come true.
Direct Unit Control (DUC) is a feature added in Userpatch 1.5, also available in DE, that allows you to give specific commands to your AI's units and buildings, just like a human player directly controls their own units. Over the next several articles we'll demonstrate multiple examples of how to use DUC, such as targeting enemy buildings, claiming sheep, boar luring, and deer pushing. Through constructing these examples step by step, you'll learn the essentials of DUC. By the end of the tutorial, you'll have a solid DUC foundation so that you can maximize your AI's potential.
This guide assumes you already know how to use most 1.0c commands and that you have some experience with Userpatch commands. If you're at this stage, you're ready to venture into DUC, which is the final frontier of Userpatch scripting.
Read on to get started!