(Note: A solid knowledge of triggers is required to understand and or do the things described in this article.)
There are still a large number of people who do not have the expansion pack for AOM yet. One of the new features in it, is a random number generator, an effect called “quest var randomize” Well, I wont go into detail on why a random number generator is important, but I will touch on it briefly. With a random number generator, you can make random events. What good is this? Well now in a scenario you can make things different every time by putting out random settlement locations, random resource locations, random units in an army, etc. This is very easy to accomplish in AOMTT with the built in random number generator. But what about all the poor souls who don’t have the expansion yet? Well I thought of a way to make an improvised one. It will not be as effective, nor as efficient, but it will work. Now how do we go about doing this? I was stumped in the beginning but then started thinking, “What is already random in the game?” “Is it possible to use the something else already random in the game to fire off an event?” The answer of course, yes. Try going to the map editor and using a trigger to make a hawk. Does it fly off in the same direction every time? No, it does not. So why not use that randomness to make a random number generator. Here is how. Place a small circle of cinematic blocks. Now, in the center of this circle use a trigger to create a hawk. Now make more triggers for each cinematic block in the circle. For your condition for these triggers use the “unit in area” trigger. Now for your effects just have whatever random event you are trying to fire off. Now for the example. You want settlements placed in one of 12 possible places on a map. Make a circle of 12 cinematic blocks, since that is how many possible spots you want it to be. Now say the hawk is created and flies to the block at the right side of the circle. It meets the condition for being in the area of that cinematic block, then will fire off the effect of making a settlement wherever you wanted that particular block to make one appear. Here is a picture of what the circle looks like
You can see the bird flying over one of the blocks on the left. Again, it will meet the condition for flying over that particular block and fire off what event you wanted to happen when the bird flies over that block. I will give one more example just so you fully grasp this. You want each player to start off with a different unit. There are a possible 12 units you want them to start off with. If the hawk flies over the top left block they get an Ajax. If the hawk is created and flies over the bottom right block they start off with Chiron. I hope you understand the potential for random events this can have (there are far more complicated possibilities, feel free to use it in a scenario, cinematic blocks are invisible, and a flag isn’t required so no one will even notice. Use it for random resources, units, armies, buildings, whatever you want to be different each time you play.
Final note: For this trick to work, you must create the hawk with the effect “unit create” so you can assign it a name. Then you must use the condition unit in area by name. (This means the condition will be met when the unit created with that name is in the area) It will not work using army triggers such as army deploy. The reason for these different triggers is because the game wont register a hawk normally flying over, it only seems to meet the condition when you use the by name triggers. These can be found in almost any map editor patch, I would assume that is no big problem, since most hardcore designers use these anyways. Also, this is restricted to single player since last time I checked the “unit create” trigger didn’t work to well in multiplayer. I hope you understood this article, and its usefulness. Try looking for other ways to accomplish other random events in vanilla AOM, I’m sure this isn’t the only way.