SpeedType
The terrain table column a vehicle's per-cell throttle and passability are read from.
- Applies to
- UnitType
- File
rules.ini- Section
[<ObjectType ID>]- Value
- SpeedType
- When omitted
- Context-dependent`Track` in a `Crusher=yes` section and `Wheel` in every other.
One rules.ini section per land type — [Clear], [Road], [Water] and the rest — carries one figure per speed type token, and this key picks which of those figures the vehicle reads out of every one of those sections.
[Water]Track=0Wheel=0Hover=1
[MYSKIMMER] ; a UnitType registered in [VehicleTypes]SpeedType=HoverMovementZone=AmphibiousDestroyerTwo decisions read the chosen column. A cell whose figure is 0 is refused when the vehicle asks whether it may step into it, unless the question is asked at the height of a bridge deck over that cell, or with no height at all — a vehicle standing at ground level under a bridge is refused exactly as it would be in the open. The second decision belongs to the drive locomotor alone: a driven vehicle crosses every other cell at the fraction of full speed the figure gives, after the slope multiplier that the same value selects — Track takes TrackedUphill and TrackedDownhill, while every other speed type — Foot, Hover, Amphibious and the rest alike — takes WheeledUphill and WheeledDownhill. A vehicle moved by any other locomotor reads its column for the per-step test and nothing else, so a hovercraft or a tunneler crosses ground priced at a tenth of full speed at the same speed it crosses ground priced at full. Movement and terrain sets out where each of the ten takes its speed from.
SpeedType and MovementZone
Section titled “SpeedType and MovementZone”MovementZone answers a different question. Every cell is sorted once into one of a handful of terrain classes, and connected runs of cells sharing a class become the zones that reachability is judged against; a type’s movement zone says which of those classes count as connected for it. That sorting reads the Wheel entry of a land type and no other, after Water and Beach cells have already been set aside as water — so a vehicle’s own SpeedType never changes which cells the game treats as connected.
The two settings therefore have to agree. A hovercraft whose [Water] Hover= is above zero still gets no route across a lake unless its movement zone accepts water, because the zone map never consulted the Hover column; and a movement zone that accepts water still strands it if its own column reads 0 for Water, because the per-step check refuses each cell as it is reached.