The UNIT PROPERTIES option is reachable through the PLAYER menu. This menu can provide the sole purpose for your mission, or it could turn your mission into a joke. In the Unit Properties menu you can alter virtually every statistic for every unit, except for unit speed. Let's take a closer look at what you can use this for.
Of course, you can make characters that are so incredibly huge that they whack and cleave everything that gets in their way. To top it off, you can give them a few hundred hit points to make sure that they can single-handedly conquer a ten-hour mission. This use of the editor is very dangerous, though. You must always remember to use the editor's various functions to enhance your missions, not to unbalance them. If you make a super-unit, what will happen if the player builds additional units like that? What if the computer builds the unit? Super-units are still trained in the same fashion as the regular units are trained, it is just that they have superhuman powers. Never edit something so lopsided into your missions if there is any possibility of the player or the computer gaining additional super-units without your intention.
How can you make use of the super-units, while keeping their production off of the playing field? By modifying the gold, lumber, and oil cost variables. If you start players with a super archer, they may think that it is pretty neat. However, they are likely to come back down to earth when they realize that in order to train another regular archer, they must pay over 2,000 in gold, lumber, and oil just to build one unit. This is most effective when there is little or no access to oil on a level. Boosting the unit costs to insane levels (or lowering the hit points to just one) is the way that you keep a player from building airships with which to spy on all of your nicely hidden traps. For your information, the maximum cost that you can set is 2,550.
Aside from making massive units to enhance a game, the same principles can be applied to restrict game play. For example, you may turn an average, ordinary two-against-one land battle into a gripping struggle if you remove the capacity for the player to upgrade armor and weapons. Simply make blacksmiths cost the maximum amount of resources, while providing the computer-controlled players each with a blacksmith of their own. If you are really feeling evil, make a mission where the player must capture the "forbidden" unit if he or she wishes to use it. The possibilities are nearly endless.
The most important thing to remember is that, if you actually want your changes to go in as part of a particular mission, then you MUST be sure to remove the checkmark from the "use default data" box in the upper left corner of the Unit Properties menu. For some reason, this check remains, even once you've changed the mission, so if you do not de-select that option, then your changes will not be present during game play.
A complete, in-depth look as to the various uses and pitfalls of modifying the unit properties would take an entire manual. If you give the player a super-unit, be sure to work some early attacks on the player to make up for the benefit. If you edit a unit out of the game by increasing costs, you must playtest that mission nearly to death, making sure that the mission can still be beaten without that unit. In the end, simply be careful with the changes that you make, and be ready for problems.
