Haha, almost everything you’ve brought up hits the same limitations of what’s possible – hopefully that helps drive home hard balancing / bugfixing (and RoN modding in general) has been given the crippling constraints.

Both passive and active abilities are hardcoded in RoN – you can’t add new ones or change the functionality of existing ones (other than adjusting numbers in some cases, such as the cost of bribing for example). So active healing ability and field medic transform are both off the table.

On top of that, many special functions of units (such as Citizens) are hardcoded only to that unit. There’s a bit of leeway with grafting (more or less “try to inherit the functionality of unit X”), but I’m doubtful it would work flawlessly for something as complicated as Citizens. Even if it did seem to work at first, the amount of testing/QA required to ensure all Citizen functionality works in all scenarios with no stability issues would be obscene – it would need to be outsourced to the community, but the RoN community is generally allergic to testing things so that’s probably a no-go.

Unit garrisoning ala RA2 IFVs is also no-go. The ability to both garrison and eject units is hardcoded to the Aircraft Carrier – and it even has to remain a naval unit for that to function. With extensive work I can get a unit to garrison in another non-naval, non-AC unit in some limited capacity, but it won’t be able to eject so it’s basically only useful for flavor or showing off technical capability (i.e. Fall of Nations).

Hmm, maybe instead of making it a passive ability like the French Supply Wagon, maybe make it an active ability? Click on a unit and it gains HP. Would that be possible within the limits of the code? Ideally the Citizen would walk up to the unit first and interact with it, hitting it with a hammer for example if it’s a vehicle, but if that’s too hard it’s not necessary.

Or perhaps it’s possible to turn Citizens into some sort of alternative Militia line unit? Perhaps Citizens could be convertible into some sort of Field Medic that heals units around them like a French Supply Wagon (ideally at a slower rate), at the cost of not being a Citizen until they convert back. Would that be workable? Citizens converting into quasi-Supply Wagons?

(Oh, and I remembered where I first got this idea: the Engineer IFVs from Red Alert 2. I looked at that and thought, “Damn, what if Citizens could do that as well?”)

Buffing Citizens (or something along those lines) is also one of my favorite ideas thematically, but of the three checks (technical, gameplay, thematic/intuitive) I think it unfortunately fails the most important one immediately. As best as I can think of, it’s either not possible to implement, or requires so many hacky workarounds to implement (without scripts) so as to be practically impossible. Appreciate the suggestion at least 😛

In other words, Monarchy is about the Monarch, while Democracy is about the Citizens – each offers their own bonuses. Like the Republic, Democracy helps you on defence, while Monarchy is like Despotism in helping you on offence; Democratic armies have citizens in battle like it’s the French Revolution, while Royal armies are commanded by Kings like the Despots of yore. Thematically elegant, even if I’m not sure it’s mechanically balanced.

If it’s too weak, consider increasing the strength of the healing effect, allowing it to stack up to a limited number of citizens (say 3), allowing Militia type units to also generate the healing effect, or even moving the healing effect to cities (less thematic, but stronger since cities have far more hitpoints than Citizens). If it’s too strong, consider decreasing the strength of the healing effect, removing the ‘stacking with other sources of healing’ ability, locking it behind certain research (e.g. the Supply technologies at the Smelter), and limiting it to only Citizens in your territory instead of allied territory.

(Note: I originally had this idea as a Nation Power for some sort of new nation – I didn’t know what kind of nation, and I knew that this was stepping on the toes of France somewhat, but I thought it would be interesting to have a Nation that sends its citizens into battles in foreign territory, perhaps being able to use Partisans and other militia type units in enemy territory without suffering horrible attrition. Then I realized that this could actually be a good fit for Democracy, and that you said that Democracy needed some kind of boost.)