Making races optional
 

I maintain data files for a game system where the publisher recently produced a set of experimental rules that rework several factions/races (for instance, splitting existing factions into multiple ones, or renaming existing factions).

I'd like to add these experimental rules, but control them with a ruleset. I can easily use a ruleset to prevent units from showing up, but I would also like to suppress empty factions from appearing.

However, I can't figure out a good way to control whether races show up. Can I disable/enable a race? Can I use a ruleset to control whether an .aug or .ext is invoked?

To elaborate on the problem:

Let's say V1.0 of the game system has a race called "United States".

In V1.1, they split that race into "US Army", "US Navy", "US Air Force", "US Coast Guard".

If the ruleset for V1.0 is used, all US units will be in the "United States" race, and all new races will be empty.

If the ruleset for V1.1 is used, all US units will appear in their branch-specific race, and the old "United States" race will be empty.

In this scenario, it would be nice if the empty race would be invisible. If not, there'll be a fair amount of misleading and confusing entries shown, both for "New Roster..." and for adding allies.

Tags will allow you to do this. Look at how the BA 2.0 files use tags to limit certain unit from appearing in the force org based on the selection

Thanks for the suggestion. I downloaded BA 2.0 and looked around a bit.

It looks to me like there is support to keep units from appearing in Nations' lists of units, but nothing to prevent a particular Nation from appearing in the list of Nations.

I don't really know Bolt Action, but an example of what I'm trying to achieve might be Flames of War. The original rules only supported Europe and Africa. Later rules introduced the Pacific Theatre. This means that the faction/nation/race Japan is completely absent in the original rules.

Given that scenario, I would like to use some kind of setting (like a ruleset or some other user-modifiable mechanism) to specify if the original rules should be used (no Japan!) or the new rules (Japan is included).

I hope that makes sense. If there's something like that in the BA 2.0 data files, would you mind telling me where to look for it?

A related question: could somebody explain why there's a "Visible" property for Race, but no legality expression for it? (Or is that just a shortcoming in Creator?)

Any ideas about this?

Is it possible to use the <entityhide> tag for this? I experimented with using entityhide with "race.xx", but that only hides units with that race attribute, not the race itself.