Increasing unit costs
 

I want to increase the per model cost based on the selection of a ruleset.

Races have the option of choosing a faction ( or not ). The selected faction will raise the cost of each model in the army by a few points. Each race will have 6 or 7 unique factions to choose from.

The decision to either take a faction or not is done when they set the army up so I started making different rulesets...then hit a road block when I tried to get an easy way to increase the model cost.

I started by using the unit's Override element...but that's gonna be a ton of work if I have to touch each and every unit in each and every race :cry:

Thanks!
The Butcher

Increasing unit costs
 

The use of overrides will only assign new characteristics to an entity - not adjustments. So a cost adjustment of 3 points to all models will have to be applied as separate overrides for each entity. However, you only need to use overrides if you want the adjusted cost to be shown in the Available Units list. If the cost adjustment can be applied after the entity is added to the roster, there are various ways you can solve this much easier.

The first option would be to add the logic to the global EntityDone script. Within the script, you could test the various race and ruleset conditions, applying the appropriate adjustments there. To keep things more organized, you might define a separate procedure for each race that applies the different factions for that race. Then the EntityDone script simply needs to determine the race and invoke the proper procedure.

The other technique would be to use options. You could have one option for each race, assigning that option a "Live" tag expression that limits itself to that race. Each of those options would then chain to a set of options, where each chained option corresponded to one ruleset. Those chained options would have a "Live" tag expression limiting them to the proper ruleset. The chained options would also apply the appropriate cost adjustment.

With the options technique, you could assign all of the master options (i.e. the ones based on race) to a linkset and then designate that linkset as global. This will automatically assign all of the options to every unit. The "Live" tag expressions would then sort out which specific option applied in each situation.

Another advantage of the options approach is that you could make the options visible to the user. This would give the user direct feedback about the cost adjustment as a solid reminder. The script-based approach would do the adjustment behind the scenes, so the user wouldn't see where the extra N points were coming from. You could also designate the option as "info only", so that it was only visible during roster construction and didn't show up in roster printouts.

If any of this is unclear, let me know and I'll be happy to elaborate.

Hope this helps,
Rob

At 12:52 PM 11/25/2005, you wrote:

If you want to take a look at someone who's gone the entity done route then take a look at the Babylon 5: A Call To Arms files...I had to use a series of rules to adjust the price of pretty much every unit based on the level of the game (ruleset) and the level (composistion group) of the unit...

Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks for the help guys :D

Butcher