Allies question - removing the label for child units

[Mathias]

I'm using child units to represent equipment so I get a nice display of their stats. However, when units are selected as allies, I'd rather not see the ally notification in brackets next to the name of a piece of equipment. How do I remove this?

[rob]

At 05:45 PM 2/18/2007, you wrote:

I'm using child units to represent equipment so I get a nice display of their stats. However, when units are selected as allies, I'd rather not see the ally notification in brackets next to the name of a piece of equipment. How do I remove this?

I'm not sure if you'll be able to accomplish this. It depends on the nature of the data files you're writing. If you have allied units that themselves have child units OTHER than the weapons, you won't be able to change this behavior. However, if only the weapons are child units, you MAY be able to solve this.

AB assumes that ally behaviors are consistent throughout the entire roster. So ally behavior is an all-or-nothing things. You can control how child units behave as allies within the definition file via the "childally" attribute in the Structure section. You can try the following two approaches.

First, you could set the behavior to "active". This will cause all child units to be considered NON-ally units. Instead, they will be treated as "native" units and will therefore have no ally designation in parentheses. However, this will also likely impact how point costs are allocated, so you'll have to do some extra work to adjust for this.

Second, you could set the behavior to "prefer". You would then need to assign EVERY race tag to EVERY child weapon unit, which would cause the child unit to be treated as "native" to the current race and not be classified as an ally. You would ALSO have to designated each child weapon unit as hidden so that it didn't appear in the list of available units. Lastly, this appraoch will also likely impact how allied costs are calculated, so you'll need to do some adjusting.

Hope this helps,
Rob