overrides - the condition statement

[Mathias]

First, please add more information about what can go in the condition statement of an override. It deserves it's own page in the manual.

How do I set an override depending on what the unique ID of the parent is?

The child unit in question has different stats, depending on what unit is selecting it as a parent.

[rob]

At 06:04 PM 2/17/2007, you wrote:

First, please add more information about what can go in the condition statement of an override. It deserves it's own page in the manual.

How do I set an override depending on what the unique ID of the parent is?

The child unit in question has different stats, depending on what unit is selecting it as a parent.

Overrides are designed for use with different rulesets. As such, they are based solely on GLOBAL tags. There is no way to have an override based on the parent unit. If a child unit differs based on a parent unit in some way, those differences need to be handled via conditional links and options on the child unit in conjunction with the parent unit.

So you'll need to have the parent unit inform the child unit who it is. This can be done with one or more tags either passed down to the child unit or reference by the child within the parent. Once the child unit knows which parent is involved, it can make appropriate adjustments to customize itself.

Remember that you can use tags with a numeric suffix. By using "tagvalue" on a wildcard tag specification, you could have the parent unit specify the value to be used for a stat within the child unit. For example, the parent might assign the tag "group.value7" to the child, and the child could extract the value from the tag "group.value?", which could then be assigned to a stat value of the child.

Hope this helps,
Rob

[Mathias]

Okay, I was hoping for a more detailed use of overrides - I have up to 6 versions of the same weapon in use, and I was hoping to use overrides to modify them depending on the unit taking them.

[rob]

At 06:49 PM 2/20/2007, you wrote:

Okay, I was hoping for a more detailed use of overrides - I have up to 6 versions of the same weapon in use, and I was hoping to use overrides to modify them depending on the unit taking them.

The primary purpose of overrides is to change the behavior of a unit or item based on changes in rulesets. Using 40K as an example, there are all of the different Space Marine chapters, each with somewhat different equipment options, point costs, and behaviors for a variety of units that are largely the same. One approach would be to re-implement each of these units separately for each chapter. However, using overrides allows the same units to be modified slightly for each of the different chapters.

Looking at Warhammer Fantasy, overrides are great for the various "special armies" that many of the army books include. For example, the Lizard book includes a healthy number of differently flavored armies, each with slightly different rules. Overrides make it possible to include all the units once and properly adapt them to the specifics of each of these special armies.

You can also use overrides in conjunction with global tags that are assigned by units. For example, there are some armies in WFB where the presence of a particular special character causes some units to be treated differently (e.g. different point cost or re-classification of special units as core). By assigning a global tag to the special character, the rest of the roster can dynamically adapt itself appropriately. However, this only works with global tags, so it won't work for your situation.

Does this help to explain how and when overrides can/should be leveraged? If not, let me know what you still want me to explain and I'll do my best to provide it.

Thanks, Rob

[Mathias]

No, your first message was fine, thank you. When I read about overrides at first, it sounded like I could use it to compress all those different versions of the same thing into one version, and save having to remember which version goes with which unit.