Tutorials?

[rob]

Actually, your descriptions have been extremely helpful. I think I now grasp the two fundamental issues here. I now understand how the Warlord system is structured sufficiently to also understand the problem with particular leaders causing units to change their behavior when taken with that leader.

Now, there is one critical thing remaining that I don't know about the existing Warload files. However, I'm going to provide an answer at a conceptual level anyways. Hopefully, you'll be able to take this explanation and map it to the existing Warlord files.

The actual classification of a unit as leader/elite/etc should almost certainly be done via tags. So the trick is going to be to delete the current classification tag and assign the correct new one via scripts tied to options. I believe there is a topic about this technique in the documentaion, but it's for something slightly different. The topic is entitled "Re-Classifying Units When They Are Allies". You want the same basic behavior, except for a slightly different circumstance.

The trick is going to be figuring out how to recognize and trigger the appropriate changes within the Warlord data files. From looking at the files, all units are placed into squads, with a squad containing some mixture of leaders, elites, etc. Unfortunately, this means that there is no direct linkage between the leaders and their followers. That means that there is no way to actually have Warlord Gerard trigger a modification of the adepts in his squad, nor is there a way to have the adepts recognize the precence of Warlord Gerard (using your example). So things become ugly. :-(

I assume there are squad rules in place that verify the composition structure is properly maintained for each squad. If so, then the solution will need to be in using a variety of accrued tags and checking those tags within the squad rules. For example, the Warlord Gerard could assign an accrued tag identifying his present, as could the soldiers are treated specially in his presence. In the squad rule, you would first get the counts of the different classifications (leader, elite, etc.). Once you have the totals, you would perform a series of tests that would modify these numbers. For example, you would test for the presence of the Warlord Gerard tag. If you found it, then you would get the count of the number of the soldiers that get re-classified. You would then subtract that number from the total number of soldiers.

After all of the appropriate adjustments have been applied, you could then apply the actual rule tests that verify the ratios are correct.

There is another mechanism you can use, but I'm not certain how helpful it would be. AB has something called "Aggregate Contexts". You'll find details on this within the docs. In a nutshell, you could write a global SquadDone script that does some of the aforementioned testing. Since you can add and remove tags within a SquadDone script, you could effectively re-classify units by adding and removing tags. Then those tags would be in place when the squad rules were tested.

Hope this helps,
Rob