Drag 'n' Drop and questions regarding new Space Wolves for 40K files

[shaggai]

Trying to make something work and it doesn't look like the files will cooperate as well as I would like it.

Setup: Space Wolves have a unit known as Wolf Guard, veterans who can either form a squad, or be moved and used as leaders for other squads. I would like to useDrag and Drop to simulate this but there problems are:

1) I read that children cannot be moved via dragging, only top level units. I was able to get what I wanted by having a unit with the Wolf Guard being selectable as a Detached option choice - which adds members to the squad in top level. The question/problem, this does not seem possible to have the unit setup this way - that is I would like the unit to have 3 top level units when selected to the roster, but all permutations only allow the detached option selected by the user, so the user would have to add 2 models to the squad by their own actions.

2) When a model is moved from one squad to another by drag and drop, does it have any "memory" of where it came from? The Wolf Guard have some weapon options which are tied to a ratio (one heavy weapon per 5 models in the squad). This would only be possible if the model can either remember where it came from - so if he chooses the heavy weapon, the original squad (which he was moved from) is disallowed this choice. I imagine that this could be done with tags to an extent, but is there something which may be easier - almost like an invisible duplicate which is in the same unit even though it was moved to another location?

2A) I thought that leader/follower may be something to help me with the above, but I don't think that a unit can be made up of leaders (with the purpose of being diverted elsewhere) - I remember that I had an AB crash on one attempt of the like.
3) One of the restrictions the Space Wolves has is that no character can have duplicated wargear. Is there anything in AB that can perform something like an entity comparasion? Or would there have to be something like a rule which counts up all the wargear of an entity (using tags) and then compares it other entities. Or rather I think a statcalc to do the tally and then rule to perform the diff...

Let me know if you need a better explanation or some type of example on the above questions...

[Colen]

1) Correct, child units (i.e. units added by a link) cannot be dragged and dropped - they are part of their parent unit.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of this question. What exactly do you mean by "I would like the unit to have 3 top level units"? Can you give me an example?

2) No, when a model is removed it has no memory of where it came from.

3) Yes, AB can do this. To activate it, you need to specify uniqueness="yes" for the units which must have different wargear (under the Other Details on the unit tab), and then specify a value other than "None" for "Sig. Check" on the options tab for each option that needs to be treated specially. For more details, check out this location in the help:

c:\ArmyBuilderEx\docs\kit\kit_tricks.htm#unique_co mbos


Question - do all Wolf Guard models come from the same squad? For example, let's say I have a 2000 point Space Wolf army, with 20 Wolf Guard in it (pulling numbers out of nowhere). Am I forced to have a single Wolf Guard squad of 20, detaching single models as I like to other units? Or could I have one Wolf Guard squad of 10, one squad of 5, and 5 single models with other units?

If you have a single "squad" of wolf guard, the problem is pretty easy - just keep track of the number of heavy/special weapons all wolf guard have, and compare that to the total in the roster.

If you can have more than one squad, things get more complex. A leader/follower relationship is probably the best way to handle this - the squads of Wolf Guard are the "leaders", and the independent wolf guard assigned to other units are the "followers" which must choose which squad they belonged to. If you get any crashes when using this, please let us know how to reproduce them and we'll get them fixed in a bugfix update.

Hope this helps!

[shaggai]

Originally Posted by Colen

Question - do all Wolf Guard models come from the same squad? For example, let's say I have a 2000 point Space Wolf army, with 20 Wolf Guard in it (pulling numbers out of nowhere). Am I forced to have a single Wolf Guard squad of 20, detaching single models as I like to other units? Or could I have one Wolf Guard squad of 10, one squad of 5, and 5 single models with other units?

If you have a single "squad" of wolf guard, the problem is pretty easy - just keep track of the number of heavy/special weapons all wolf guard have, and compare that to the total in the roster.

If you can have more than one squad, things get more complex. A leader/follower relationship is probably the best way to handle this - the squads of Wolf Guard are the "leaders", and the independent wolf guard assigned to other units are the "followers" which must choose which squad they belonged to. If you get any crashes when using this, please let us know how to reproduce them and we'll get them fixed in a bugfix update.

Hope this helps!

You could have in a basic army a choice of up to 3 of these Wolf Guard units. Each unit would be from 3 to ten models, the ability to make any one of the a leader of other squads is possible. And of course, each one of these squads would have limits on what the total squad could purchase. So that's why it would be sort of necessary to know of where the leader for x squad came from, for the purposes of these limits. All in all, it looks like something that the player should do at the time of deployment instead of army building - but then again if I could make it work it'd be nice :-)

I'll try reworking some of the prvious ideas and see how the unique option works out - if it does, then that is one real big headache out of the way...

I'll also see if I can work on some screen capture to explain the top-level vs. parent and child tests and I'll search through windows to get you that crash report.