There is a huge difference between tags and unit stats. The two overlap in a few important ways, but they are very different things. The overlap occurs in the following ways:
1. Every non-private must have a corresponding tag group.
2. Every non-private unit stat will always have a corresponding tag auto-generated by AB that identifies the initially assigned value of that unit stat for each unit. The author can explicitly assign the tag to be used if he wishes, which takes precedence over any auto-generated tag. The primary use of these "initial stat value" tags is to enable filtering of units in the Available Units list.
3. If a unit stat is designated as tag-based, then the unit stat value will actually be dictated by the tag assigned to the unit instead of an actual value. This is ideal for specifying things like composition groups.
4. At runtime, every unit stat will have a corresponding "runtime" tag defined that reflects its current value. This makes it possible to easily reference stat value within tag expressions.
From your description, you are using a traditional unit stat that has a value assigned. Therefore, the only thing you need to worry about for the tag group is that you have one defined. Beyond that, you can let AB do everything else for you.
Every unit stat always has a value implicitly assigned. If none is specified for a given unit, the value defaults to zero. When you define the unit stat itself, you can specify a minimum and/or maximum value for the stat. If zero falls outside of that range, then AB should automatically adjust the value to comply with the valid range when it is displayed to the user.
By definition, a unit stat can only have one value. Technically, it has both a "base" value and an "adjusted" value, but that's probably a topic for separate discussion if you're interested. The exception to this is for unit stats that are tag-based (i.e. the unit stat is designated as "uses tags"). When this occurs, the "value" is driven by the tags that are assigned to the unit. Normally, one tag will be assigned to the unit for each such unit stat, but that's not an absolute requirement. I can't think of WHY someone would have more than one tag per unit stat, but it's theoretically possible. There's a topic in the docs entitled "Defining Tag Groups for Each Unit Stat" that delves into this topic in more detail, plus another entitled "Auto-Generated Tags Corresponding to Unit Stats". Please give those a read and then yell if you have further questions.
The bottom line on this is that your unit stat will always have exactly one value, so you don't have to do anything special with the tag group. All you need to do is define it, and you should be good to go. There are situations where assigning multiple tags to a unit can be quite helpful, but those have nothing to do with unit stats.
Hope this helps,
Rob
At 01:04 PM 2/17/2006, you wrote:
OK, I'm struggling with this one.
Tag Groups can be assigned a minimum and a maximum value in the Groups window in ABCreator.
Mincount is defined in the docs as Minimum number of tags from this group that must be assigned to an entity. Maxcount is defined as Maximum number of tags from this group that can be assigned to an entity.
So, if I want a stat to be forced to have a value, I would set mincount to 1?
And if I want a stat to have only one value at a time, I would set maxcount to 1?
(I've tried this, and it makes my units illegal... so I must have it wrong...)
