Unit and equipment requirements

[IBBoard]

After too much of the in-laws, to little computer (dead hard disk), too little free time and now a son, I've spent too long without working on WarFoundry and so am going to try to kick-start things again.

I've recently read the Chaos Warriors army list in the latest White Dwarf and realised that while there may be some requirements that I had covered, Games Workshop keep introducing extra ones. I'll enumerate things here so that people can add to them as they feel is necessary.

Unit requirements:

• Must have at least one of unit Y to take X
• Can have A units of X for each B of unit Y
• Cannot have any of Y to take X

Related to units (things that Rollcall had as Unit Requirements that aren't quite requirements and other things):

• "Is champion" (i.e. can't be selected on their own)
• Has to be general
• Can be general
• Unit counts as X units in category (e.g. in a Chaos army they must have a minimum number of core units, but Hounds don't count, and the Hell Cannon takes two slots)

Equipment:

• Must take item X to have item (e.g. "must have Mark of Khorne to take Axe of Khorne")
• Up to X% of unit can take item (mainly Lord of the Rings bows)
• Up to X can be taken by a unit
• X per army

There must be more, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

[Brother Tober]

"Unit counts as X units in category (e.g. in a Chaos army they must have a minimum number of core units, but Hounds don't count, and the Hell Cannon takes two slots)"

Precision: with 0 <= X.
There are units that do not count at all in a category (e.g. Dark Elf Harpies, Orcs&Goblins Snotlings)

[Brother Tober]

Further precision: X may be fractional (while being rounded up).

E.g. one may have two Dark Elf Reaper Bolt Throwers counting as a single rare choice. So one RBT counts as 0.5 if you have two of them. If you only have one RBT it counts as 1.

[Brother Tober]

There is a very special requirement I think of regarding Blood Angels Death Company.
There are some units (Tactical Squad, Terminator Squad...) that add an extra model to another unit (Death Company) at no cost when taken into the army.

How would we model that?

[IBBoard]

Welcome to the forums, thanks for throwing some ideas in. It always helps to have a view on other races as well since each race seems to include some little quirk or other.

With regards your first post (if you could just use the "edit" button in future for updates over a short period that'd be great) I was already considering zero because of Chaos Hounds. The more awkward one we will need to take account of is some W40K squads that take one Troop slot, but can't be counted as your core troop selection (i.e. if you have to take two Troops then you can take them but you still need to take another two troops to fulfil your minimum and they do count to your maximum).

Fractions will need to be counted as well, but we need to make sure that's the best option. "Up to X as a single choice" as a decimal works quite well for situations like that, but I think there might be other situations where it might not work so well or where there might be rounding down instead of rounding out or up. The other idea I had for how to implement that was basically to make each "Up to X" choice a single unit in the data files and rather than being fixed as one of the unit, make them selectable up to a limit (so a roster might say "Two Bolt Throwers". The only downside is that if you took four then you'd have two lines saying "Two Bolt Throwers".

The last requirement is the most awkward. In terms of where the requirement would go, I'd think putting a "X free models for each unit in list Y" 'requirement' on the Death Company unit would be best in that situation. It'd be cleaner with less repeating, and it'd keep the data the more meaningful way around because the Death Company unit would know from its unit definition how many extras it could have, where as the other way around would involve it either a) querying every other unit type to determine if it has a requirement that allows it free members or b) every other unit updating a counter in the Death Company unit type, which might never be used and which would then need resetting for new armies.

[Brother Tober]

Sounds totally convincing.

[IBBoard]

Good, at least I sound convincing It then just needs a method working out for how to define it all in the data files (preferably in an extensible way) and how to implement it!

[Brother Tober]

As I do not know of the current format of the data files I can hardly tell anything about that at the moment.

Another question: Are there any documents describing all the requirements that have been discovered so far? I'd suggest putting up such a document and complete it step by step as we discover more requirements.
After defining the requirements we should write some kind of specification in order to avoid to produce too much random code before knowing what we want as exactly as possible.

For being able to collaborate, we should put up a version control system. Do you know git? Here is a tutorial about it: http://www.cimgf.com/2008/06/03/version ... rogrammer/

The tutorial also shows how to use a Dropbox account for collaboration. The advantage of using git with Dropbox is that we do not need a central server.

[IBBoard]

They need an overhaul, but I'll try to post the DTDs (I'm planning to move to schemas) and some example data files (or at least the XML part, because they're being stored in Zips so that icons can be defined by the data file and used to make more advanced interfaces like this example.

As for the other things, I'll make a new post about them rather than dirtying this post.

[IBBoard]

Really old post here, but as we're going to start supporting unit requirements in v0.2 then we need it now

So, does anyone have any other requirements that tend to occur for units? Or did we cover them in the first post? We'll be able to AND and OR them as well for more complex situations, and the output should hopefully be a sensible description of what specifically failed rather than just "requirements not met, here are all requirements in cryptic text"

[snowblizz]

I'm trying to think of a few, so hows about I give some examples and you can formulate rules for them? Some may or may not be applicable of course.

"equipment" X requires unit Y present (Grotsnik's Feel No Pain upgrade in 40k Orks)

unit can take "equipment" X+Y+...+Z up to a value of A (WHFB magic items, 100 or 50 points of magic items eg)

BSB in WHFB, can take 50p magic items OR magic standard of any point value
the same equipment combination can only be taken once (Space Wolfs and Dwarf Runic Items)

unit X makes unit Y count as cat A instead of cat B (a lot of themed special characters eg)

unit Y counts/does not count as part of unit X for unit size, number of equipment etc (champions and stuff)

unit X requires z number of models of unit Y (Blood Angel DC Dreadnaught requires 5 DC models / dread included)

equipment X enables/disables unit ability A (some units can swap out equipment or buy mounts and will count as a different unit type, eg a character is infantry but buy a horse and he now becomes cavalry)

One unit of Terminators can pick a Landraider Transport option, but others can as well so another unit of Assault Terminators can also take a Landraider Transport, but a further unti of Terminators cannot as each unit can only take this option once in the army.

unit needs to have enough eg weapons per model

I'll add if I can see more

[IBBoard]

Equipment X requires unit Y is a different flavour of the unit based on and should be okay.

Points costs are going to be the odd ones to handle. I'll need to think about those a bit more. I guess there is also a related "can only be taken in armies of X points and above" for some special characters as well.

"Counts as cat Y" was probably going to be dual category membership with conditions on which they can actually be taken from. That way we can validate the rule and say "unit in wrong cat" if you take the unit first then the modifying unit, rather than taking your modifying unit first.

I think counting for unit size should probably be separate from constraining what you can take, unless anyone has any good arguments the other way.

Unit size would be a sensible one and probably not too different from unit count.

Equipment enabling/disabling abilities is probably like counting for unit size - something to consider separately. For now we'll let the user work out whether their winged hero can fly now that he is also mounted on a horse or not.

The terminators sounds like a variation of "must have N+ of X to take M units of Y" (where M can be unlimited), as long as Terminators and Assault Terminators are separate units. Is that the case, or is it more complex than that?

[snowblizz]

yes, can only be taken in armies of </>/= X points would probably be needed

in the Teminator example, in this case yes They are both separate units that can have 1 each of the same option. But this option is available in it's own right as well. Eg. You can buy Land Raiders as HS choices and Termiantors (one unit each) can buy them as transports not counting the towards any FOC slot.

[IBBoard]

Ah, good point. So what you've got with terminators is an increase in the population cap on the Land Raider if you take the terminator unit.

[snowblizz]

Ah, good point. So what you've got with terminators is an increase in the population cap on the Land Raider if you take the terminator unit.

Yeah, I guess you can put it like that. Provided of course it won't allow you to buy 4 HS ones of course. Though the "normal" cap on HS at 3 total should stop that anyway.