How many types of equipment?

[IBBoard]

How many types of equipment are we likely to have so that we cover everything in generic categories?

Warhammer has:

• Weapons
• Armour
• Magic Items
• Mounts

Warhammer 40K has:

• Weapons
• Armour
• Wargear
• Mounts

So that's a fairly common set of four (weapons, armour, 'special equipment' and mounts). I'm just thinking about the different parts we need to handle to properly separate all of the available items while not ending up with an equivalent of the "MagicItems.txt", which was (in name at least) fairly game-specific.

[gregmita]

It's probably best to allow the user (of the data editing program) to add categories and name them for flexibility. Various Warhammer 40k codices can use different terms and divisions - for example the new Space Marines codex categorizes mounts (jump packs, bikes, etc.) under "Other Equipment" along with things like teleport homers, as a separate section from wargear. I'm not sure 40k is that consistent at naming these categories. I have no idea about Fantasy though.

[IBBoard]

Given the range of games we could be covering you'll never get a perfect match, but I think we could come up with some general categories. In terms of the Space Marines, I can't see a real problem with deviating from the Codex groupings. As long as jump packs/bikes/mount-like things are under "mounts" you're still being consistent. I guess teleport homers aren't quite "wargear" for bikers, so that'd imply an additional category of "extra equipment".

My thinking was two-fold. Firstly, if we've got sub-categories of equipment then that lets you break up the list so that you can have slightly less cluttered selections. Secondly, you may end up wanting plugins that handle restrictions on the amount of (for example) wargear that someone takes. We don't really want lots of different lists in the data files since they're all just "equipment" or "things you can take" (or do we?), so the easiest solution is an attribute.

The second one could be done in an extensible manner (and probably would be for Lord of the Rings where they need to distinguish between combat and missile weapons, since some scenarios limit the percentage of missile weapons allowed), but the first one is stuck with the categories we define unless you have an ugly "other" section that includes a mix of everything we don't have a specific section for.