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Unit Manipulation

The actions in this group are a mixed bag of manipulations. If they need to be in your game, then the need will be obvious, otherwise they are pretty much optional.

Transferring Unit Parts Action

Any unit whose parts-max is greater than the default of 1 is a multi-part unit, and its hp denotes size rather than amount of damage. Armies and fleets are two kinds of units which can be usefully defined as multi-part.

Players will very often want to merge or detach parts of a multi-part unit, and there is an action transfer-part provided for that. You can control the cost of the action by setting acp-to-transfer-part.

Changing Side

Side changing is like capturing, but players can only do it to units that they control. The action is change-side, and you enable by setting acp-to-change-side to 1 or more. This will also enable side changing for units that cannot normally act.

Side changing is especially useful for alliances in multi-player games, so it should usually be enabled. On the other hand, it should not be too cheap; you should consider what side changing really means in the game's context.

For instance, even in the close British/American alliance during WWII, armies never actually changed sides; British ground units were always British, and American ground units always American. On the other hand, ships and bases could be traded back and forth with only a cost in time and expense.

Changing Type

In some games, it will be useful to have a notion of promotion or upgrade for units. You can implement this by allowing players to do a change-type action.

You enable this via the acp-to-change-type table.

Disbanding

Sometimes a player will want to get rid of a unit, perhaps because some type has been overproduced and is tying up valuable resources, or to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

You can allow this by setting acp-to-disband to 1 or more.

You can control the rate of disbanding with hp-per-disband. You may, for instance, want to allow the deliberate destruction of large units, such as battleships, but you don't necessarily want disbanding to be a convenient way of preventing their capture. Setting hp-to-disband so as to require several turns to get rid of a unit will accomplish this. The table supply-per-disband will allow you to govern the rate of recovery of the unit's supplies during the disbanding process.

It is also possible to make disbanding a way to recover materials that were consumed in the construction of the unit, by using the table recycleable-material. Care should be taken that creation and disbanding of units is not a convenient way to manufacture lots of a material; players will use the loophole if it exists!

It should usually not be possible to disband something large like a city, otherwise a clever player might try to eliminate it as a strategic target, but most mobile units should be easily disbanded. This is especially helpful in an "construction spiral" game, where the winning player(s) can accumulate large numbers of useless units.


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