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Completion

By default, newly created units are complete and ready-to-use. This is rarely a good idea in a game design, since even 1 acp-per-turn creators can then create another brand-new unit on each turn. If you're going to allow that, then you should include something else to keep players from being swamped by overpopulation. You can set high accident or attrition rates, make creation require scarce materials, or make the creators be scarce.

The best way to slow down unit creation is to create incomplete units and then require build actions to finish them. Completeness is defined in terms of completeness points (cp) that you can set for each type. A build action then just adds to completeness points. Incomplete units do in fact exist as units, so for instance they can be captured and completed by another side.

As with creation, you have to set acp-to-build to 1 or more just to enable build actions.

In order to regulate the rate of completion, you have to set the cp-max of the unit types being constructed, which defines the point at which the unit will be complete, and then fill in cp-on-creation and cp-per-build. The most straightforward approach is to set cp-max to be the number of turns you want to have between each unit being constructed, then let cp-on-creation and cp-per-build both be 1.

You can set build-range so that several units can cooperate to accelerate construction of a unit. There are no maximum rate limits set on this, but it's unlikely that players will ever be able to achieve much acceleration, because of the limit on the distance between the builder and the unit. For instance, the default range of 0 implies that multiple builders of a unit have to be in the same cell, which may in turn be constrained by stacking limits.

As with creation, you can also set values in material-to-build and consumption-per-build to govern material requirements and usage.

You can also allow units to complete themselves. For instance, large ships often use part of their soon-to-be crew to help finish the last stages of fitting out. You set this up via cp-to-self-build and cp-per-self-build. Since incomplete units are incapable of doing any actions, this is a totally automatic process that happens at the beginning of each turn. Self-building and normal building can proceed simultaneously, so you can use this to accelerate the final stages of construction.

Finally, newly completed units can have materials created for them, as defined by supply-on-creation.


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