Remember, the game mechanic only involves 3 attack dice.  If your territory minimum was 3 or more, there are not enough dice to make that attack. So perhaps only allowing a territory minimum of 1 or 0 would be okay... (and incredibly helpful - from a designer standpoint)

ratsy wrote:

Remember, the game mechanic only involves 3 attack dice.  If your territory minimum was 3 or more, there are not enough dice to make that attack. So perhaps only allowing a territory minimum of 1 or 0 would be okay... (and incredibly helpful - from a designer standpoint)

Exactly.  Min 2 wouldn't break things, but its uses would be well, ..minimal.  For simplicity's sake, a min 1 checkbox is all you would need.  Because designers can 'toggle' between Abandon ON and OFF, it might be best if the box was present even if Abandon is OFF, even though it would have no functionality at that setting. This is not dissimilar to the way any thing you set-up doesn't work unless "Set-up based" is selected in the "Initial Set-Up" field. 

Obviously a min of 1 in abandon on games would be the most useful, but it would be easy to set it up where any arbitrary minimum would work without "breaking" anything. The most obvious to me is that the minimum would only be applied for factories affecting the territory and when attacking from a territory. For example, lets say you had a min of 5 on each territory. Factories affecting the territories only bring it down to 5 and you can only attack with the number of units -5. So if you had 10 units you could only attack with 5 of them. If you captured another territory then you would move those 5 units into the captured territory, but could not attack from it until it had at least 6 units. Just like a regular game, if you capture a territory with 1 unit you can't keep attack from it until you have at least 2 units. Doesn't sound very useful to me though.

Wouldn't it be easier just to have a new factory type? The whole point is to be able to use factories like abandon is on, but play the rest of the board like abandon is off. How about a special factory type based on the autoneutral that can take a territory to 0 and make it neutral at the same time. I suppose the factory could even just leave the territory at 1 unit, but convert the territory to neutral whenever it tries to take it below 1.

I think the reason (from a very limited xml knowledge) that abandon is a toggle is because it affects the rules that the server processes on.  

So if abandon is "on" it interprets the actions different from if abandon if "off", as opposed to a setting or a tag that lives with the territory description - which is the info the rules are processing. 

Abandon changes the rules, not the information. 

So I don't know if that kind of factory is possible... but maybe...

I would think from a programming standpoint, as well as a usability standpoint, that it should be easier to just allow individual territory min 1's when abandon is on rather then to create new factories to accomplish the same?  That said, I am no programmer.

Currently the Designer makes is such that with Abandon OFF, AutoCapture captures the factory even if the balance is negative, and puts a single unit on the factory (the territory minimum of 1).

I'm almost sure that if a negative or zero balance AutoCapture could be voided/ignored, then used in conjunction with AutoNeutralReset, the problem has a workaround.  A capital will probably be necessary.  My thinking is that if the AutoNeutral factory is named such that it engages before the AutoCapture factory, then the target (off-board) factory will start each turn neutral, which is the intended result, right?  (for our purposes, abandoned territories will be set to revert to neutral.)

If this works, and assuming that there are existing boards that require a zero or negative balance to capture, then either a "1 Min" checkbox would do the trick, or create a AutoCaptureSumCheck factory. I think I like the checkbox because, though I haven't given it any thought,  the feature might be useful for other factory types.

M57 wrote:

..if the AutoNeutral factory is named such that it engages before the AutoCapture factory, then the target (off-board) factory will start each turn neutral, which is the intended result, right?  (for our purposes, abandoned territories will be set to revert to neutral.)..

Hmm.. For this to work, would it require Real-Time Factories?