OO.. I wish I had though of this before I made the Go boards!

On the Designer>Continents page, when defining a continent/factory, a Combinations dropdown becomes available. 

The dropdown produces a list from zero to the # of territories in the continent.  ..or 0-ALL.  Default is ALL.

Examples of Uses..

• Instead of games having to solely use the territory bonus section of the player to define end-game parameters (like in Go), the designer selects the requisite territories (in this case the 121 or 81 squares on the board), and then choose the number necessary for victory from the dropdown (61 and 41 respectively).  This bonus could be applied to a "victory" factory and could free up the standard bonus section of the player for other uses.
• Instead of having to create multiple continents that create redundant factories (like the the four factories necessary to make each square of Go subject to capture), the designer simply selects all related capture territorys and then chooses the number needed for capture from the dropdown (in this case 3 ..for every 4 territories selected).
• Set to 0, a designer could create a group of territories that allocate armies (- or +) to areas of the board (or to players' bonus allocation) only if they don't own any part of the that continent.  (I'm pretty sure some designer will jump on this one).
• Designers could create ramped bonus structures for continents where partial ownership of continent gives players a piece of the continental bonus.  (once again, either as a Factory or as a Standard bonus).
• Designers could create continents where every player has to hold at least a piece of it to stay alive.

I don't think this would be too difficult to implement (it's just one dropdown in the player, and sussing combinations is a easy job for a computer, right?). It has a lot of currently needed as well as theoretical uses, and it will potentially save designers who manually enter factories a LOT of time.

Does it make sense for players?

Yertle wrote:

Does it make sense for players?

That's a loaded question.  I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Do factories make sense the way Ed N. manipulates them?  Heck, I don't even understand how he uses them.  I guess the answer is, like any other mod ..it all depends on what the designer chooses to do with the tool.  

In the sense that it can save the designer from having to create potentially billions of factories, it is entirely invisible to the players and doesn't change any existing aspect of game-play.  E.g. I would have to create over 2.1 x 10^23 factories with the existing designer tools to make the 11x11 Go game victory conditions factory driven and not continent driven. 

Summarizing the above; if the options are from 1 --> n, then it makes no impact on game-play.

With the 0 option is included, then it is potentially a game changer.  It is up to the designer to use the feature in a manner that "makes sense for players".