15 — Allow Win

Marks a trigger's tag as one that holds its house's victory back in a campaign.

Editor data

Numeric ID: 15
Engine ID: TACTION_ALLOWWIN
Editor name: Allow Win
Need token: NEED_NONE
Parameters: None
Attachment: none

INI example

[Actions]
<TriggerID>=1,15,0,0,0,0,0,0,

A marker rather than an action

A blockage is a count held on each house, and this action is how a scenario adds to it. As the scenario is read, every tag whose triggers include the action adds one to the count of the house that owns the tag’s first trigger. The action has no handler of its own, so springing the trigger does nothing; only the count matters.

A house is actually given the win when all of:

It is flagged to win.
Its borrowed time has run out.
Any of:
- The session is a skirmish or a multiplayer game.
- Its blockage count is zero or below.

The test runs every frame, so a house flagged to win while a blockage stands does not lose the flag; it simply waits.

The count is not added to and taken from the same way. The addition takes the position of the trigger’s country in the rules and uses it as a position in the scenario’s own house list, with no range test; the subtraction searches that list for the house whose country matches. The two agree where a scenario’s houses were created in country order, which is the campaign case, and they need not agree in a scenario whose houses were each chosen separately.

What brings the count back down

The count comes down in one place only: the disposal of an allow-win tag. It is the tag’s own link to its triggers that supplies the house to credit, so a tag whose link is already empty by the time it is disposed of goes without the count being touched.

Springing empties that link. A trigger that fires on a tag whose lifetime dies on firing is queued for disposal ahead of the tag itself, and disposing of it moves the tag’s link on to the next trigger in the chain. A tag carrying a single trigger — the ordinary shape — has no next trigger, so it reaches its own disposal with an empty link and the count stands where it was.

A tag carrying a chain of linked triggers is the one springing case that can still release the count, and only if at least one trigger of the chain outlives the tag. The house credited is then the one that owns the trigger left at the head of the chain, which need not be the house the count was charged to.

A persistent tag is never disposed of by springing at all, so its count stands for the plainer reason that firing leaves the tag exactly where it was.

Every disposal that reaches the count also sets the credited house’s borrowed time to four seconds, whether or not the count had anything left to give back, replacing whatever the countdown held. At the default SavourDelay of a little under two seconds that lengthens the wait rather than shortening it, so a fate decided inside those four seconds waits for them.

Destroying the tag instead

Destroy Tag is the disposal that does clear the count. It removes every tag of the type it names on the spot rather than queuing it, and the triggers are still hanging off the tag when it goes, so the link that supplies the house is intact and the count comes down whatever the tag’s lifetime and however many triggers it carried. The exception is a tag whose triggers Destroy Trigger has already taken away, which leaves the same empty link that springing does.

It has to get there first, though. The action names a tag by type and works through the tags currently in the scenario, and a tag already disposed of by springing is not among them, so nothing is left to credit the count back to.

Caveats

Springing the trigger runs nothing at all. The hold is counted before the first frame, from the action's presence in a tag's trigger list.
The count is per tag rather than per trigger or per action. Two triggers hanging off one tag, or a single trigger listing the action twice, add one blockage between them and not two.
The hold is charged to the house that owns the tag's first trigger, whichever of the tag's triggers carries the action.
A tag carrying one trigger, which is the ordinary shape, does not give its blockage back when springing disposes of it, and nothing can give it back afterward because the tag is gone.
Only a campaign or standalone mission consults the count. A skirmish or multiplayer session ignores it entirely.