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Spoiler for personal activity stuff and open source experience: Anyway the engine is pretty close to some of the major features I wanted to use, especially dynamic mesh swapping/prop attachment, and that Hyrule overhaul showed you can do magic stuff pretty well. My first goal is to reimplement a bunch of key Mandate[GlestAE] features for Majesty stuff and get a functioning item system and advanced production possibilities. I've always wanted Majesty with deeper Guilds and more city building. Main Topic However the topic of this thread is unit stats. In Mandate I implemented layered "health" stats plus mana and a couple other stats. For my overhaul for pyrogenesis I'd like to advance farther than that. I'd like to set up a vector of highly customizable health stats, ideally you'd be customizing in xml and not js files. You'd have the basic health stat that functions like standard RTS health. Then you'd have an arbitrary number of optional health stats that you could customize. This is a pretty abstract description so I'll try to give a good set of examples. You can set the display name of the stat. So shield. You could use the custom tags + some associated values to set it up like the Protoss shields in Star craft. You could make shields that block specified damage types. So spell shield that blocks all magic but not physical attacks. You could do a shield that blocks all ranged attacks until it is used up. If you were doing a sci fi game you might want to make layered shields. The first layer could regen at 10/s but it is only 50hp. Second shield is 1000 hp but it regens at 1s. Not sure what the lore explanation would be for that but you could do it if you wanted. These shields would ignore non-listed damage types. In theory this would allow you to create an "ethereal" unit by having the base health not list crush/pierce/hack. Might confuse the AI though. In GAE and Mandate units have as many attack skills as you like and in Mandate specifically there is a damage calculation the AI performs to decide what skill to use. So a Wizard has several attacks with different cooldowns and mana costs and damage types and the Hero AI checks what the most ideal wizard skill to use on a particular enemy would be. Mandate also has a "resource-pool" vector that defines energy/stamina/mana w/e else you wanna use. That is a bit more straight forward. Also you can link resource pools to "health/shields/armor" so one unit in Mandate has a mana shield skill. I believe Health, Shields, and Armor can all be defined by a single vector. For sci fi you could use ablative armor that ablates, hehe, like health but it would take more or less damage from like lasers vs kinetic vs gravitic or w/e. Should also be relatively simple to add a +/- so fire damage could heal one kind of shield or something. The human context is irrelevant to the code. "Resources" would also be defined in a single vector with customization options. I am also planning to look at the damage system as well. I would like to add a malady system. DoT damage with like poison or disease magic is the iconic ability for one of the "Guilds". I also plan to give damage types custom options. Skills as well. Like for magic stuff: There is an Arcane spell school. One Arcane ability would allow you to ignore specific health/shield/armor elements in vector. XML would be like <ignore>[name of xml defined health/armor/shield]<ignore>. That way if I added an ability in enchanting called imbue that let a specific H/A/S change the resistance to a damage type it wouldn't conflict. One part of the magic system I implemented in my grand strategy game was attribute transfering. With a vector of H/A/S elements you could apply "bark skin" or something to someone. Instead of a resistance buff it would be a well defined ablative armor type thing. From my experience forking GAE to make Mandate there shouldn't be any difficulty defining the code so that the xml files don't need to be modified in "public". Obviously mods that change js files would be impacted. For upgrades, items in my case, and such you should be able to simply add a "stats" section to the XML which would be loaded then the js code would have a combine() function or something. A primary goal I have is to move a lot of unit/skill/item/structure/upgrade customization from the js files to xml. Just as a convenience factor. This stuff is all functional in my old Glest fork but sadly it is done purely with xml and c++ so I'll have to figure out an implementation for javascript. I'm going to look at changing the mesh/prop code to enable items, the same changes should also allow use by upgrades and promotions, to apply models to prop points dynamically. That is one of the key things I like about pyrogenesis, even with the variant system. I think it would be a big improvement to just employ dynamic changes, though. You'd still probably use variants for some stuff.