Sides and Countries

[Renegade]

I kind of can't quite follow the logic here. Side-specific features are side-specific. Country-specific features are country-specific. Countries are sub-elements of sides. ....the end?

But since sides are planned to be as easily addable as countries and vehicles and whatnot, in the case you actually do need a side feature for a country, simply create a new side.

This is the part I'm having problems with. According to that logic, if I wanted every Allied country to have a country-themed GUI, they would have to stop being Allies, each become their own independent sides of Germany, France, Britain and so on, and then be back-linked to be independent sides that act like another side.

In other words, you go from
"This is the Allied country of France."
"This is the Allied country of Great Britain."
"This is the Allied country of Germany."

To
"This is the independent side of France but it is allied with Great Britain and Germany and behaves like it is part of the Allied side."
"This is the independent side of Great Britain but it is allied with France and Germany and behaves like it is part of the Allied side."
"This is the independent side of Germany but it is allied with Great Britain and France and behaves like it is part of the Allied side."

You turn a simple thing into a complicated mess. You said it yourself:

countries are just a group of instances of a side with slight modifications.

So why not treat them like that? Just add inheritance. Make all side-flags work on countries as well. The side-specific settings are the default, if countries need something else, they can override. If I want the Allied country of France to have a little pink unicorn on its GUI, it makes a lot more sense to simply override the GUI, instead of having to create an entire new side with entirely independent settings for it, and then overriding these independent settings and forcing it to behave like the side it just came from.

If I had 3 sides in my mod with 5 countries each, and wanted each side to have a unique GUI, having it your way, I'd need 15 sides, all backlinked to a master side, while it is actually logical and correct that there are only three sides.
Using an inheritance based system, I would simply have 3 sides with 5 countries each, with custom GUIs.

All in all, I understand that sides have the cooler features, and these are more in demand, but I am not in support of foregoing a simple, logical structure just to get an extra feature or two.

This system would turn a simple game of Allies vs. Soviets into Switzerland 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 vs. Switzerland 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.