Thanks for the additional information, YG. I’m beginning to think that whatever these units end up being called, their names are in a sense the least important thing about them. To echo what LHoffman said (“remembering a couple minor changes here are quite insignificant compared to the vast swath of information needed to play G40… which we are assuming has already been memorized”), in practical terms, what matters during game play is for players to know and remember:
- What they look like (shape and colour)
- What their production number is (10, 5, 3)
- The various rules that apply to their purchasability, upgradeability, damage-resistance, etc.
Players need to keep all these details straight in their minds to use the units properly, and changing any of these things would affect how the units function. Their names, however, have no effect on anything. It would make no difference if you called them 10s/5s/3s, blues/reds/greens, Class-A/Class-B/Class-C factories, or any of the other nomenclatures that have been discussed here. The names are labels, not performance specifications, so in principle anything would do. Their sole purpose is to help the players mentally categorize them, and it would therefore be advantageous to have a nomenclature system that’s as straightforward and unambiguous as possible.
I’m not going to frame the following as a recommendation, because I’d be very surprised if you liked the idea, so I’ll just frame it as an abstract argument. I’d argue that the most unambiguous approach would be to completely scrap the terms “major” “minor” and “industrial complex” because they replicate words that have very specific meanings in the official A&A rules; thus, any use of them is likely to create confusion in your house rules. You pointed out that it would be a confusing deviation from the original rules to keep the name Minor Industrial Complex and give it a new output value of 5 rather than 3. Fair enough…but I’d argue that it’s just as much of a confusing deviation from the original rules to have a unit retain its output value of 5 but to rename it a Major Factory rather than a Major Industrial Complex, and to have Industrial Complexes take on a new meaning separate from the original major/minor dichotomy. (After all, when players use house rules, they know that they’re using rules which, by definition, deviate from the official ones, so it should come as no surprise to them to run into units whose numbers or values have been changed from their by-the-rulebook origins.) So I think the possible issue here is that the OOB terminology is being retained but partially re-wired and redefined, rather that either being kept completely intact (in which case they wouldn’t be a house rule) or being replaced with an entirely new and unambiguous nomenclature that breaks cleanly with the OOB wording.
