BAR modding: missing subtables and weapon damage through tweakunits

Required subtables for tweakdefs

New BAR tweakdefs fail silently if expected subtables are missing from a unit definition. The most common culprits are buildoptions, customparams, weapondefs, and weapons. If you try to write to ud.customparams on a unit that has never set customparams, the write goes nowhere. The fix is to check and create the subtable before writing:

if not ud.customparams then
  ud.customparams = {}
end
ud.customparams.myvalue = "something"

This applies to all nested writes in tweakdefs. Missing subtables are the single biggest cause of silent tweakdef failures.

Weapon damage via tweakunits

Modifying weapon damage on existing units is cleaner through tweakunits than tweakdefs. The pattern targets specific weapon names inside the weapondefs subtable:

{
  corcrwh = {
    weapondefs = {
      krowlaserh = { damage = { default = 90 } },
      dragonmawh = { damage = { default = 6, subs = 3 } },
      dragon_missileh = { damage = { vtol = 76 } },
    },
  },
}

Damage takes different keys for different target types — default is the base damage, while keys like subs and vtol override damage for specific unit categories. Set both the base and category-specific values if you want consistent behavior.

Bulk unit addition via table loops

Adding the same build options across multiple commanders or builders uses a simple loop:

local t1ConList = {"armck","armcv","armbeaver","armca","armcs",
                    "corck","corcv","cormuskrat","corca","corcs",
                    "legck","legcv","legaceb","legca","legcs"}
for i, conName in ipairs(t1ConList) do
  table.insert(UnitDefs.armcom.buildoptions, conName)
end

This pattern scales cleanly — just add unit names to the list. All T1 constructors across all three factions get added to the commander build menu in one pass. Test with and without Legion active, as some unit names change under certain mod configurations.

Encoding for lobby sharing

Once your tweak works locally, encode it for lobby sharing. Paste the Lua table into a base64 encoder, set URL encoding mode, and remove any trailing equals signs from the output. The trailing equals sign breaks decode on the receiving end. This is a consistent failure point — always check the encoded string before sharing.

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