If you mean the way I showed you now, well, it's a work-around so it's bound not to be all that great. But it works, and that does count for something. And if you mean the "other" solution, then it's actually rather elegant, but before I test the values and the exact order I can't give you a guarantee that it will work; the one thing that I know for sure is that after testing it will work, though, and it will only use one skill and trigger what you want with either a one-turn delay (which doesn't mean all that much, balance-wise, because you can plan around it) or a zero-turn one (depending on how well it goes when I test it; I'm not sure if it's this one or the other one). More like, there are two kinds of mana drains/gains. A simple numeric one, and a percentage-based one. But only the first one can be used as a requirement (for the "drain x mana or the skill won't work" thing), and the other just drains a given percentage of mana as one of the called effects (the numeric drain can also be called as an effect, though) but it can bring you into negative mana instead of just stopping at zero. A "drain all but one mana" effect would consist of two effects, the first one being "drain 100% of mana" (which will bring you to 0 mana only if your mana bar is full, and otherwise will leave you with negative mana) and the second one being a "give 1 mana" effect (which will bring you to 1 mana you'd need for the activation check, but only if your mana was not negative). Yes. Just have the skill trigger itself with some sort of requirement or at a lower than 100% chance (if it keeps on triggering itself without a chance to stop, the whole thing will explode in your face); alternatively, have it trigger something else with the same constrictions.
Heheh I haven't coded in over 20 years, but I haven't forgotten the rule of infinite loops Thanks for all the info, I will play with the ideas some more in the next couple days, and probably pop back in here to ask more silly questions about different stuff.
