Default army size?

[IBBoard]

Just a quick question for the community as a whole:

What's a sensible size for a default army?

The Windows version of the app uses 2000pts, but the GTK/Linux version uses 1000pts. I'm a bit out of touch with normal gaming, but 2000pts is a "big battle" to me and 1000pts is a "quick battle". Is that about right, and which do people think are played more?

[snowblizz]

Depends on the system!

WHFB its 2000 - 2250 as the most common tournament and home game sizes.
40k its 1500-1750 as the most common standard size.

While Battlefleet Gothic a large game starts at 1000 and 1500 is laready an all-nighter. From what I recall anyway.
Mordheim uses a common point of 500 "gold crowns" as the starting size of a new warband.

Would this be a default for all systems or could it be different for each? In fact something better would most likely to just remember the last size you used. Maybe a quick menu with the 3 most recently used ones? Just a suggestion.

Now that I think of it, as I switch between system often 40k/whfb I'm often forced to change the "default" value.

BTW how would that impact on system that use a vastly different way of calculating points?

[IBBoard]

I did wonder whether a "per-system" default might be best. It shouldn't be too hard to work, and maybe drop back to a default of 1000pts.

Mordheim should also be workable, although it'll be mis-named as "pts" for now. Given that it should be translatable as well (because "gold crowns" won't be the same in German) we might need to work something out for making system-based cost names and making them translatable.

In terms of other systems with vastly different ways of calculating points, was there anything particular you had in mind? I know about the GW games in general, and even the more unusual ones like Mordheim and Gorkamorka still had some concept of "point-like things". The Starship Troopers game I looked at (from Mongoose Publishing?) worked on a points system that was quite similar to WH as well.

Tickets 97, 98, 99 and 100 are now in the system. Feel free to add more

[snowblizz]

"Vastly different" should probably be read as "snowblizz has no idea what he's talking about and is making unsubstantiated guesses"
But since AB uses points at least all the dozens of gamesystem incorporated there should be compatible with a "points" regime of some kind.

I did not have anything specific in mind a least consciously just expecting there to be something, somewhere which breaks the norm (a drawback of being "scientific", one tends to cloak everything in vagueness and make allowances for being proved wrong).

As you say most game systems deal with "points" of somekind, they may not call them such but that's a secondary concern indeed.

BTW, just struck me, it will be possible to change the size of the roster after you start working on it and when you modify an existing roster I hope.

[IBBoard]

That's fine - I know the "be hand-wavy" stuff as well. No point in saying "that'll never happen" when you don't know if it will or not

Roster sizes will be changeable, but they aren't at the moment. I'll add a ticket for that to make sure we don't forget.

It's a bit of a separate topic, but the one thing I did think is variable costs and experience. I'll start up another topic about experience in armies, but did Mordheim increase the cost of models with experience? Maybe that's a situation we have to take account of (once we've got experience included): units whose cost is based on per-model cost, base unit costs, equipment costs and some "added value" for experience.