Campaign-based games / equipment suggestions

[Rosomack]

Hi all,

first of all, let me introduce myself. I'm an IT student from Poland (doing my master's right now). I'm very interested in your project, as I have been searching for a good, free army builder for as long as I remember .

Right now I'm fiddling around trying to produce something working for Necromunda. The rulebook is free to download.

Here are my issues/suggestions. Sorry if it's been brought up before, but searching for it would probably take ages :

- It would be good if there were means of using campaign-based systems. Army points value would be calculated based on other in-roster values (in case of necromunda, collective experience plus collective equipment cost). Stats would be modifiable (very important here!) during campaign progress. Abilities could be optional (so you could add one after you obtained it in the game, not have it hard-coded in the roster). Injuries would have to be possible (some of them stat-modifying). Keeping injuries in the roster is paramount, as this injury could later be removed by some means.

- Equipment in equipment (sounds silly, but bear with me). Let's assume we have a ganger with a boltgun. Total cost is 50 for the ganger and 35 for the boltgun = 85. Now let's assume the ganger is equipped with a special type of boltgun (so-called one in a million weapon). The cost for the weapon doubles, based on the weapon selected, so the total cost is 50+70 =120.

So basically, instead of copying all available weapon costs and doubling them for one in a million weapons (which is A LOT of unnecessary lines), why not add a piece of equipment that we can attach to said weapon that takes the base weapon cost as an argument and provides access to simple arithmetics (cost x 2 or cost + 5). The same could apply to additional ammunition etc. This is probably no simple task, but I think it's worth it.

- An optional stash. For systems that use it (Mordheim, Necromunda, etc.) it's a drop box for any spare equipment and in-game currency. Also optional would be including the stash in army value calculation. It's easy to simulate using a unit, but dedicated support would remove some problems with that approach.

- Equipment multi-grouping. This, I think, would be useful in a broad spectrum of cases, and probably not too complicated to implement. It would probably drastically improve readability and file size in some cases. Basically I'm thinking about adding an attribute to the equipmentItem tag. Something in the lines of: group="pistol;common;ranged", signalling that this item belongs to these three groups.

So for example if everyone pays the same points for a piece of equipment _and_ equipment is grouped by types (which is the case in Necromunda and Mordheim) we could just put the equipment group in a unit's equipment tag instead of every one item of this type. Example: Juves have access to pistols, so we put one pistol group tag. A special type of ganger has access only to ranged weapons, which include pistols, rifles etc., so we put a ranged group tag in his equipment.

Ok, sorry for that wall of text, but I see many potential improvements here and I wanted to bring some ideas to your attention. I honestly have high hopes for WarFoundry .

[IBBoard]

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestions. A lot of them are planned, and I've thought about campaigns and flexibility for Necro and similar games, but there are a few new bits in there.

* Points values based on other values - that could be quite difficult to do as an absolute points value. What I was more likely to do was have a secondary cost-like value that was calculated as appropriate. From what I remember of Gorkamorka then your gang and equipment were still bought from Teef, but your "rating" was a value based on cost and experience.

* Optional abilities and stats modifiers - yeah, they were planned. I was going to try and get some more basic things in first (like equipment with stat lines for mounts, etc)

* Equipment modifiers - I think that is something we'll need to handle. Even in 40K then there are similarities - things like master crafted weapons, I believe. The trickiest bit there might be the UI to assign what you're adding it to.

* Stash - that sounds like a great thing for turning a one-off army list application into an army manager for a campaign. I'd thought of tracking experience for campaigns, but not "stashes" for equipment. I'm sure there'll be a reasonable way to handle it. Again, though, we'll need the UI to make sure that we can easily say to the user "do you want to buy a new one or use the one from your stash?" when they add a weapon.

* Equipment multi-grouping - we should be able to handle something already, or in the near future if we haven't done it yet. I'd rather the files were a little bigger and we had separate elements for each group, since that extends better and could potentially do referential integrity where necessary, but that's just an implementation detail. Using that as an "allowed equipment list" would be useful as well.

All help is useful, including ideas and promotion of the tool, but if you've got any free time to help document the application or help write the code then it would be very much appreciated

I've been a bit behind recently due to other duties (like fixing up my wife's online store, building her new computer and trying to work out why mine was misbehaving). Hopefully I'll be back to work and making good progress soon

[Rosomack]

* Points values based on other values - that could be quite difficult to do as an absolute points value. What I was more likely to do was have a secondary cost-like value that was calculated as appropriate. From what I remember of Gorkamorka then your gang and equipment were still bought from Teef, but your "rating" was a value based on cost and experience.

You're right on point (pun not intended), my wording was a bit awkward. I think I'm getting close to something working here. I managed to use the standard point calculation system by implementing experience as an item. It should easily calculate the right gang value.

* Optional abilities and stats modifiers - yeah, they were planned. I was going to try and get some more basic things in first (like equipment with stat lines for mounts, etc)

* Equipment modifiers - I think that is something we'll need to handle. Even in 40K then there are similarities - things like master crafted weapons, I believe. The trickiest bit there might be the UI to assign what you're adding it to.

Great!

* Stash - that sounds like a great thing for turning a one-off army list application into an army manager for a campaign. I'd thought of tracking experience for campaigns, but not "stashes" for equipment. I'm sure there'll be a reasonable way to handle it. Again, though, we'll need the UI to make sure that we can easily say to the user "do you want to buy a new one or use the one from your stash?" when they add a weapon.

I did manage to circumvent the current limitations and implemented the stash as a zero-cost unit with zero-cost optional items. Of course, one will have to do everything by hand (including money bookkeeping). As you say, it would be best if it worked automatically, but hey, it's still better than writing all this down on paper. I'll upload my results as soon as I have something good enough. The biggest pain right now are non-optional abilities and no stat modifiers. I'll temporarily add them as items as well, just to make easy bookkeeping possible.

* Equipment multi-grouping - we should be able to handle something already, or in the near future if we haven't done it yet. I'd rather the files were a little bigger and we had separate elements for each group, since that extends better and could potentially do referential integrity where necessary, but that's just an implementation detail. Using that as an "allowed equipment list" would be useful as well.

You mean defining items as usual and then grouping them by their IDs in a separate element?

All help is useful, including ideas and promotion of the tool, but if you've got any free time to help document the application or help write the code then it would be very much appreciated

Another idea to help with campaign games. Probably something you'll want to implement much later. It could help if you could view the current stats, equipment etc. summary (pretty much like roster printing works in the _youknowthename_ program, but viewable in a window). Maybe it would just boil down to printing the current list to pdf and opening it. I realise that printing is not implemented yet, but I suppose you have it planned.

I would happily do something to improve the program (probably coding). I'll have to finish my master's first though. I should be done in a few months. Thanks for the offer, I'll keep it in mind .

[IBBoard]

I look forward to any contributions you can make Unfortunately, I've dropped the ball a little recently, so everything went a bit quiet. There are more ideas than I can handle on my own, but not enough to really catch the interest of lots of people, so I'm stuck in a fight of promoting something that most people won't think is mature enough or making it mature but having to try and do it mainly on my own.

Optional abilities were planned, but I think I stuck with fixed abilities because that was what most units had and because optional abilities could always be treated as "equipment" for now.

Stat line modifiers could be quite hard to do in a cross-system method. Stats are currently just strings, because you can have just about anything as a stat (6, 143, -, 2D6+3, 19' per day, and probably some that are just letters that mean something within that game). That means we can't actually modify the stat, but my plan was to have a row of "modifiers" in the table.

With the equipment grouping then I was thinking of putting one or more types on each equipment item (which should be defined once and referenced from each unit that can have it). There's then a topic that I was going to implement a suggestion from that put the "Add equipment" UI in tabbed groups based on those IDs. Allowing units to be assigned entire categories of equipment wouldn't be backwards compatible with previous versions, but it would simplify army creation and reduce repetition.

The army overview would be a good idea. For now we've got HTML output, which gets it into a format you can view or print as you want. I thought it was more important to add features and get just enough output rather than spend too much time trying to handle printing etc.

Good luck with the Masters!

[Rosomack]

I'm interested because I see the potential in the program. You definitely have good ideas and wish to produce a quality piece of software. That and I'm fed up with AB being the current high-priced monopolist and other free programs being basic to the point where they don't validate even the simplest things like unit size. Like writing on paper, really, with the added benefit of an auto-calculated cost . As for getting more people to contribute, I strongly suggest Google summer of code. You are guaranteed to have volunteers

For the modifiers - based on your examples I have an idea that might alleviate this to some point, correct me if I'm wrong. Implementing a stat as a composite value (numeric value plus a string) could make the trick. Basically you could modify the numeric value if one was present and leave the string alone. Numbers could be placed using a regular expression, so the location would be arbitrary. Any things that don't fit into this scheme could then be put in the modifier line. I think stats work best The '19" per day' could easily become '21" per day' Similarly, if you put a dash inside, there is no numeric value at all, so no modifications could be done, but something could be put into the modifier line. I think readability is key here. Better to have all calculations done for you, so you know everything the instant you look at the roster.

Thanks for the good luck wishes, luck will certainly come in handy

[IBBoard]

GSoC would be great, but that involves mentoring someone and I don't think I'm a) big/prestigious enough or b) have enough time! I'll help out new coders where I can, but GSoC is a commitment for bigger FOSS projects (like the Banshee music player).

I don't want this to turn into a sprawling topic, so I think we need to break any further discussion into new topics. Just as a brief comment, I'd thought about your idea of modifiers on string that looked like units (although I hadn't thought about semi-strings like "19' per day" having the 19 treated as a number ). I'd initially discounted it because of the overhead and the potential for mistakes/not doing what users wanted.

I think GW used to use a separate row in the stat line when they had campaign battles (like Necromunda) so that you could see where the modifier was, and that was the idea I was planning for. If people can come up with use cases and ways of doing other methods then that's fine by me.