Sort of dead in the water, I suppose. I don't want to slam anybody, but it would be reassuring to have at least some kind of progress (or lack thereof) report. At least I would then know if I need to feel guilty about not doing any work on the construction tool I started back last Summer :wink:

Howdy, all, and my apologies.  My Real Life job has gone to hell in a handbasket over the last several months (by way of explanation -- this is my boss:  http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwest/ ) and I haven't had the time to devote to the spreadsheet that I'd like to have had.

That being said, I've also found that the Defiance army building system is extremely complex, much more so than I had thought when I first offered to Demian to do this.  I had figured it would be something on the order of Starmada, but the sheer number of options, exceptions, and requirements of army building in Defiance have proved to be daunting.  Compared to this, Dirtside was a cakewalk.  There are some very touchy technical issues that I'm not good enough to solve without changing the flow of information within the worksheet.

The easiest thing would probably be to have a worksheet allowing a user to make a single infantry frame, then another allowing a single weapon frame, and so forth, leaving the user to put their squads together on paper.  I decided not to go there with this thing, since building an actual army -- squads and vehicles -- required making global assumptions about tech levels and whatnot that will effect everything else.  I figured it would be required that all that could be done through a single application, but I might have been wrong.  It gets especially complex when you throw in all the special Augmentations, such as the One-Shot Grenade Launcher that would require buckets of re-calculations to be done to incorporate it.

So I really don't know, now, if I've gone in the right direction with this thing.  I can certainly simplify it, but then I'm sure I'd catch flak from people who want to build their entire army in a single workbook. 

Thoughts?  Suggestions?  I'm open to hearing 'em.

Regarding the customiser: I primarily want just to be able to work out infantry, vehicle and weapon frames. I'd rather the program not try to "help" me with restrictions etc.

It would be nice to be able to organise things so that it automates some operations with the resulting frames, like Demian said; that is, once I've created the weapon and the infantry frame I can quickly tell the program "six of these guys, three of those guns, three of those support weapons, everyone gets a grenade" but for me, the tiresome bit is just statting up all the troopers etc in the first place.

In terms of "help", I'd like it to tell me if I attempt an outright illegal build like an Indirect Fire weapon with too short a range, but mostly I'd just like help with the intitial numbers.

Yeah.. I don't need it to tell me if I am breaking the rules. All I need it to do is figure costs. Heck, make it so I can break the rules. It allows me to take into account house rules and such then.

I need something that will simply speed up the process and reduce the amount of page flipping.

Keep that data cards thing that. That was awsome. I always want my information to look good and be easy to read.