Would anyone have the interest and capability to write a custom squad builder for a completely rebalanced version of the game using house rules that I'm developing? I'm not normally a web coder so I can't really be bothered to write the app myself. For the house rules I'm fundamentally changing several things:

1. Points doubled to 200 for better granularity
2. All pilots now get an 'upgrade' stat which determines how much upgrade cards cost (1 = low, 2 = medium, 3 = high)
3. All upgrade cards now have three corresponding costs. For example Veteran Instincts is 1 / 2 / 3.
4. Every upgrade card and pilot card has been changed as a result.
5. I have a few custom upgrade cards that I am adding for balance purposes.
6. I expect to update the rules as time goes on to tweak values and more importantly keep adding / adapting to new FFG content. So I will need to have different revisions of the house rules.

Building the squad builder would not be a trivial effort because it needs to be built from the ground-up with multiple version control.

I am not anywhere near done finishing the House rules yet, but I am documenting everything in a Google doc. The thought was that I may be able to export the relevant sheets as .csv which could then be read in by the squad builder.

I asked @geordan but he's pretty booked, ditto on @sozin

Haven't pinged @voidstate yet.

Thanks.

Ships done (as of August 1) :

Imperials

• TIE Fighter
• TIE Advanced
• TIE Interceptor
• Inquisitor's TIE
• TIE/fo

Rebels

• X-wing
• Rebel Y-wing
• B-wing
• Z-95

Scum

• Scum Y-wing
• Z-95
• IG-2000
• Protectorate

Ships remaining:

• Imperial Firespray
• TIE bomber
• Lambda Shuttle
• TIE Defender
• TIE Phantom
• VT-49
• TIE Punisher
• TIE/sf
• TIE Striker
• Upsilon Shuttle
• TIE Aggressor
• A-wing
• YT-1300
• Rebel HWK-290
• E-wing
• YT-2400
• K-wing
• T-70 X-wing
• VCX-100 Ghost
• Sabine's TIE
• Auzituck Gunship
• Scum HWK-290
• Scum Firespray
• Starviper
• M3-A Scyk
• YV-666
• Kihraxz
• Jumpmaster 5000
• Mist Hunter
• Shadow Caster
• Quadjumper
• Scurrg Bomber

I have no capability of helping, but this would be a homerun if someone would be willing to do it. Would have made my custom card value league much more palatable.

With the sheer number of changes that I will be making, a squad builder will be a necessity to make it easy to use. It would be a pain to have to manually add up all the point costs manually, referencing The Big Table for every pilot and upgrade.

52 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

With the sheer number of changes that I will be making, a squad builder will be a necessity to make it easy to use. It would be a pain to have to manually add up all the point costs manually, referencing The Big Table for every pilot and upgrade.

Ya that's exactly what happened with the league. It was just too tedious to figure out adjusted point values.

I maintain the BattleScribe files for X-Wing. I think all this is doable in BattleScribe. Do you use BattleScribe at all?

FYI - BattleScribe is a free program (desktop or mobile app) for making army lists for war games. The program itself is generic and can be used for any game - users make the various catalogues for different games. Many widely useful catalogues are hosted at battlescribe.appspot.com but it's easy to make and distribute "private" catalogues too.

BattleScribe has its pros and cons - the big pro for me is the mobile app not requiring an internet connection (except to periodically update data) and the local storage of lists (which are easily portable between systems). The cons are a lack of an easy way to browse full card images and the fact that the program, while generic, is clearly developed with a 40k-centric approach (though the developer is responsive about stuff).

Would setting up a set of BattleScribe catalogues for your variant help?

No, I haven't used Battlescribe yet. One of the nice things about YASB and Voidestate is that you can output a url for importing into Vassal Play with auto-squad generation. But Battlescribe would be better than nothing, and might be a start.

I could make it, but seems extremely niche. Lot of work for these house rules that maybe not many people plays. Maybe if this gets really popular or something, since it does sound pretty fun <3!

Wait, are these the balanced Mathwing rules thingy? If so, then I wouldn't mind.

EDIT: If @geordan is busy, think he would mind if I make it from his source code? Can pull request to his thing.

Jumpmasters at +20 points problem solved

9 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

No, I haven't used Battlescribe yet. One of the nice things about YASB and Voidestate is that you can output a url for importing into Vassal Play with auto-squad generation. But Battlescribe would be better than nothing, and might be a start.

If you want to download BattleScibe (at battlescribe.net) and my X-Wing files from battlescribe.appspot.com , you should play around with it for a bit. If that seems like a squad builder you are comfortable with and could see yourself using for this, I can see what it would take to implement your house rules.

Nifty program, but can we get the X-wing plugin to work so that you can output something that vassal can auto-spawn a squad with?

Should be free in August to work on a thing. Kinda wanna see your .CSV thingy format to see what we're dealing with.

For formats, most programs currently work with XWS: https://github.com/elistevens/xws-spec - it's a lovely JSON format, used not only for spawning in Vassal, but also importing and exporting from one squad builder to another (and also Lists Juggler, and Han Shops First, and meta-wing).

54 minutes ago, haslo said:

For formats, most programs currently work with XWS: https://github.com/elistevens/xws-spec - it's a lovely JSON format, used not only for spawning in Vassal, but also importing and exporting from one squad builder to another (and also Lists Juggler, and Han Shops First, and meta-wing).

Converting into that format shouldn't be an issue if he already made it in something else.

2 hours ago, haslo said:

For formats, most programs currently work with XWS: https://github.com/elistevens/xws-spec - it's a lovely JSON format, used not only for spawning in Vassal, but also importing and exporting from one squad builder to another (and also Lists Juggler, and Han Shops First, and meta-wing).

Yeah, any electronic application at this point should be working with the XWS spec IMO, and certainly anything that serves as a squad builder app for these house rules will need to be.

2 hours ago, Chibi-Nya said:

Should be free in August to work on a thing. Kinda wanna see your .CSV thingy format to see what we're dealing with.

Googledocs can output to a standard .csv format, so I have just been entering data like this:

(spoiler alert, X-wings get buffed!)

^^^ That should do just fine. But h

11 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Yeah, any electronic application at this point should be working with the XWS spec IMO, and certainly anything that serves as a squad builder app for these house rules will need to be.

Googledocs can output to a standard .csv format, so I have just been entering data like this:

(spoiler alert, X-wings get buffed!)

Awesome, this should be workable. Step 1 will be to convert it, but should be done first. Let me know when it's ready.

Also, why are there values for 100pt game, just in case someone wants to convert?

BTW, I think the 200pt double cost rule, while not as "pretty", is very important. There's some cards that def should be like 2.5 points.

3 minutes ago, Chibi-Nya said:

Awesome, this should be workable. Step 1 will be to convert it, but should be done first. Let me know when it's ready.

Also, why are there values for 100pt game, just in case someone wants to convert?

BTW, I think the 200pt double cost rule, while not as "pretty", is very important. There's some cards that def should be like 2.5 points.

It'll take a while to balance the entire game, probably another month or two, because I'm doing it in my spare time and I'm going through each and every pilot pretty rigorously. And yes, it's using an unpublished version of Mathwing. It's now sufficient to be used for game balance, unlike the previous public versions I posted about.

The squad builder app should get developed in parallel as much as possible, to avoid adding to the critical path. I can make a copy of the database (GoogleDoc) with only a few ships in it, which are fully populated, just to get the basic plumbing working. Upgrades are actually about done. PM me your email and I can give you view access to the GoogleDoc.

The 100 points column is there strictly for reference. Most of the columns you probably wouldn't need to read in the squad builder app.

Yeah, the 200 points rule is needed for two reasons, actually. One, I can be much more accurate with pricing, and two, it'll be very obvious that these are house rules if someone prints out a squad sheet and brings it to their LGS.

5 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

The squad builder app should get developed in parallel as much as possible, to avoid adding to the critical path. I can make a copy of the database (GoogleDoc) with only a few ships in it, which are fully populated, just to get the basic plumbing working. Upgrades are actually about done. PM me your email and I can give you view access to the GoogleDoc.

You have PMs disabled. But you can give invite me to VIEW on [email protected]

As said, won't be available for about 3 weeks.

When you get to a point where you're ready to talk about these rules, we'd love to have you on the shuttle tydirium podcast - these rules might appeal to a lot of our audience. feel free to hit me or heychadwick up if/when you're ready to talk about this project

Awesome man! I've recosted and house ruled other games and been pretty happy with it. I use them when running games at cons and at home. But none of them have a competitive scene like X-Wing. Are you doing any playtesting?

10 minutes ago, Babaganoosh said:

When you get to a point where you're ready to talk about these rules, we'd love to have you on the shuttle tydirium podcast - these rules might appeal to a lot of our audience. feel free to hit me or heychadwick up if/when you're ready to talk about this project

Whoa, which guy are you? I love that podcast! <3

NVM, Chadwick! My bad.

14 minutes ago, Chibi-Nya said:

You have PMs disabled. But you can give invite me to VIEW on [email protected]

As said, won't be available for about 3 weeks.

Oops! My inbox was full. Fixed. I can send you a rough csv file in the next couple of days (should be fast to do regardless if you'll use it yet or not), then we'll see where I'm at in another 3 weeks.

1 minute ago, Cpt Hellcat said:

Awesome man! I've recosted and house ruled other games and been pretty happy with it. I use them when running games at cons and at home. But none of them have a competitive scene like X-Wing. Are you doing any playtesting?

Not yet, but I would like to before I go full public with them. I can get pretty close to the values that I want using straight up math in conjunction with the last 5 years of empirical data to provide a relative baseline. But playtesting will be very helpful at the last stage before going totally public, because ComboWing is going to be even harder to manage with this version than the stock game -- simply by virtue of more upgrade cards being viable now.

3 minutes ago, Chibi-Nya said:

Whoa, which guy are you? I love that podcast! <3

NVM, Chadwick! My bad.

Cool, thanks for listening!

I'm Phil.

jim is heychadwick on the forums

3 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Not yet, but I would like to before I go full public with them. I can get pretty close to the values that I want using straight up math in conjunction with the last 5 years of empirical data to provide a relative baseline. But playtesting will be very helpful at the last stage before going totally public, because ComboWing is going to be even harder to manage with this version than the stock game -- simply by virtue of more upgrade cards being viable now.

When you're ready, I'd be up for doing some testing. A BG free play night would work good...get to try out lots of different stuff!

17 minutes ago, Cpt Hellcat said:

When you're ready, I'd be up for doing some testing. A BG free play night would work good...get to try out lots of different stuff!

Definitely! Are you on our Thursday night FB page? At a minimum I'll post there once I'm ready to enter beta testing.