So I have made this alternative format concept back in the early days of 1st ed. around Wave 6. I am not going to talk too much about the idea behind it I already have a thread for that below in the main forum that I will link below this paragraph. Instead I want to talk about how I made these Custom formats in the FFG App, and all the workarounds I had to do. Once FFG put Custom formats on their App I'd figured it would help me promote the format. Maybe help was the wrong choice of words. Well anyways here are the different challenges and work arounds I had to do.

So 1st challenge is that my alternative format was a faction mixing format means you chose 2 factions and make a list of that. Problem is that in the Custom format the app is naturally set for players to select only 1 faction. So instead what I did was to make a Custom Format for every possible faction combination and bunch all the different custom formats in my alternative format threads. The Custom Title would tell you what faction combination you were using. It was a little bit easier because not every faction could be combined with each other (this was a deliberate choice upon the theme of my format). However there were quite a few lists that the order of the faction selected made for the same custom format in terms of options but just a change in name. Thankfully FFG put in a Duplicate format to be used for simple revisions.

Another challenge is my format has restrictions on the 2nd faction you chose. The app does not allow you to separate points when building lists. So I put a quick restriction reminder in the title and suggested they start their list building with the secondary format first then finish the list with their first faction choice. I don't really like this because this is putting responsibility on the user instead of setting up the App tools to notify the user when they break the restrictions. However with the tools we have so far this is the best work around available. I made sure to put the rules clearly in the thread so that they could build their own list format with just a point sheet if needed. Which also means I had to simplify my alternative format from its 1st ed. iteration.

The last challenge is that those browsing this on their mobile device instead of a desktop or laptop has been redirected to the Asmode(North America) page. I found this confusing as I had to use my smartphone to recreate this problem when all the work I done on my personal laptop (the computers at work don't access the squad builder). So when making the thread I used the share button on the custom format creation page. Lets just say this share button has a lot of problems. The last 2 letters of the hyperlink ten to go off the screen. It says it has copied to my clipboard but when I paste it wasn't the hyperlink generated. So I had to highlight the entire message box (and get the characters that are off screen). Then after I paste I had to delete the characters that were not part of the hyperlink. Still there is also the problem of mobile devices. So instead of using the share feature I just copied the hyperlink from the address bar and then paste that next to the faction combination name to direct mobile users to the site.

So as you can see there were many issues when making a custom format. I still wish there were a few additional options such as being able to highlight points for a second tracker or maybe even a format that allows you to modify the points and highlight those changes (red is an increase, blue is a decrease). But it still can be a useful tool, even if it is a little cumbersome.