Feature Suggestion: Battleforce Selector/Force Organization Viewer

[Rixnor]

Longtime Army Builder user, love the software.

One of my favorite ways to use Army Builder is to document my entire army. I like to add customized fluff notes, change the names, all sorts of stuff like that (I'm excited to add photos of the units). Once I have my armies in all of their glory, I then get to the task of whittling the army down to playable lists. This is where I believe that some sort of battleforce selector option would be great.

The general idea is that you can select a unit and declare this is in a list, or another and say this is out. You can build up your army see how many points are left over (or more often how many you need to find), and start optimizing. Things like: "I like my terminators, but what if I drop them and add two scout units...", this is where I spend most of my time tweeking. In order to do this currently I take my large list, and start deleting units. This is cumbersome when I need to add back a unit, as I need to create it from scratch or reload my full list and start over.

The simple version of this would be a check box option next to each unit to include in the list or not. Taken to a higher level you could have multiple lists within the same basic army, and associate each unit in different lists. You could then filter and have printouts of specific lists.

Now the next higher level feature could be a force organization viewer. Using this you would be able to view your units as boxes in a hierarchal pattern. I imagine a input where you could drag the unit boxes to the "in-list" area. Then you could see what is in your list and what is out in one picture. If you got really fancy you could even the ability to parent-child units together, so your commander could have these troop units attached, but your librarian has these units.

Anyway, just some thoughts, thanks for your time.

Rix

[Mathias]

Have you seen the "Save Unit" option in the unit menu? That would allow you to set up various squads in the configurations you like and then load the ones you want to use.

[Rixnor]

I have, and your right its an improvement over starting from scratch. But, it still is very cumbersome managing 10-15 squad files and going into the "load file" UI. My real goal is to be able to manage my whole army from one file, and to quickly swap in and swap out for list building.

Rix

[Mr_Rose]

According to Colen's response to me in this thread LWD do plan to have saved units more fully integrated into the UI in future.
Would that be the sort of functionality you'd be looking for?

[Rixnor]

Short answer probably not. To be fair I am just making a suggestion to software I already love, so please don't take this as some sort of rant post. But, incorporating saved units would probably be a lot more cumbersome than incorporating a checkbox feature to just grey out a chosen unit and exclude it from force organization/points calculations.

Don't get me wrong, I will probably like saved units more with an update, and will probably use them. I just got a vision in my mind

Rix

[Colen]

Your idea ties in with one of the plans I've had kicking around for AB for the last few years; basically, instead of something being deleted when you delete it, it'd just be "sidelined". You could then view the "Sidelines" just like you could see the regular roster, and move units back and forth between them. That way you could add or remove complex units with a single click, and not worry about "What if I want to put it back later?"

It's not something we can get into 3.3, but it's definitely something I want to add to a future release.

Thanks for your feedback!

[Rixnor]

Perfect!