Got my Fleet Book and some issues with it

[H]

No clear reason for the change!? Repeating an error because it's always been wrong? Sorry, Triggy, I don't buy it. What is the order in the book now? When I'm reading the ships trying to visualize what they'll do by the numbers I'm irked to hunt for arc coverage. When I write the ships up for play, it's equally infuriating. It's too late now, and luckily the fans who make gaming aids to fill in where Mongoose dropped the ball will instinctively correct this mistake. I just have to wait for the cavalry. Still, for me, the fleet book isn't as useful as is should be because of this.

It was hardly what people were most concerned about. yes sure, I agree that personally, i'd like my firing arcs seperated, but i'd like my ships listed in priority order too, but enough people either don't want that, or couldn't give a rats arse that it wasn't a priority, what was, was removing blatantly broken ships, moving some ships around so they got chosen more, trimming much of the chaff, and consolidating all the changes of the previous few years.

 

[Burger]

luckily the fans who make gaming aids to fill in where Mongoose dropped the ball will instinctively correct this mistake.

There's nothing instinctive about it, it was "corrected" by my fantastic ASP code sorting the weapons by arc. Sorting them by range within each arc was done by sweat and toil (oh alright copy and paste )

 

[animus]

Okay, I agree that the priority was fixing the lists on the whole. However, what I'm surprised wasn't done was the simple formatting corrections to make the books more usable - priority level listings and firing arcs my two biggies.

I do VERY MUCH appreciate your work Burger, Thanks a bunch. You save us all hours of work and are the kind of glue that keeps gaming together.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

They're listed by type rather than arc, right? So the Primus has its lasers listed, then ion cannons. Within weapon types they're listed by arcs, if memory serves. Hardly mind-bending stuff, I can cope with it fine.

 

[Obsidian]

It's that against my explicit recommendations on this very forum, Mongoose didn't list the weapons for each ship in arc order!

I've been after them about that since the first printing. The ordering system for the weapons is totaly chaotic and near useless during an actual game. Some debate ranges vs. arc and I can see that under some circumstances but for the vast majority of the time I start by determining the arc and then the range.

I'd really love to know how they put that information into the PDFs that they print. Does it come from a database? an excel spreadsheet? do they manage it directly within the PDF itself? It should be possible in all of these solutions to put something together that automatically sorts the data for you so that it comes out in something that makes more sense at printing time, but they don't seem to be able to do it.

priority level listings

Now on that one I have to side with Mongoose. Putting the book in alphabetical order makes it much easier to find a ship than if it were by priority level. Imagine opening the book and trying to find a variant for the Hyperion. The only reason that form of listing works for the various player aids out there is because you can look at the list and click directly to the ship. Can't do that in a physical book so you resort to flipping pages back and forth trying to find the information. Might be nice if the Fleet listings at the front of each section listed the page number of the ship (i.e. Omega Destroyer (pg. 42) ) so you could tell exactly where to go, but that would probably clutter things far too much and be a nightmare to maintain.

*shrug* I've yet to pick up any of the new books, so I can only talk about them in terms of what I have seen here. Looks like there have been some interesting changes and it would be nice to put them into the combat sim. Simply a question of time, money and motivation. Of course if ever anyone wants to pick up the torch, the source code is out there for anyone to take and update at their leisure.