Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

@UncleNate:

Don’t get me wrong–I’m a huge fan of the efforts you have made to provide free tools for A&A style gaming.  I also appreciate all the effort you put into parsing user entries for battles in your new calculator.

I’m just saying, it became like staring at a system prompt, rather than a GUI.  Many people wouldn’t have a clue what to do if they had a system prompt staring them in the face.  Now, is a GUI superior to a system prompt?  Not if you’re trying to add a prefix or suffix to several hundred file names in a given directory!  While it may not be nearly as powerful, a GUI is generally considered friendlier (but some GUIs are actually counter-intuitive and pretty yucky).  You just happened to migrate from a no-questions-asked interface to one where people need to figure out how things work–at first glance, people have no idea how forgiving your input field was–it’s only by playing with it that people discover the speedier entry of attack/defend units.  (I’m still not sure yet how one would have changed the OOL for attack vs defense, since I wasn’t looking to spend time figuring that part out)

Thanks.

Attack vs Defence OOL - the attacking units are killed in the order they are listed, and the defending units are killed in the order they are listed.

There were/are instructions right on the page…

Yeah, the Inf/Art thing is supported by the underlying code - I’ve only made changes to how the actual units are entered. Once entered they are handled the same as before.

Now I feel bad - I really was sleep deprived last night. It’s clear though that the new version needs a little more work yet before I can justify replacing the old one. I think once I add NAs and multiple unit groupings for OOL people will see past the “change” from the familiar.

Also, just adding better documentation ABOVE the form so you can’t help but see it I think will also ease the transition

The thing is, the intent behind it was to make it easier. Here’s how:

You are already typing your battles in to your forum post. This was designed so that you could copy and paste your battle description. Within reason, it accommodates a wide array of formats: with/without spaces, different abbreviations for the same unit types eg. Fig Ftrs Ftr F, uppercase or lower case, and will even ignore extra data stuck in there like (2 from Kwa, 2 from Man.).

So the idea was that you could just type your move in for your forum post, and then copy and paste it into AACalc rather than having to click and enter each unit total separately.

I think it was just too advanced - like showing a cell-phone to a caveman  :wink: . People just don’t see the convenience, or can’t think of a different, easier way that would require them to change their style.

Anyhow, the plan is that I will incorporate multiple unit group OOLs - eg 4 Inf then 2 Art then 2 other Inf then 1 Bom then 3 more Art, or whatever. To do that you will have to enter a total unit listing anyway, so the individual unit boxes become redundant. Once that is in place I’ll probably make the new one the default again.

People will learn. It just takes more typing, less mouse clicking. Not even typing if you copy and paste. And less moving between keyboard and mouse.

Okay, I think I have a plan that should satisfy everyone, including me ;)  :

I will work from the old form. I will add above it a “Quick load” form where you can enter the units you have typed in to your post, or a list of the units you are planning to use. Click submit on that form, and it will add up all the units and populate the regular form.

Then, beneath the individual unit fields, there will be rows where custom OOLs can be entered. These will be blank by default, and if blank a default OOL will be followed, which will be posted somewhere. If however you wish to deviate from the standard OOL, you can enter what units you want killed first, in separate groupings eg 1 inf 1 art then 1 inf. Once those units are used up (if not all are accounted for) the default OOL is followed for any remaining units.

@ncscswitch:

The one issue with the “copy and paste” as being faster…

Some folks still use you as a sim, and thus have not typed a battle to copy and paste in.

Just something to consider…

It seems that people are quite attached to the individual fields, so I will have to leave those it seems.

But Switch, you can type in the units for sim purposes just as easily as you can click on different fields. But whatever - I’ll leave both as an option. And the OOL field will be a separate fields will be separate from the “quick load” field.

Now, allowing these custom OOLs will take some significant reworking of the combat engine, so don’t hold your breath… Fortunately the work I did on the text-based input is also what I needed to do to parse the custom OOL field. So no work has been wasted (which is what makes me happy with the plan.)