Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Army Builder Custom Output

   I like Army Builder, I really do - but I quite often find myself either not needing all of the output it can provide, or wanting to paste an army list up on a forum for comments.  Take tournaments for instance.  Most tournament players will know that garden variety Space Marines have And They Shall Know No Fear, Combat Squads and wear Power Armor.  Army Builder provides excellent output detailing every little fact about each unit in my army - the problem I have with that is redundancy and the fact I have to carefully read each entry (especially in the case of squad leaders) to see their wargear.  Nothing against reading, mind you.  Pictures are worth a thousand words, so take this basic Army Builder output:


And compare that picture with this one:


Both are for the same units - two assault squads (one in a Rhino) and one Stormraven.  I've omitted the point costs because I don't want to get sued.  In my output I get the unit stats, and stuff I bought for the unit.  Note that looking at the bottom picture I know right off the bat that both Sergeants have Power Fists.  I can learn that same information looking at the top picture, but it will take a little longer.

    I also brought up posting army lists to forums for comments.  Forums are places where unit point costs should not be posted.  They also support BBCode.  That being the case, I created another custom output that displays units and their upgrades without point costs in BBCode.  Here are the same three units from before:

[b] Troops: Assault Squad (10) [/b]
Chainsword x 7, Bolt Pistol x 7
Meltagun
Chainsword, Meltagun
Meltagun
Chainsword, Meltagun
Sergeant
Bolt Pistol, Power Fist x 1
Rhino
Dozer Blade, Storm Bolter

[b] Troops: Assault Squad (10) [/b]
Bolt Pistol x 7, Chainsword x 7
Meltagun
Chainsword, Meltagun
Meltagun
Chainsword, Meltagun
Sergeant
Bolt Pistol, Power Fist x 1

[b] Heavy Support: Stormraven Gunship [/b]
Searchlight, 4x Bloodstrike Missiles, Twin-Linked Multi-melta, Twin-Linked Lascannon

Granted, it's not as nice looking as the pictures but you can post it on a forum pretty easily and have your squads appear in bold font.  BBCode does not preserve white space (i.e. spaces and tabs in front of text) so my nice indents are gone.  I'm still working on this custom output, I just wanted to provide an example of what is possible. 

   The built-in help inside Army Builder provides excellent information on creating custom output.  I'm more than willing to provide my custom outputs to anyone who may be interested. 

4 comments:

  1. i just found your post i would be interested in your custom output files for AB.

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    Replies
    1. I put them up on Google docs, let me know if you get them: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4kV9Mt67WjUMDNkMGFkNjktOWE4Yy00MWRmLTgzNjYtM2QyMjdhNjNmM2Nl
      https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4kV9Mt67WjUYWNlMWQ4YWYtMzQ3Yy00YTY3LWJkNmYtOTY4MDg2ZWYxNTEy
      There should be two separate files. Note that I have not updated those since August, and there have been a couple of AB updates since then so things may not show up exactly right.

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