Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Trasvi wrote:
It's not *that* difficult to create an army builder software. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

No, it's keeping it updated and working correctly that's the hard part.

Most likely reason they don't have one is that they haven't figured out how to make money off of it yet.

Bookwrack wrote:

Trasvi wrote:
It's not *that* difficult to create an army builder software. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

No, it's keeping it updated and working correctly that's the hard part.

I know GW struggles with rules consistency, but this part also isn't hard. Battlescribe runs off a handful of after hours volunteers: you just need to make it one person's job one day a week and you'd be amazed how much gets done.

(In an ideal world, the army builder would come FIRST, and the codex datasheets would be generated from the builder, allowing gw to have a central repo they can modify to affect every publication and generate Chapter Approved without errors... but that would be difficult)

flandarz wrote:Most likely reason they don't have one is that they haven't figured out how to make money off of it yet.

This.

Trasvi wrote:

Bookwrack wrote:

Trasvi wrote:
It's not *that* difficult to create an army builder software. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

No, it's keeping it updated and working correctly that's the hard part.

I know GW struggles with rules consistency, but this part also isn't hard. Battlescribe runs off a handful of after hours volunteers: you just need to make it one person's job one day a week and you'd be amazed how much gets done.

(In an ideal world, the army builder would come FIRST, and the codex datasheets would be generated from the builder, allowing gw to have a central repo they can modify to affect every publication and generate Chapter Approved without errors... but that would be difficult)

flandarz wrote:Most likely reason they don't have one is that they haven't figured out how to make money off of it yet.

This.

I dunno man, I've made quick and dirty battlescribe rosters in the past. You want anything besides the basic "5 dudes for x points, up to 10 dudes for Y points" and I hope you're ready for a lot of trial and error, fixing accidental conflicting options, and ensuring only legal options can be taken. That last one is key, it is so incredibly easy to make units with illegal loadouts unless you're very careful. Fire up the roster editor sometime and look at how much work went into the current 40k 8th edition roster files. That wasn't something a guy banged out in a few hours, that took a ton of work.

Also remember, this is GW were talking about. They've had mistakes in books so bad they had to FAQ the book before it even came out (trust me, my local SW players still rant about it and I don't blame them ) you really expect them to do better with a roster builder that has to handle multiple detachments, specialist detachments, factions, codexes, and almost constant FAQ's and errata? Even the very talented guys working the battlescribe rosters now have trouble with that. You can tell when you read the unit stats and abilities, lots of them have tiny errors that can radically change how a unit plays. And they're actively trying to get it right on the first try. It's not something you just have one guy do once a week as a side job. Not if you want to build something worth money and want it to be done even remotely soon. Think about it, how many codexes are in the game? FW units? How about weird characters that only come in box sets or were limited edition. How about rules that came in a white dwarf like the Inquisition? You'd need a team of several people just to make sure you didn't miss any units, let alone get the thing running. And if you want all the rules in now you've dramatically lengthened the design process.

I wouldn't trust a GW run roster builder farther than I can throw it, just like I don't trust people who only use battlescribe to make lists at the moment. Which is frustrating because with the pace of books and errata about the only way to be certain someone is using a unit correctly is to have the codex and the errata/FAQ out at the same time.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:

Trasvi wrote:

Bookwrack wrote:

Trasvi wrote:
It's not *that* difficult to create an army builder software. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

No, it's keeping it updated and working correctly that's the hard part.

I know GW struggles with rules consistency, but this part also isn't hard. Battlescribe runs off a handful of after hours volunteers: you just need to make it one person's job one day a week and you'd be amazed how much gets done.

(In an ideal world, the army builder would come FIRST, and the codex datasheets would be generated from the builder, allowing gw to have a central repo they can modify to affect every publication and generate Chapter Approved without errors... but that would be difficult)

flandarz wrote:Most likely reason they don't have one is that they haven't figured out how to make money off of it yet.

This.

I dunno man, I've made quick and dirty battlescribe rosters in the past. You want anything besides the basic "5 dudes for x points, up to 10 dudes for Y points" and I hope you're ready for a lot of trial and error, fixing accidental conflicting options, and ensuring only legal options can be taken. That last one is key, it is so incredibly easy to make units with illegal loadouts unless you're very careful. Fire up the roster editor sometime and look at how much work went into the current 40k 8th edition roster files. That wasn't something a guy banged out in a few hours, that took a ton of work.

I'm acutely aware how much work goes in to it... I'm a software developer and I was actually writing an army building app years ago but battlescribe beat me to market :( .I contribute to battlescribe data sets and I wrote datafiles for Army Builder when that was still a thing.
Writing an app purely for GW games would actually make things a lot simpler. Eg when I was writing my version, I had to contend with a lot of different game system structures. Some game systems have multiple different kind of points! Some use percentages, different time periods, much different ways of working out what can go in to which army, units which change size in increments of more than 1... GW could streamline that all to work just for their own system.
Once the appplication itself is built, I imagine that getting the data from the app to the codex would be less effort than eg translating to a different language, or formatting the book for iTunes delivery, or any of these other things that they already do.

Also remember, this is GW were talking about. They've had mistakes in books so bad they had to FAQ the book before it even came out (trust me, my local SW players still rant about it and I don't blame them ) you really expect them to do better with a roster builder that has to handle multiple detachments, specialist detachments, factions, codexes, and almost constant FAQ's and errata? Even the very talented guys working the battlescribe rosters now have trouble with that. You can tell when you read the unit stats and abilities, lots of them have tiny errors that can radically change how a unit plays. And they're actively trying to get it right on the first try. It's not something you just have one guy do once a week as a side job. Not if you want to build something worth money and want it to be done even remotely soon. Think about it, how many codexes are in the game? FW units? How about weird characters that only come in box sets or were limited edition. How about rules that came in a white dwarf like the Inquisition? You'd need a team of several people just to make sure you didn't miss any units, let alone get the thing running. And if you want all the rules in now you've dramatically lengthened the design process.

The development of the application itself, yes its expensive and requires a team and a few months or a year. Maintaining datafiles after that is comparatively simple and could be done by the FAQ team or whatever. Its a few hours of work every so often, but if you can pay someone its pretty easy. The issues around rules text or whatever should be trivial to solve because GW has access to the master text somewhere and you can just copy/paste it in.

My point is that for a company with a market cap of 2 BILLION GBP, it's an easily surmountable problem. As evidenced by the fact that battlescribe and all its data are maintained by *volunteers*.

I wouldn't trust a GW run roster builder farther than I can throw it, just like I don't trust people who only use battlescribe to make lists at the moment.

I kind of find this funny because battlescribe never put neophytes at 55 points per model like GW did. Honestly I trust it more than GW publications these days.

Which is frustrating because with the pace of books and errata about the only way to be certain someone is using a unit correctly is to have the codex and the errata/FAQ out at the same time.

That's kind of another whole conversation. Ideally GW would write perfect rules that don't need errata. Their current solution however is leagues better than their attitude of 6th/7th/8th edition where no updates came ever.

The point around GW can't make an army builder app that keeps up with its own rules releases is amusing. Of course it can. Indeed the easiest way is to make its army updates come from the app first and be constrained by that when writing their extra bits.

And as perhaps I should have made clear at the start, the army builder is only a hook to get people to surrender information.

So it comes down to is GW the kind of company that can use said information? They have experimented a bit with apps, clearly an aborted internal initiative by some exec or team, and they didn't catch on which would have dimmed their desire to try again.

So it comes to culture - can GW become the type of company that can efficiently exploit customer data and therefore put the resources into gathering it?

It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

You should be taking your books with you, because Battlescribe is trash.

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

Some of the design in this game is rather awful and half the use of a good army builder is getting information in one place.
Often not stats or weapons, but special rules that have unique wording all over the place.
Or in some cases a tick menu all in one spot.

You can also make one fast, I can do a couple of kill teams in a few mins, throwing units and such down and see points as it goes. Take things off just as fast.
It’s fairly easy to see the use to players

Not using the GW for a lot of reasons, was it any good ?

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

That's your problem for supporting a game requiring 12 books to play

 ValentineGames wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

That's your problem for supporting a game requiring 12 books to play

"If you don't like the rules, vote with your wallet!"

"Fine, I'll vote with my wallet by not purchasing the rulebook, and any slight errors that occur by using this third party app won't matter that much to me."

"no, not like that!"

 ValentineGames wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

That's your problem for supporting a game requiring 12 books to play

So your problem is people don't use calculators, or people don't carry around all the books for whenever they feel like making a list, or people play 40k?

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

I use battlescribe. Why? It is handy, I don't take my bookS everywhere. And I don't need multiple books, just an app.

That's your problem for supporting a game requiring 12 books to play

So your problem is people don't use calculators, or people don't carry around all the books for whenever they feel like making a list, or people play 40k?

None of the above. But you limit me by only giving 3 choices to pick.

 Blood Hawk wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I get the books point - yet battlescribe exists. And physical retail operations love to have loyalty cards or other programmes to better understand their customers, so if anything their model encourages such a product.

Yea the popularity of battlescribe shows their is a market for it. I would love an app from GW myself but they seem still to have the old retail mindset.

Not necessarily. The popularity just shows the cultural obsession with 'labor saving' apps and cutting corners.
The high tech phone toys dont do anything you can't do yourself, it's just easier to let someone else do it.

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

The GW army builder vanished because it was about 5 years too late to market, buggy, less features than its competitors AND was a blatant cash grab (sellling the app in 2 halves in an attempt to eek out a few more dollars).

To be honest I don't think that people DO want an offical app. Even though that would be the ideal presentation of the rules... Battlescribe is better quality and less errors than the actual GW print publications these days, so I don't really see why an official one would be necessary.

The question is WHY GW didn't jump on the app bandwagon 10 years ago, and I firmly believe that it is because they feel that an application would reduce their book sales.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:

 Blood Hawk wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I get the books point - yet battlescribe exists. And physical retail operations love to have loyalty cards or other programmes to better understand their customers, so if anything their model encourages such a product.

Yea the popularity of battlescribe shows their is a market for it. I would love an app from GW myself but they seem still to have the old retail mindset.

Not necessarily. The popularity just shows the cultural obsession with 'labor saving' apps and cutting corners.
The high tech phone toys dont do anything you can't do yourself, it's just easier to let someone else do it.

These damned whippersnappers with their electro-gizmos! They just want things to be easier! What has society come to these days when people want life to be easier! Back in my day we constantly wished life could be harder... this division of labor is bullgak commie propaganda...



... yes, it is easier to do it with an app, that's the entire point.
But *especially* in today's age of GW releasing erratas and points updates, the applications are becoming a near necessity.
A few weeks ago I attended an 800 point 40k event. In order to build my army I needed more publications than I had units in the army, and the total cost of which came fairly close to the cost of the models.
- The Rulebook + Errata
- Chapter Approved 2019 + Errata
- Codex Chaos Space Marines. + Errata
- Imperial Armour Index - Forces of Chaos + Errata
- Vigilus Ablaze + Errata
- Psychic Awakening - Faith And Fury + Errata

It's not just easier, it's damn near required these days.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Apple fox wrote:
Some of the design in this game is rather awful and half the use of a good army builder is getting information in one place.
Often not stats or weapons, but special rules that have unique wording all over the place.
Or in some cases a tick menu all in one spot.

It's a fairly consistent design pattern for GW that you can't find all the rules to play any single unit on any one page.
I'd bet my left... toe.. that this was originally purposeful in order to reduce the ability for photos or photocopies to be an easy way of leaking or pirating codexes.
Even their datasheets still require a secondary lookup for points costs.

I pity tournie organisers checking army lists...

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I pity tournie organisers checking army lists...

Given the number of times people have had illegal lists, I don't think they really do.

Trasvi wrote:

 ValentineGames wrote:
It's highly amusing that when GW had an army builder nobody cared or used it at all and it vanished.

Now people want one because none idleness makes a calculator too hard to use.

The GW army builder vanished because it was about 5 years too late to market, buggy, less features than its competitors AND was a blatant cash grab (sellling the app in 2 halves in an attempt to eek out a few more dollars).

To be honest I don't think that people DO want an offical app. Even though that would be the ideal presentation of the rules... Battlescribe is better quality and less errors than the actual GW print publications these days, so I don't really see why an official one would be necessary.

The question is WHY GW didn't jump on the app bandwagon 10 years ago, and I firmly believe that it is because they feel that an application would reduce their book sales

You're on about something FAAAAR later.
GW had army builders long before phone apps existed.
Long before mobile Internet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I pity tournie organisers checking army lists...

Yeah. They never had to do it beforehand ever...

When did GW have the software, I was using list building software during 3rd edition? That worked at least into 6th.
If GW had something I do not remember it making a splash here back then at least.

 ValentineGames wrote:

You're on about something FAAAAR later.
GW had army builders long before phone apps existed.
Long before mobile Internet.

"App" these days is a pretty ubiquitous term for user facing software on any platform.
I am talking about their desktop software thst was around... some time in 3rd or 4th ed 40k. Iirc they sold it as 2 parts, imperial and non. It was expensive, buggy, and couldnt compete with Wolflair's army builder that was widely used at the time.
Afaik they never even attempted a mobile or web army builder.

I would rather GW not make an list app. Battlescribe exists, is free, and is pretty much perfect, anything GW makes will probably be buggy.