I have a local convention coming up soon called Tacticon up in Denver, CO and I have submitted a set of five events to run. Two Grinders and Three Jihad Turning Points games. I provide everything in these games...sheets, miniatures, terrain etc. So, to prepare for these games I needed some way to decide on what units I was going to use and so I turned to BFB. Inner Sphere Grinder The first game I will be running I needed to create a list of Light, Medium, Heavy, and Assault Mechs to use. For this game I started out by taking out every Inner Sphere Light and Medium Mech miniature I own so that I could select my choices based on minis I already had available for use. Then I went through and picked either the best looking miniatare, or the least commonly used for each weight class and using the Mech List dialog and filters I then selected the Mech and version to add to my list. Once each weight class was added I then took the highest BV mech and adjusted all of the others skills until they were less then or equal to that amount. Here is the clipboard output from the program (clipboard icon) Lights (1100)---------------------------------------Unit Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BV--------------------------------------------Unit Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BV---------------------------------------Unit Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BV---------------------------------------Unit Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BV
I then was able to use the program to quickly print a Force List Sheet and ALL Mech Sheets with the click of one button. I print all of my sheets to PDF so that I can keep them on a thumb drive and re-print as necessary. So now I have 5 files in my IS Grinder directory:IS Grinder L-M.bfb - Battletech Force Balancer XML file to save the unit lists and information IS Grinder H-A.bfb IS Grinder Lights and Mediums.pdf - PDF output of my force list sheet IS Grinder Heavies and Assaults.pdf Lights.pdf - These are pdf's of the actual mech sheets Mediums.pdf Heavies.pdf Assaults.pdf Next I have two different Jihad Turning Points to setup (John Tiffany is setting up the third himself). Jihad Turning Points Tharkad For this game I am using the JTP Tharkad pdf file and choosing a scenario or two as the basis for the game. I chose Sifting Through the Rubble as my foundation and from that found that my two forces would consist of the Word of Blake Thirty-seventh Division against the Royal Guards and Twenty-fourth Lyran Guards RCT. One of the wonderful things about the JTP's is that they provide you with information about those units and what Random Assignment Tables (RAT) to work from. Well this called for the Random Selections tab in BFB's Add dialog. First off I opened the Total Warfare directory and chose Random Lance Type and had it select 2-3 options (I threw out any BA or Aerospace as I am not running any of these). Now that I know the basic types I then used Light Lance Weight Composition or whichever was called for to determine a random set of unit weight (for Word of Blake I just added 2 more units randomly). Now that I know how many of each weight class I need I then changed to the Word of Blake directory and selected the 3062 tables and randomly generated units until I had a mix of mechs that matched with miniatures I had available. I then switched back to the Unit Selection tab and highlighted each of my random selected units to filter the list and double-clicked the matching unit and variant to add to my Selected Units list. Once I had them all I hit the Add Units button to put them all into my Unit screen. After doing this for each side I ended up with the below: Word of Blake Thirty Seventh Division Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BVTrebuchet TBT-7M 50 1,348 Adept Carl Omega 4/4 1,550Recon Lance Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BVScarabus SCB-9T 30 926 Mechwarrior Miller Recon Lance 3/3 1,445Fire Lance Tons BV Mechwarrior Lance/Star G/P Adj BVFirestarter FS9-P 35 940 Mechwarrior Swift Fire Lance 3/4 1,297Now all I had to do was do some random skill rolls (also in the Random Selections area) and then do some work to balance out the two forces. Done! Now I have all of my forces created, Mech sheets printed, Force lists printed, and even have all of my miniatures seperated into units and stacked with a cut off sheet of the force list so that I can easily find them when it comes time to run the games. My hope is that this gives you an idea of what BFB can do to help you with your games! |