Upkeep for summoned units

[Hellboy]

Edi said:
Converting the thing to Excel, while possible, would have been more work than it was worth at the time when there was so much else to do.

...

It's possible I'll provide an Excel version at that point, and it will also have fixed formulas for age and possibly for prot as well. The problem with an Excel file would be, aside from data format conversion (which is rather trivial now that I know some of the OO peculiarities regarding Booleans) its size. The current Unit DB in Excel could run over 10 MB easily if past comparisons of Excel vs Open Office file size for the same data are anything to go by.

Much though I am a fan of Excel, and sceptical about Open Office, I don't think that providing this in Excel format needs to be a high priority. It's pretty easy to open it up and export to Excel, for any one that really want's to work in Excel (and in fact I do that sometimes).

Just my two cents, but Edi if you're more efficient working in Open Office, I think you should continue to do that. Now, if you were one of those rich IW developer guys, just raking in the cash like they do, I'd feel entirely different about the question

[Edi]

Actually, an Excel export is fairly easy to do from the finished file. I'll still be working in OpenOffice. I'm not touching Excel with a ten-foot pole if I can help it, so a conversion is the most I would be willing to do. But not before the next patch version.

[Sombre]

Open Office might be as easy to learn as microsoft office, but since I've already learned office, it's annoying having to adjust. I'm sure other people feel the same way. Not your problem I know, but don't act like people are ignorant for not liking/wanting to use Open Office.

People keep telling me to use Photoshop or GIMP instead of Paint Shop Pro, but I know Pro well and I have no interest in switching. If people put out graphics which you needed to use GIMP or Photoshop to even look at I'd feel annoyed about that too.

[Edi]

Not a very good comparison, since the different graphics formats have been standardized. No such standardization in office document file formats. Further, Dom3 requires specific sort of graphics of a standardized format, so choice of the tool you use is irrelevant as long as it can do the job.

The only thing I commented was that MS Office and Open Office are similar, especially if you stick to the basics. Ease and comfort of use vs what you are used to if you switch was not addressed at all. Obviously switching is going to require adjustment, which is awkward and less productive.

I do not fault people for using Excel or wanting to use it, their preferences just differ from mine. PReviously, I did not know how to accommodate Excel users with the DB files regarding some of the data formats, now I do. But I'll not go to extra trouble with a new patch just around the corner. When I've got the DB up to date vs the new patch, THEN I will have incentive to do so.

[Sombre]

I'm not comparing them in terms of what /you/ could have done in creating a database because I'm not annoyed /at you/. I'm just annoyed by the problems I have with the unit db. Similarly, if someone wants to make graphics or whatever available in GIMP only format then I'm not going to be annoyed at them, even if they could have released them in .bmp or .jpg. I'd just be generally annoyed that I had to use some new program just to get use out of them.

[MaxWilson]

Edi said:
I do not fault people for using Excel or wanting to use it, their preferences just differ from mine. PReviously, I did not know how to accommodate Excel users with the DB files regarding some of the data formats, now I do. But I'll not go to extra trouble with a new patch just around the corner. When I've got the DB up to date vs the new patch, THEN I will have incentive to do so.

On this old computer that I use, Excel is markedly faster than OpenOffice (probably because OpenOffice is written in Java, as I understand it), so I exported it. It wasn't that much trouble. I think it does make sense to have this kind of important documentation for a multi-platform game in OpenOffice instead of a Window-only format, but at the same time it took me several weeks to decide that it was worth the hassle of downloading the 100MB install for OpenOffice to view the spreadsheet. I think providing an .xls export of the official .ods spreadsheet would be a courtesy much appreciated by casual players (even if .xls files are huge in comparison to .ods).

Anyway, thanks a lot for maintaining that list. It's very handy. In passing, I've been wondering whether there is any flag to show whether a unit is recruitable and/or capital-only? I can't find a column that seems to indicate that; I'm trying to find a new favorite nation and good recruitable-anywhere mages is my top criterion.

-Max

P.S. By "it wasn't that much trouble," I wasn't criticizing Edi for not already having done it. On the contrary, I meant that even if Edi didn't provide .xls it wouldn't be a tremendously big deal, although obviously it's very nice if it is provided.

[Edi]

You should have a page named ArmyList in the DB (last page, iirc), which lists pretender selection, recruitable unit selection and recruitable commander selection by unit number for each nation and that has mentions of capital only. The main display page does not, because it is intended only to list the units (all of them), not make any distinction between national recruitments. It would be further complicated by some units being available to more than one nation (e.g. all non-sacred EA Van infantry are both Vanheim and Helheim units).

It would be possible to make display pages for all the different nations (too much work, really) or for all the different eras and only include the unit numbers for units that are in. If something belongs to multiple nations, have it there several times. Then add a nation column and enter that data there by hardcoding. The downside would be another large number of data retrieval from arrays, which increases file size and number of calculations and slows things down even more. So I'd rather not do it. At least not the whole display. Maybe unit ID, name and nation + capital only status and do it per era, then sort by nation.

I was figuring on doing everything in OO for the next version and then doing an export to Excel when that was ready.

[mivayan]

If all you want to know is the upkeep, I made a little text file with unit number, name, gold cost, resource cost, sacred-or-not, upkeep.

I copied some columns from Dom3_DB_WeaponsArmorUnits_RC-1_0.ods, added the upkeep formula, and saved as a .csv file. Hope Edi doesn't mind.