About me: I am a total noob. I like miniature wargames, I like collecting and painting armies, but I have no one near me sharing the hobby so that I could actually play. So, zero feedback, zero practice, zero possibility to learn on the go. All there is left is a sort of mind game in which I try to at least build functioning armies by educating myself, reading through forum threads or watching videos of battles. About Vedics and Greeks: Three years ago I fell in love with the Vedic Sectorial of Aleph which was the only sectorial on the vanilla Aleph horizon, so I started collecting. Then Corvus Belli (CB) decided to bring in the Greeks. And then more Greeks. More Greeks. Lots of Greeeks. Oooops a Naga, yay. Then more Greeks. And not to forget second versions of ... you might have guessed it ... Greeks. I was patient, one day CB will bring some more Vedics. And they did. Now I am all happy and energized and hitting the forums again to find out what they can do and can't. Abbreviation Mania: I have one huge problem though, I can not handle the abbreviation flood of the experienced members, it is way too much technobabble to be able to follow. Scientific Solution: In science papers it is custom when a term occurs more often and you want to abbreviate it that you at least write it out fully once, when first mentioned, and you put the abbreviation in parentheses. Senseless Example: I think the Deva Functionary (Deva) with the Heavy Machine Gun (HMG) will be far better than the Corporate Security Unit (CSU) with the Boarding Shotgun (BSG) ... because the CSU costs less than the Deva and the range of the HMG is nothing for closer targets in comparison to the BSG. This way everyone knows what is abbreviated with what and if unsure can always check further up where the term was mentioned first and the abbreviation introduced. Thanks for your time, maybe you consider this suggestion to make tutorials more easily accessible to noobs and please excuse my weird english.
Some forums have a built in acronym lexicon, that detects common short-form words and allows you to see an explanation when you mouse-over them. It might be worth asking is a similar feature could be implemented here?
I totally agree. The constant abbreviation can be quite confusing. It is more an internet wide thing. I wish you luck in trying to enhance understanding and avoid abbreviation technobabble, and I hope clarity of writing spreads throughout the internet. However I think the task is about as likely as herding cats.
After months they still haven't fixed the issue of people automatically logging out after too little time. It might be too much to ask. Still worth asking though. As for the topic itself, i agree. Making a good glossary pinned to the top of everything would be an alternate and much easier to implement solution, but what you propose is a good practice anyway.
It's pinned to the top of the New Users subforum: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/infinity-acronym-glossary-for-newbies.285/
I agree that it's helpful to provide various kinds of help with abbreviations, but you can't expect people to handhold over obvious ones either. Yes, Boarding Shotgun = BSG should be something that people actually explain occasionally, shows up in a glossary or lexicon, or whatnot. HMG, Deva, and CSU are all poor examples though, because in Army builder, they're all listed as those things. Sure, for Devas they're listed as such within their unit profiles, but it's not exactly confusing that "Deva" acts as a stand-in for the wordier "Deva Functionary". Meanwhile, the title of CSU is: "CSU, Corporate Security Unit" for example, so unless the context makes it difficult to tell someone is talking about a unit, when the person looks it up on Army, they'll find it, if anything, more easily than if it was referred to as a Corporate Security Unit. As to individual posters always referring to them the way you're suggesting, it's definitely something an auto-lexicon or similar would help with, because inevitably some people will not define their terms. Still, when using any term not present in the army builder, and in particular any that the individual ever had to look up, ask about, or otherwise didn't recognize the very first time they saw it, it'd sure be considerate of people to define said terms. Maybe hand out carrots (likes) to people when they do define their terms, and you'll see some minor improvement when combined with continuing awareness of the issue.
This might be a trouble in some rare cases, for example LI that can stand as Light Infantry or Limited Insertion. The context would give the meaning, but the forum would just add confusion. I personnally avoid writing LI as Limited Insertion, often writing it in full or saying 1-group instead. Otherwise it is a nice function that was already on the former infinity forum.
