The only time I’m willing to build an army without a digital tool is something like warmachine Mk 2. You had a very simple points system with few alterations/discounts and individual units don’t have configuration options beyond min/max model count. Anything more complex than that, and working out the list by hand becomes an error-prone headache when you’re trying to juggle equipment options to fill out the last few points. That Infinity provides a good, free list building program is huge. I would very possibly not have gotten into the game without Army.
I generally use BattleScribe. It’s got a pretty active 40K community that’s good about timely updates and fixes. The UI is terrible, but...
Yeah, Battlescribe is very widely used, and the datafiles tend to be updated very quickly. And yes the UI is terrible. :-(
Tbh issues with tracking all your options throughout all kinds of releases when you don't always find info on what's officially usable and what was abolished is not so much an issue of rule complexity, but rather an issue of poor rule organization. 40k rules are arguably less complex than Infinity at this point, but if you still have to manually dig through all the books like it was like 5 years ago, then yeah...
Exactly, they made an army builder app for the simplified narrative mode that didn't even need one. But matched play with balance issues, points for wargear and paid patches in form of annual Chapter Approved? Tough luck, either get third party software or break out ol' calculator, pen and paper. Army6 is not perfect, but I cannot imagine playing without it now. Even my most hardcore paper only friends switched to it after a while. While maybe army building wouldn't be as obtuse in Infinity (since it's fewer points and there's no "build-a-squad" or "build-a-chapter-master" thing that requires you calculating wargear combos), the ability to look up all skills through wiki links and a notifier if a list is legal or not are very handy. All Army6 needs now is get ported to iOS and get a link team legality checker.
'tis a bit funny. From when I played 40K, I must say that the paper (digital or dead trees, doesn't matter) version of the army options were much, much, better in 40K than they are in Infinity. Infinity's Army app really keeps the game at a playable level.
I can build Ariadna lists in my head pretty easily, but Army is incredibly valuable for anything I don't know as well. There's too many options now to keep it all straight; I only have Ariadna memorized because I've played them so often and for so long.
Not needed and not overly useful. On account of Fireteams aren't a thing created at list-building level. They are decided during playing-the-actual-game time during deployment. and army builder cannot help with that.
It would be nice if you could get a list of all the skills, equipment and ammo you had in your army too. That would probably get me back trying to play the game but I can't convince any of my friends (or myself) to play anymore as 3-4 hours (for like 150pt to 200pt games) for one game, due to all the constant looking up what stuff does, get tedious and unfun which was always the case for us as we only played once maybe every 6 weeks or so. That and having alternate range bands for smaller tables. We play smaller point games and 4'x4' is just to much space and on a 3'x3' some weapons are just too dominate (though it's not like I couldn't house rule that). Anyway, not sure what got me to come visit these forums after like 6 months away but that's just my thoughts. Complexity is subjective and I'm not one that wants to take away fun from people that enjoy what Infinity is (though cleaning up some rules would be nice) but making the myriad of rules more accessible by just making all the stuff you need available with an additional check in army options would help a lot of people I think.
Moving from 4' x 4' to 3' x 3' isn't too hard math-wise, as all of the range bands are divisible by 4. 0-8 becomes 0-6, 8-16 becomes 6-12, etc.
Probably multiplying all of the movement rates and other distances by 0.75 (so ZoC changes to 6", Engage is 1.5", etc.). And print out new templates at 75% scale. Then again, all of the Operation scenarios use (mostly) full size templates, full range bands, and just keep as much distance between the deployment zones as they can.
The reason I'd prefer a smaller board is with less units conflict doesn't happen as easily and it's hard to really do most missions with fewer figures so lowering movement and I don't think would be beneficial to the end goal. However if you don't shorten range bands it really affects the games from when we've played as all guns are just better and no one really ever moves to do mission goals and every games turns into a kill fest. A combi can shoot right up to the deployment zone at only -3 and you're almost always in the long range weapons +3 band. Templates are a bit trickier as I don't think the width really needs to be shortened but maybe just start them a few inches behind where you actually shoot. Maybe they really don't need to be changed at all though. If I remember right Ice Storm had shorter range bands for it's missions but the later ones didn't.
I should add another thing that would help CB is have default lists in army. I know they have the start boxes and the beyond boxes but having somethings in Army that are good lists at a certain point value (150, 200, 300) would be useful I think to those that want to try before they buy. Had a buddy really into the game and he was thinking of buying Aleph so he made a list to try against my pre-uprising JSA and it was brutal. 9 actions vs 15 on my side. Had everyone but Achilles dead before he had a turn. He decided Aleph wasn't for him and really hasn't played since. It was a pretty bad list of things that didn't work together but neither of us know the faction so I didn't spot anything too wrong outside of the order pool which is said could be an issue for him. That game is one of the reason we use to play smaller limited insertion games.
If you play on a smaller table the extra distance should come from the DZs. So a 3" X 3" table is (usually) 6" DZs. Even then you'll see a shift to Spitfires and Rifles. But it's not as oppressive. I recommend the Recon 2.0 rules as a place to start with this. I quite like Recon on 3x3 tables. You have more room to play tactically, but it preserves the relative simplicity of Recon.
The game is primarily balanced around 300 point games, any major changes to weapon range bands would really, really break things. I don't want to play a game where every match it decided by who brought a better sniper, personally.
There is something, but it takes a while longer to update and CB really should have made Army iOS compatible considering how prevalent iPhones ad iPads are. I use an Android phone myself, but I got my girlfriend into the game a while ago and we were unpleasantly surprised that Army doesn't work on her phone or tablet. That third party app wasn't updated for Libertos yet last time we checked and she really took a liking to that fishman.
