First Edition of the Printed Book

[vodnik]

...a great literary excursion by markleslie4 but back to the reality. An army list describes a certain army with its battleline & optional troop type and is not the holy bible nor the koran. The online army sheet has not much information but needs several useless pages...

[David Kuijt]

An army list describes a certain army with its battleline & optional troop type [...]. The online army sheet has not much information but needs several useless pages...

650 army lists, with enemies links, allies links, allied contingents, thematic categories, maneuver and invasion ratings, metadata of various sorts. At one page per army list that's 650 pages. The print book is about 64 pages and will be $30. So that's 10 books and $300. We could possibly get that cut in half by condensing (choosing an ugly, hard to read, method of presenting the army lists, abandoning the use of white space and so on) but that would still be like 5 books and $150.

There are other reasons why we have our army lists online (flexibility, universality, accessibility, responsiveness, inclusiveness) -- cost to the user is only one of them. But it is a major one, and we haven't heard much push-back on that issue before. If you (and this is the general "you" speaking to all readers, not just to vodnik) can convince us that there is a real market for printed army lists, we'd consider it. And by real market, I mean a major percentage of our players would treat them as an asset rather than a financial burden, and would buy them.

Creating print army lists would be a lot of work, even if we did decide it was desirable. We all have day jobs and real life (I was going to say night lives, but that didn't come out right) so the amount of time and effort we can put into Triumph is sadly finite. Prioritizing that time is a constant concern, so we are working on the projects that are most important to Triumph moving forwards. We are happy to consider player input on what those priorities should be, but players need to be aware that we are doing what we can, in the time available to us, on the projects that we consider most important. Battle Cards, updates to Meshwesh (many of which are associated with Battle Cards), Grand Triumph, Scenario Books, a Campaign Book, and Fantasy Triumph are all on the queue right now, as we are finalizing details of the print run from the major effort of the last two years (print rules).

[Andreas Johansson]

This might something were a poll (probably better on the FB page than here) could give some useful input.

I don't expect I'd buy a set of printed lists myself - certainly not at $300 - and about the only advantage to them I see is guaranteed availability if WGC goes belly up and Meshwesh goes defunct. But the better solution to that would be a downloadable digital version. For normal usage I find the online format more convenient than paper books, not least because I can browse it from any web-capable unit without carrying a bunch of books with me.

[Rod]

That has been discussed, and makes sense.

I find the electronic form of Meshwesh so much more useful because it has the search capability. I still remember how painful it was trying to flip through DBA 2.2 books trying to find a particular army list.

[vodnik]

...for DBA2 you could search in the online index... but try it in meshwesh...
...just an example: where are the West Sudanese? Another one: Who are the Jacquerie men?..

[Rod]

DBA2 had a searchable online index? of that I was not aware, can you send me a link?

What Western Sudan army do you feel is missing? One nice thing about Meshwesh is adding Armies if there is enough data to justify it as separate list.

[Andreas Johansson]

He must be referring to something fan-made, perhaps the list of armies at Fanaticus.

As for who the Jacquerie were (as opposed to where to find the army list: I have no trouble finding it in Meshwesh), the Wikipedia article has the basics.

[Autodidact-O-Saurus]

Veering a bit off topic but what does the underlying architecture of Meshwesh look like? I enjoy writing scripts that turn data into documents and find myself looking for a new project right now.

--jeff

[Bill Hupp]

I find Meshwesh very easy to use and I print the lists I need. The point system makes it tough to have the one line summary of DBA although with 3.0’s format they went away from the summary form. The DBA army codes have to be learned and unpacked and I don’t miss that at all when doing army lists. A couple of thoughts on this topic and I ask forgiveness to the extent they are off topic.

1- I love the DBA books army list section and refer to it a couple times a week. It’s like an historical atlas. It’s all in one place and the introductory paragraph and references are very useful.

2- But I don’t use the DBA books enemy lists because I have Meshwesh where everything is spelled out. I will also check army lists across game systems. I like the lists in Tactica because they are high level views of those armies.

3- I would not buy Meshwesh printed books. Would I like a copy to download? No, I don’t want to manage another piece of software in the age of the cloud.

4- Some more verbiage in the lists might be nice though. Notes?

Bill

[David Schlanger]

4- Some more verbiage in the lists might be nice though. Notes?

Bill

We have had some discussion and planning about crowdsourcing notes and army list specific information. Hopefully we will get there at some point!

DS