Suggested Sheet Ettiquette...

[Cannonshop]

The funny thing is, I managed to get two players in, but because of issues in how the setups went, one of them didn't get his orders-sheet to start playing until late.  The other, I spent a week fixing his sheet (recopying to a clean sheet) before turning over to Raginar to spend the 20-year-break points and deploy his units.

Thus, at least for the time being, the TC has an orders sheet that (for the first time, I'm told) actually works, because the formulae aren't all screwed up.

I take that as  a personal marker of success, by the way.  The borked up formulas on the old TC sheet created some interesting and scary deficits in the income tabs, including a 60 point total Cyclical movement pool, and a resource shortage about ten or eleven points lower than the actual value of his existing real-estate.

Just rebuilding the Naval tab data on a clean, undamaged new sheet gave him a useable Cyclic pool-that's how bad things were.

So...I've got a few suggestions for y'all...

Suggestion 1: when you're laying out your Equipment tables, on the Dropship columns, please, put your most common designs in the middle, and your least commons (anything that doesn't appear more than once) on the outlying.

Suggestion 2: Don't try to force FP values on your sheet-if your actual value is lower, put the difference between what you spent, and what's there, in the "Damage" column and let the formulas do their work.

Suggestion 3: When you are expanding your territory tab? COPY THE FORMULAS CORRECTLY FIRST!!!  and don't try to edit them.  Editing the formulas when you don't know how they're supposed to work is BAD.

Suggestion 4: If you spent more, and the line-item maxes out in your naval tab, add a line item to take up the slack.  You'll get more flexibility out of it, more MP out of it, your formulas won't end up broken, thus you won't have the heartache of a sheet that doesn't work.  I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a ten point Vincent or Lola II.  These designs don't carry dropships, droppers are about the only way to pump value over single-digits on such designs.  I recommend either a Monolith or Star Lord, depending on how high you have to pump things, or a pair of Merchants or Invaders with a Scout class-this gives you a nice little flotilla that can send recon elements ahead into a system during invasions, Blockades, Commerce disruptions, or when you're going into Naval Engagement (search and destroy) mode.

Suggestion 5: if you have the time between turns, and you just got a faction?  It might be worth it to hand-copy data over onto a clean sheet, instead of trying to copy-and-paste.

Suggestion 6: Wall-of-text is hard to read.  Break things up a bit on your Ground and Naval tabs.  You'll find it's easier to track what is going where and in what force strength, which task-forces/Regiments/Divisions/Brigades/Clusters/Galaxies or whatever have taken what damage and where, and it's easier to see what's assigned to defend a given hex  or group of hexes.

it's also easier for the GM staff to read (when going through your orders), or for the guy who takes over when you're burned out and leave to read.  The wall-of-text on the old Turn 45 orders I had to work with when prepping Raginar's sheet for him was nearly impossible to track until I started inserting 'breaks' to group things down in five-line to ten-line bunches.

Now, not knowing what Raginar bought (because I told him NOT to tell me!) to fill out his forces and infrastructure between 3070 and 3091, ('cause, after all, it's HIS faction, not mine), I will say that what I gave him was not the ineffectual and weak Taurian Concordat that was implied the last time Jeyar was playing-it would have been good if someone had been able to help Jeyar the way I was able to assist Raginar, he might still be playing/active/here if someone HAD been able to assist him.

Which leads me to the next point of suggestion...

7: if your faction feels unplayable, maybe a reworking of your sheet, with manual work, on a clean, up-to-date version, is a good idea.  Sometimes things just get missed or messed up, sometimes you need to reorder your data on something that hasn't had a large bit of wear imposed upon it.  A faction that looks totally boned, might actually be rather good, once you've cleaned up the entries and gotten your territories actually generating the revenue they're supposed to be generating, or eliminating that wall-of-text for a more grouped and organized format may present you with better solutions to current or predicted problems imposed by people stomping the crap out of you (due to your not knowing at a glance what you HAVE in a given area-this happened a LOT with the Lyrans from 26 on to 41...)

[Fatebringer]

Nice post. Most people don't usually edit their own sheets But I can see why getting a sheet from someone else can be trying. I myself have learned a lot about the formulas because I had 3 seperate equipment tabs for Bear / Raven / Wyvern (FRR), my naval tab includes an equipment row for each table and I was able to combine the naval tabs finally from seperate orders. It was a major achievement for me to make sure it all worked right and the MP Calcs were accurate

As far as breaking up the big blocks of text, I didn't do it with the ground units, but my Naval Stars all have the command vessel in blue so I know where the Star Admirals are.

[Dave Baughman]

Great post, cannon. I think a lot of folks will benefit from your advice here!

[chaosxtreme]

He has a point. My fleet's are ordered based on when things we're built not what fleet they are in.

Its even annoying to me. I keep saying "One day I am going to go back through this and put things together.

I even have the odd Combined Arms Brigade that is not with its aerospace wing in sheet order which is annoying.