Originally posted over on the Two Hour Wargames Forums:
I have a handful of THW products but except for Friday Night Fights I've never had a chance to play; just too many things going on in life to spare the time to paint figures and make/set-up terrain.
I really wanted to try RRTK however so I started setting up a virtual tabletop on Powerpoint. That stalled when I bought FNG and decided to use Excel instead.
Why use Excel? With a rudimentary knowledge of VBA coding (which is my level...) one can set up macros to help run the game environment. The picture below will help me explain.
Each of the green round tokens and the red PEF triangles represent units and are actually Microsoft Office Shapes. They're easily moved all around the "board". When you click on one and then click the shiny "Select" button it runs a macro. The select macro cross-references the Shape's name to a roster table (on another sheet). This referencing then fills in the unit info, so you have all the figure's stats right in front of you.
Since a figure's status will change, you can click the "Status" button to bring up a list of conditions. Then simply pick from this list and select the new condition (from Carry On to Out of the Fight for example). The status macro will then overwrite the old condition with the new one for the figure on the roster. Since it's captured on the roster, the info is available on future turns.
The dice rolling buttons are self-explanatory. My favorite macro is the ruler function. The player just grabs the black arrow pointer and places it wherever it is needed, adjusting the length appropriately. Then when the "Range" button is pressed, it displays the correct range. The playing area is scaled to represent a 36x48 inch table.
This will never replace actual miniatures for me but it does give a convenient way to explore the rules and play the games. I played five FNG missions in just two hours! Which, by the way, is a great game.
I have thought about playing the off game with Excel, but never to the extent you have! I feel if I do, i may never use my miniatures and i love pushing them around, I use Excel and gaming for random army lists, scenario generation etc but that is also because I use Excel a bit at work. i have never gone done the VBA route as that ways may lie madness! If I learn VBA I am sure my work spreadsheets will be incomprehensible, and so would my gaming one when I come back and modify them years later. But after seeing what you have done I may have to investigate VBA a bit further. It would help with some of the more tortuous sheets and formulas, and maybe I can get a bit of a game here and there when I am out and about and not at home.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely check VBA out. I've been perfectly comfortable using Excel for years at work and always thought VBA was just too in depth for a "non-programmer" like me. Then all I did was watch some YouTube videos and the language really opened up to me. I do vastly prefer gaming with miniatures but I paint torturously slow and never seem to have my armies ready.
DeleteThis is very intriguing. I'm in a similar boat, own many THW titles but never get around to completing a project (miniatures terrain etc. to game it the way I want to. I've considered using Roll20 and it's offline predecessor MapTool, but excel looks pretty good. I wonder if I could do something similar in Open Office Calc? Things to ponder.
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with Open Office Calc, so I can't offer much help in that aspect. Does OPen Office Calc have the ability to access the code, like VBA for Microsoft Office? I had to watch YouTube to learn to code in VBA but it only a relatively short amount of time to learn the language and make the Excel do a bunch of cool stuff behind the scenes.
DeleteHi pahoota, it looks like open office has it's own programming language, Open Office Basic. I'm looking for ways to learn about it.
DeleteCool; good luck!
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