Validate your rosters

Today, we rolled out a new feature of Battleplan that automatically validates your army or deck as you change it, according to the ruleset you have selected. If there is an invalid combination of things in your roster—be it duplicate units or exceeding point totals—messages will appear at the bottom explaining what's wrong. Of course, there is the option to turn off these messages entirely by choosing "No Rules" from the list of rulesets.

The new validation system goes further than just telling you what's wrong after you've made the change, it also lets you know before you make the change whether the change will be valid or not. This is done through dynamically changing the style of the add/remove buttons. A solid color button means that adding or removing the item is OK and won't invalidate your roster. A partially gray, partially colored button—paired with a popup message when hovering over the button—lets you know that adding or removing the item will cause your roster to be invalid, which will likely be accompanied with a message saying why it's invalid.

For some game systems—such as Heroscape, which has all of three core army designing constraints—the new validation system will offer a minor benefit, while other game systems—such as Summoner Wars, which has more complex deck designing constraints—will provide a much greater benefit by tracking the details for you. In any case, this means you spend less time on the arduous calculations of ensuring a valid deck or army, and more time strategizing and designing the deck or army you have in mind. (Or you can spend the same amount of time designing more decks and armies. Either way is fine with us.)

While we are quite proud of the new validation system, we also have future plans for extending it that we're excited about working to bring you. The most notable of the planned extensions is to offer fix options along with the validation messages you receive. For example, in Summoner Wars, if you add a Summoner, you'll get a message saying you need to add the Summoner's required cards. With the fix options, you'll be given an option to add all the missing cards in one click. Or, if you somehow end up with multiple factions in your deck, you'll be given options to remove all but the faction of your choice.

We'll be working hard to bring that part to you soon. In the meantime, we trust you'll find the new validation feature quite neat and beneficial.

Better buttons for faster edits

Many of our most recent changes to Battleplan been in the spirit of reducing the time it takes you to create an army or deck, so you spend less time building and more time playing. The first change we made was to increase the clickable area of the add/remove buttons, making them easier to hit. Previously, they were 10x10 pixels, and we increase them by a whopping 2 pixels in both directions, totaling 12x12 pixels. While 2 pixels may not seem like much, think about it this way: a 10x10 pixel image has a total of 100 pixels, where a 12x12 pixel image has a total of 144 pixels. So, the 12x12 pixel image has 44% more area than that of the 10x10 pixel image! Certainly not insignificant.

Another change was to put add/remove buttons next to the items in the browse pane (the list on the left). This comes with several benefits, but most significant is the ability to quickly add (or remove) an item to your roster, where before you would have to click on the item to view it and then move your pointer to the add (or remove) button next to the tabs. This also allows you to actively see how adding or removing an item changes the statistics within the roster's Analysis tab.

The Summoner Wars console in particular has a couple of notable changes. First off, we've put add/remove buttons next to the required cards within a Summoner's Stats tab. Again, this affords less navigation activity and more focus on designing your deck and, even more importantly, playing the game. Secondly, we've added links to quickly load a standard Summoner Wars faction deck. Just click the Clear button at the bottom of the roster pane and you'll see them in the list area. So now, if you just want to tweak one of the standard decks, you no long have to construct it from scratch.