ADLG: Learning Materials Part 2

In Part 1 I chronicled my attempts at producing process sheets for ADLG.

In designing the process sheets I read the rules many times and that has helped me learn the rules.  Unfortunately, reading isn't the same as playing and most of the sheets didn't help me that much during play.

On reflection I feel they are too complex for me at the moment. I am still an ADLG novice and I need something far, far simpler. After I while I settled on the idea of unit cards arranged on a cheat sheet.  This adapts the idea from Battlefront's Team Yankee who I am sure saw it somewhere else.

The cards slice the rules in a different way to the process sheets.  Instead of a full set of tables covering one process and all unit types, a card focuses on one unit type across all processes:



Each line on the card (almost) represents a different phase with shooting in the middle and combat at the bottom. In the end I decided to focus on the really important things and not get too worried about every exception.  This was to help me learn the base factors.  Once these are ingrained the exceptions will follow.

I can get nine of these on one side of paper which is enough to cover all the unit types in my current Ilkhanid army list with a few cards to spare.   

Update, 10 Dec 2017: the full page of cards shown in the original post has been removed as I need to correct some errors. 

Update, 13 Dec 2017: a new set of unit cards has been posted in pdf format.

I used the first sheet in my most recent game and found it easy enough to use: it is just one page and the basic factors are far easier to find.

I can't say it was perfect but it did help me progress. I still couldn't "unlearn" the DBMM/FOG approach where troops tend to have just one factor. ADLG units have quite different shooting, protection and combat factors. The sheet worked well for the first two but I kept forgetting to look at the combat factors later in the game as things got tense.

For those technically inclined the cards are created using nanDeck with an Excel spreadsheet for the data.  I intend to use the same card template for each cheat sheet and, because of the way nanDeck works, it's best if each list has its own spreadsheet.

It's the work of minutes to create a new spreadsheet for a list by cutting and pasting the relevant lines from a master spreadsheet.  Today the master spreadsheet only contains entires for the units I've used so far. Eventually I'll build up a full set of unit data but that's for the future.