@Ben
Just looked a bit through your customs sheet and discovered your three planned lighthouses. I’m excited to see what ideas you have for them. The Pillar of Eternity is a great addition already. Its ability (I won’t spoil your announcement of it since it has yet to be revealed) fits right into preexisting Pirates abilities so it doesn’t seem so foreign as many of my lighthouses do. Plus love the flavor text!
Thanks! 😀 I haven’t quite completed a full custom lighthouse of my own yet, but between some fantasy ideas and some historical precedents, I couldn’t resist your idea. 🙂 As said elsewhere, the Age of Sail sheet is much messier and random than Epic Seas, because a lot of times I just dump links to stuff I’ll make later so I don’t forget.
Also is there a planned “Published Custom” thread or how would you like us to present all our finalized customs?
I’m a big believer in data storage and backup. I think each person having a Google Spreadsheet like mine for each set or all of their sets/customs is the way to go for various reasons. I suppose it’s partly just because I don’t want people to be mad at me if they lose stuff they’ve submitted here (if the hosting company screwed up, or I accidentally “broke” the forum temporarily while editing the site), but I think it’s best for each person to store their customs somewhere other than where they publicly might release them.
As I said a few days ago:
Pros of using a Google Spreadsheet: updated instantly (no need to redo file uploads to BGG/elsewhere when a simple change is made), people can view changes in real time, very easy to share, very searchable/sortable (you can sort columns by mast count, filter out a specific faction, find every instance of an ability very quickly, etc), other people don’t need to download anything, you can download the spreadsheet in various file formats including .xlsx whenever you want. (I download a copy whenever I add 10+ pieces to either of my sets in one session, so even if google drive implodes or becomes unavailable/etc I’ll still have a copy on my computer, then you can also periodically reupload that file to a file storage site for extra backup)
I think a shared online spreadsheet works best for the above reasons. I’d prefer to not have another Organized Version thread, because even that requires editing and people’s posts become out of date. In terms of showing which customs in an online spreadsheet are to be used or not, simple things can be implemented. For example, a “finalized” sheet and an “under construction” sheet in the same document. Or as I do it, leave a stat blank, and obviously the custom is not to be used. I prefer to just put a question mark after a point cost or whatever to mark that something isn’t finalized and isn’t ready for playtesting.
I really like that a shared spreadsheet can have changes seen in real time (I just made the Pillar of Eternity for example!) and doesn’t require uploading a new spreadsheet document to the web for every little change (of which there can be many, as seen in the custom review podcast episodes). It’s also easier to share, since links to the shared sheet can be posted on pretty much any website, but file sharing is less ubiquitous and usually requires the viewer to download a file to their computer (which could already be out of date by the time they download it). I may try to let users upload files to this site someday, but there are other things to do first….
On a side note, should this forum be broken up into pages? From personal experience it takes forever to slide through all the posts on my phone…. what do you all think?
Yes. That is something I hope to work on very soon, especially for this thread. This thread loads a bit slow for me nowadays and I understand that compromises how much people will post. I’d prefer more than the 15 posts per thread page at MT (since it makes searching with ctrl+f far easier), but this one has ballooned and should be broken up.
I actually have forum pagination enabled, but for some reason it just doesn’t work. (based on my settings, it should already work as you want it to, so I’ll have to figure out why it’s not)
Sam Grunis
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: American
Rarity: U
Point Value: 7
Ability: Loyal: America. Captain. Reroll. Place this crew face up during setup. Reduce the cost of all other crew placed on this ship by 1.
Flavor text: Although just 25, Sam Grunis has proved a very capable captain for the U.S. Navy. He has thrived in every situation thus far in his career, and is exceptional at providing care and motivation for every member of his crew.
Historical Custom of the Day #367
HMS Sirius
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: English
Rarity: C
Point Value: 7
Number of Masts: 2
Cargo Space: 4
Base Move: S+S
Cannons: 4S-4L
Ability: This ship gets -1 to her reef rolls.
Link: Thomas Jamison, John Hunter, Arthur Phillip, Robert Ross, Daniel Southwell, Jacob Nagle
You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas