Codex Tracking Spreadsheet

Asking mainly for feedback from the rest of the community:

Am I the only one who has come to dislike the automatic “worker -1” that appears at the top of the actions column? It’s fine for the first few turns, and I guess was put it to remind people that it’s usually a good idea to make a worker each turn. But I’ve come to find it a bit of an annoyance as the game goes on. Not just because by the midgame sometimes you want to skip the worker, because you can’t afford to lose the card and/or the gold. But because whenever you have card-drawing effects you often want to play those before deciding what to worker. And then there’s the issue where sometimes you forget to actually drag a card over to the “workers” column - but you’ve still paid the gold for your non-existent extra worker, because you never caught it on the spreadsheet.

Since it’s really very easy to just type “worker -1” at the appropriate place in the action log, I’d personally rather it wasn’t there automatically. This means that you have to make the conscious decision to do this at a particular point in your turn, and then move the card over at the same time - exactly as you do in a real-life game. And it’s how all the other actions work in the spreadsheet (to play a unit I drag it over from “hand” to “in play” or “patrol zone”, then type in the action and take off the cost).

I’m aware that this is just nitpicking, and might not be a view that’s widely shared. But I’m wondering if it is something that others have thought about too.

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I find it easier to delete two fields (when I don’t want a worker) than type “Worker” & “-1” (when I do), but as has already been mentioned, it’s relatively easy to make changes if a particular thing bugs you.

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Yea, the worker thing can trip people up, but I decided it was easier to always remind players to make a worker (especially new players).

I have no problem with others creating an alternate sheet, but I won’t be creating features or updates for them. Armed pirates update instructions are perfectly good though.

if you want to break your actions into phases, you could add lines to the actions section of the spreadsheet, such as

[b]Upkeep[/b] Get Paid 3 [b]Main Phase[/b] Actions! -2 Worker -1 [b]Discard/Draw[/b]

which would result in the following being generated

Upkeep
Get Paid - ($3)
Main Phase
Actions! - ($1)
Worker - ($0)
[B]Discard/Draw[/B]
Float ($0)
Discard 3, Draw 2

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Is it worth it to just create a button that adds in the Worker and the -1, similar to the buttons for “Draw” and such? That way it could be done at any point during the turn (for example if you draw a card which you then decide to worker) without having to delete the built-in worker.

Not that I have any idea how to do that…

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I’ve made some slight changes to the sheet, so I get most of the code and am comfortable changing stuff. I’m still confused how it grabs the starter deck, though. I want to manually add in stats like (2/3) etc to the cards so I don’t have to do this every game.

I’ve looked at a lot of games on the forum, and if I’m not mistaken, literally every single person does this. Is there a reason I’m not thinking of that the starting stats of the base creatures aren’t automatically put in? I guess it’s slightly more “stuff” to look at and not that big of a deal to just type every game.

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You have a valid point, but I never thought it would look good in the hand spoilers. Starting cards names are pulled from the card list sheet, based on what spec is listed first in the deck selection. Changing them to have the stats is complicated, in that adding any text to the card name breaks the link on the card list sheet. Lastly, it is the fact that stats are fluid. Something like Ironbark Treant could be a 3/2 or a 1/2+2A, and anything that has taken damage, or anything with +/- 1 Runes. Basically, if people were going to have to mark stats as they changed, I figured it was basically the same as marking the stats to begin with.

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It looks like the spreadsheet has an error where if the whole deck is drawn and the discard is not yet reshuffled, then teched cards for the last turn does not count as being in the discard both on the main page and in the pbf template generated.

I noticed a bug where doing Discard/Draw with a top of deck card removes the card from the sheet completely. It might have been because I was undoing stuff a fair bit, though I would figure that the button-bound scripts would handle things based on actual cell contents, rather than some hidden state about previous cell contents.

I am not sure how to replicate either of these bugs, @feathers and @Shadowfury333

Maybe you can PM me a link to a sheet that has just had the error occur, or that will have the error occur if I click the button.

Can I download a copy to my computer?
Whenever I do, it saves as xlsx without any macros or code

My experience with google docs is that the scripts are not able to be downloaded with the spreadsheet. There is a google sheets offline mode that might work. Download as excel is probably a no go though.

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I’ve just started using this and I’ve messed something up.

I start a game and I’m dealt a hand. I can see the 5 cards in the “Hand” area of State tab.
But when I go to the Generate template tab, click “Generate”, these 5 initial cards appear under “Next Hand” and the “Current Hand” area is empty.

I tried copying a card into the “Worker” cell, and that card did appear under “Worker” in the generated text. But the rest of the initial cards are still missing… Weird.

If I had to guess, you did not use the discard draw function. This function is the end of turn and auto.atically generates the post. The generate function is there to assist with correcting mistakes and should generally not be needed.

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Yes, I see now. It works as intended. Thanks a lot! For the fast reply and for the spreadsheet itself.

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added a small update for FFA. There is now a place to mark the next player name in turn order, and it will automatically add a tag to notify that player it is their turn. If there is no name, it won’t try to add a tag.

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My current company has firewall-ed most cloud-based services and it’s such a nuisance. Your spreadsheet is so good, that we’ll use it with my colleagues here, even though we actually have the physical game right next to us :smile:

Is it too much to ask for an offline version, probably in excel? How does it all work actually? Do the scripts connect to anything external…? If I somehow get my hands on a local copy would I be able to use the scripts in offline mode, as suggested earlier?

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I feel your pain, on the firewall thing. I have not actually tried using it offline. The scripts are similar but not exactly like VBA you would find in Excel macros, so converting it for excel would just be a matter of rewriting the Google script into VBA. As far as I know the Google script is stored within the Google sheet. There are no external calls beyond the sheet calling the script.

Edit:. A brief test suggests that the script is not available when in offline mode, so that appears to be a no go.

This is, of course, just an idle suggestion. The spreadsheet is fantastic enough as is. But since all the cards are already listed, I wonder if it’s possible to design a fourth tab that only shows the cards in the specs you’ve chosen, a la codexcarddb.com? This makes referencing your deck’s content much easier and really makes the spreadsheet into the ultimate do-all tool for Codex.

I could add a breakout of links specific to your codex and your opponents but it wouldn’t show anything beyond the link and the name.

+1 for this suggestion. I end up deleting all but the relevant columns from the third tab once I start a game already, so this seems like a natural fit to me.