User talk:WarDog Mike

Welcome

Welcome, WarDog Mike, to BattleTechWiki!

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Again, welcome to Sarna's BattleTechWiki!

*******Be Bold*******

-- New user message (talk) 02:33, 26 November 2015 (PST)

Hi

Hi and Hello, and welcome to Sarna! If you have any questions or wonder where to get started, feel free to leave a message on User talk:Doneve page, oh i moved your content from the Sandbox page to your own page. Hope to see you around!--Doneve (talk) 03:44, 26 November 2015 (PST)

Reformatting

Hiya WarDog Mike, I've taken the liberty to add some formatting to this page for readability while responding to your questions. hope you don't mind. Frabby (talk) 06:11, 28 November 2015 (PST)

I have no issue at all. I am completely new to this sort of thing so anything that you do to keep me clean and readable is fine with me.

Feedback: Great House articles

Alright...I kind of want to start by pointing out some issues I have with the site...(You said...Be Bold!!!) I am compiling information to create my own 3025 era sourcebook for my Battletech Campaign - A Time of War... The House Pages (i.e. House Kurita, and Davion, Steiner, Liao, and Marik respectively) DO NOT follow the same template...some have the sub heading called Fact Sheet...Marik or Liao does not have the reference at all, while Davion has more headings than Steiner, and much more than Kurita or the fourth house that actually has the heading.

I do not personally have the resources to correct these entries...but in all the editing you guys do...The first place new players will look is the factions pages... If they are not correct or complete, what does that say about the rest of the site? Thanks WarDog Mike

Thank you for your feedback. Seriously.
Sadly, all I can do at this point is to agree with you and request/suggest that once you have compiled your information you use it to give the articles a workover to improve them. I may look into editing those articles into a unified scheme myself at some point, but judging from what I have on my plate for this wiki alone, it won't be this year or next. Hopefully somebody else will take up the task. Frabby (talk) 06:11, 28 November 2015 (PST)

I remember that I tried to spearhead an effort to unify them a while back, but it ran out of steam and I got busy/distracted with other projects. You make a good point that it is somewhere that new players will look at first, which means it should have priority over the smaller, easier-to-complete projects that actually get done. I think that a thorough proofreading/rewriting should be done over the most important pages and then have consensus over how to re-organize them and possibly split them up. What does everyone think? -BobTheZombie (talk) 11:58, 29 November 2015 (PST)

The Davion Fact Sheet has the most information, though I personally feel it is too much. We can see the house symbol so describing it with words is immaterial. So that can be eliminated. I submit for your approval the list of what I feel should be included in all Fact Sheets.

• Founding Year: 2317
• Capital (City, Planet): New Avalon City, New Avalon
• Total (Inhabited) Systems: 434
• Estimated Population (3130): 1,302,000,000,000
• Government: Constitutional Aristocracy (Western European feudal stylings)
• Ruler: Prince Harrison Davion[24]
• Dominant Language(s): English (official), French, German
• Dominant Religion(s): Christianity (Interfaith Church), Buddhism, Judaism
• Unit of Currency: Pound (1 pound = 0.97 C-Bills/1.72 C-Bills (3145)[25])

Feel free to edit or format my info as necessary... - WarDog Mike

I realise I'm interjecting here, but I think if someone's going to start re-editing the Great House pages, it's going to need to be discussed fairly widely, because of the prominance of those articles. I suspect there's never been a project looking to unify the articles because of the scope of the work that'd be involved, but I'm pretty sure that Frabby and others would have opinions on how the article format should work.

I've done a bit of work to update the Great House page at various points, both through editing the pages themselves and expanding them with supplementary articles like the Davion Civil War article, but I think the original pages were imports from wikipedia, as was the case with a fair percentage of the founding pages when Nic first established the wiki.

As a general principle, we shouldn't put information in pages that ties those pages to a specific date, because if we do, then either someone has to keep updating the pages whenever there's a new update to a new date, or they're automatically out of date as soon as something changes. For most pages, we always try and work from the point of view of treating articles as historical articles viewed from a future date.

Information like current rulers, number of controlled systems, currency exchange rates and the like are invariably date-specific. If we tie an article to the Dark Age, then it becomes less useful for anyone looking to use it for earlier eras. What if someone's looking for information on the Star League Era? Or the Third Succession War? Information that can be tied to specific dates really belongs in a seperate article - the planets articles are an example of where we've tried to compromise, including information like details on rulers and populations tied to dates in the infoboxes, but that becomes unwieldy after a certain number of data points. For Great Houses that've been ruled by the same family for eight hundred years, there's no way all of the individual Presidents/First Princes could be listed coherently in an infobox. Sooner or later, things always change, too - the Draconis Combine has had at least two capitals (New Samarkand and Luthien); the Free Worlds League has two founding dates; almost all of the Successor States have had more than one ruling family... and so on. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 23:57, 30 November 2015 (PST)

Feedback: 3rd Succession War

I also use the entry for the 3rd Succession War as a start point for my players...Our current campaign will start in the year A.D. 3016 at the end of the 3rd Succession War at nagelring Academy on Tharkad... There is very little information concerning the battles or planets that exchanged hands during the war...I realize the War is 159 years long but most of the battle references seem to stop with the Deep Raid of 2987, with only a reference to the Archon's peace proposal to the Great Houses in 3020(or 3022, I am going from memory) Are the House Books not considered CANON for the timeline of the 3rd War? Thanks WarDog Mike

Sarna has articles for each individual year of BattleTech history, with notable events (hopefully) mentioned in those articles. The problem with timeline articles is the question of what level of detail it should entail. This is problematic for the Third Succession War in particular, as it is one of the most densely documented eras in the game with new content still added in on a regular basis. Any reasonably detailed timeline is bound to be one huge article. On the other hand, if only a broad overview is given then it may not be worth having such an article in the first place.
The old FASA House Books are canon, but over time many details turned out to be... wonky. Take information from these books with a grain of salt, as much of their content had to be corrected or clarified later on, not to mention some glaring omissions. Frabby (talk) 06:11, 28 November 2015 (PST)