Something has been bugging me about this book, and I haven't been able to figure out what until last night. It was the difficulty in keeping track of where everyone ended up. In FM:3145, there were those nice maps with the locations of the major military commands, and there were the tables in each faction section that had the basics of rating, strength, and quality. I found those to be really useful, but the FM's are a bit different than this book. However, I went to look at the 1SW and 2SW books to see if maybe they were the same way, since the format of Shattered Fortress reminded me a whole lot of those two books. Sure enough, both of those books and a couple pages of tables at the end with the same sort of basic deployment info as things stood at the end of the book. No pretty maps this time, but there was still the condensed info of the unit, where they were, Quality/Loyalty, strength, and equipment rating. In Shattered Fortress, this information only seems to exist in the fiction text and, partially, in the campaign maps. There is no condensed crunch table of "ok, here is where everyone ended up and what they look like at the moment." There was, at least, that sort of info included for the new combat commands that were added, but that's it.
Is this a huge omission? Not really. I can figure most of the important stuff like who got blowed up, and where did people end up at the end of 3150, it just isn't easily accessible like it was in some of the previous books. I would have appreciated a deployment table section like 1SW and 2SW had. The Maps in FM:3145 were really nice, but they required the rest of the crunch info to be put elsewhere, so I understand switching to the table format used in 1SW and 2SW. I'm sure creating those tables is more than just copy/pasting data from a spreadsheet, but I would have really appreciated that information. If you could add it back into IlClan, I think it would be worthwhile. Maybe do a before/after style like the Succession Wars books use with 3150 and 31-whatever-the-end-of-IlCLan-is. That way we can have access to the condensed info that wasn't included in Shattered Fortress as well as at the end of IlClan. That may not work so well, depending on the events of IlClan, but I'll take what I can get.
Anyone else miss the condensed deployment tables, or is it just me?
