Hello, and welcome to my (hopefully brief) guide on using the MetaSheets!
So what is MetaSheets? Well, it’s an evolution of a spreadsheet I’ve been using for years to create drop decks for various competitive leagues. It’s not fully automated or anything, but it helps organize things and lets team leaders plan out what to do. Just open it up and look to get a good idea of it – there’s already an “Example” page I made with a couple of decks to show what it does.
Before anything else, you’ve gotta make a new copy for you to use yourself – the link above is uneditable. Make a copy for yourself by going to File > Make a copy… > and then name it whatever you want. Of course, that also means you have to be signed into a Google Account. That should open up a new version for you. And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
There are 3 main tabs at the bottom that I made for the drop decks – 4v4, 8v8, and 12v12. I did this because they are the most common formats for leagues. These are intended to be templates – you right-click on the tab, hit duplicate, and then rename it to the name of the league (or whatever else) you’re using it for. This way you maintain an original copy to use for other leagues and the like. At least that’s the way I do it, I guess you could just keep the original MetaSheets spreadsheet as your own backup. To get a new copy of a tab from the original sheet into yours, right click on the tab’s name, hit Copy to…, and select the spreadsheet you want to move it to.
In each of these tabs, there are 10 individual places for drop decks to go. Each of these is divided into several sections, clearly labeled. The only places you need to actually change in here is the Title (default is “Drop Deck whatever”), the blank spots under the “Chassis” heading, the “Pilot” slots, the “Range” thingy, and everything under “Special Restrictions”. I like to rename the title to whatever the core rule is (like, 720 tons, or 2/2/2/2, or whatever) of the drop to keep things organized, but that’s all up to you. The slots under “Chassis” are where you just type in the name of the mech you need to put in there, and it’ll search through the variants. You can search in a few ways – there’s the obvious way to type “Atlas” to list all Atlases, or you could type in the chassis abbreviation (“AS7”) or which variant you want in particular (“D-DC”). You can’t search from the middle of the word, but from the start or any point after a hyphen it’ll work. Filling this in will auto-populate the “Tonnage” and “Build” sections with the tonnage of the selected mech (duh) and a Smurfy link for the default build (I’ll get into this later). Don’t mess with these cells yourself unless you know what you’re doing, it’s a very finicky formula. The “Pilot” slots you can fill in yourself, or have your teammates do on their own. This isn’t even really necessary I guess depending on what you’re using the sheet for, but it should help make it easier to know who’s in what mech and what’s still needed and all that crap. For “Range”, you can select one of the built-in things, or write in whatever you want. And under “Special Restrictions”…put in the ruleset of the league and any extra information relevant to the match, such as the map, whether you can use strikes, any chassis restrictions…just whatever you think is important.
In addition to the meat of the drop deck building stuff, there is a “Variants & Builds” sheet. This is where the spreadsheet pulls all of the information on the chassis, variants, tonnages, and builds. This sheet is editable because when new chassis/variants come out, you’ll have to add them. Just follow the existing format and you’ll be fine. I’ve already set these builds up in a build-a-thon (Part 1, Part 2). If you want your own builds to be auto-populated into the “Build” section in the drop deck tabs, you can edit the field for it in that tab yourself, but there’s a couple ways about this. The first is, if you want to make a certain build the “default” for a particular variant, you can replace its current Smurfy link with your own as listed next to it. But if you only want a build listed in certain circumstances, you can scroll down to the end of the default builds (should be around row 250, though that number will go up as new mechs get released), and make a custom build for it. I’ve already included a few competitive builds down there that you can use as a guide for adding your own entries.
That should be pretty much everything you need to know. If you’ve got any questions, get in touch with me on the MetaMechs forum or on Reddit.
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