Return to the Altar of Freedom rules

You may recall that around this time last year I was waxing lyrical about the Altar of Freedom ACW rules.  The only issue with them is that they are definitely not solo friendly, which is a bit of an issue in times of Covid isolation.  This has meant that I haven't been able to play a game since I bought the rules.  Which of course really annoyed me as it was an itch I couldn't scratch!  So I built a back scratcher to solve the problem.  If you don't know the rules the heart of the system is a bidding process where a player bids points to allow a division to activate.  Generals have a set of traits which impact the total number of points and in some cases how they can be used.  Points can be saved for a reserve action phase but cannot normally be shared between commands or passed on to the next turn.  Divisions activate in highest bid order but here is the thing.  The Army commander can use his points to control the turn clock.  The turn clock runs down by an amount determined by a dice roll after each set of activations and when it reaches zero the turn ends even if some divisions have not yet activated.  both sides roll a dice after the end of each activation and the player who controls the clock decides which one to use.  Its a neat system which simulates a general's limits to command and control his forces.  So how to make it solo friendly?

For those who don't know me, in real life, I work as a tax consultant which means I have more than a passing familiarity with Excel spreadsheets.  So I built a spreadsheet to generate semi-random action bids for the non player side in a solo game.  I say non random as I built in a bias based upon which division I determine the non playing side needs to prioritise.  In brief I enter the number of points a general has to bid for the turn, the number of points the Army commander wants to add to that total and the level of priority a division will receive (as a percentage).  At the start of the game I allocate a number of points to be bid for each priority every turn and set a minimum and maximum range for the random bid that will be added to that value.  There is some jiggery-pokery in the formulas to ensure that the maximum bids are not exceeded and each turn the spreadsheet churns out semi-random bids made up of my pre-set manually entered amounts and the spreadsheet's random additional bid.

It looks like this, sorry I can't show the formulas but if anyone wants to play with the Excel let me know and I will send a copy by email.  The yellow and green cells are where I enter values.  Green at the start of the game (these will not then change) and yellow for any changes during the game (although my current thinking is that the player bid for each divisional priority level will stay the same throughout).  All I have to do in game is allocate each division a priority level each turn and get the spreadsheet to update the random bids.  The screen grab above is the initial version,  I'm up to version 2 now having ironed some bugs in the way it totals up the points.  It looks the same but some of the formulas have been refined.

The only thing this spreadsheet doesn't do is focus on combined attacks by more than one division.  A player could allocate the same bid for two divisions so that they activate together this spreadsheet doesn't have an option to do that.  The current version is rather clunky as the total in the check box is calculated in a different way to everything else but I'm pretty sure that it does what I want.  All I need to do is test it to destruction to find any errors which needs me to actually play a game.