Saturday 22 January 2011

Traveltime Calculator

Traveltime calculator is an excel file calculating for you lots of things and saving your precious time for more interesting stuff. Many people find it very helpful and easy to use.

I made it very simple (you need to have really basic knowledge of excel to be able to put information into cells), marked correct boxes/cells with colors and wrote a simple 4 steps instruction so you know what and where to type. Once you are familiar with it, you will not regret as it will save a lot of your time when planning attacks from many cities. It takes literally 5 minutes maximum to plan attacks from 20-30 cities (depends how quickly you can check travel times in the game and copy them into the spreadsheet).

This is how it looks like:



All you have to do is to type your desired ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) in only 1 cell (yellow one) and then travel times for each of your cities (grey cells). After that the spreadsheet will calculate for you all your times at which you should send your army for each city! (they are shown in green cells) 
It has a quick and full mode - in the yellow box you can type only an hour or the full date with an hour if your travel times are 24h+ and you might mix up days of sending.

All timings are calculated for GMT 0 but I added most popular ones like -5, -6 +8 and an extra box where you specify your real life time zone. So a quick look and you know at what time of the day your enemy will be hit or will be able to see incoming attacks. That can help you to plan better your attacks if you know your enemy real life time zone. Ther is also Your GMT part in which you can type your own GMT if its not already there.

Once you type in your desired ETA and all travel times under each city you will see times at which you have to send your army. However to make things easier all these timings are shown in the next table, which looks like this:

The right one shows exactly the same timings as the left one but in the chronological order.

Dont worry all instructions are in the file and its a straightforward operation. Now all you have to do is to write down this information on a piece of paper and keep it with you or next to your computer to control at what time and from where send a wave :)

If you find any problems or errors please inform me about them so I could fix it. I hope it will help you all. For guys with 20+ cities it definitely will ;)

TO DOWNLOAD CLICK LINK BELOW

Version 97-03





27 comments:

  1. i mnot really sure how can I help you here - Ive done everything to make it as simple as possible, ie colored boxes, added "info" sheet to the document which explains each box...
    I dont know what confuse you so cant help. Ive just downloaded it on my computer from here, changed the Travel Time of the first city to 35:00 (hrs) and it did recalculate my "Start Time" properly to 9:00, so it does work.

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  2. Looks really nice and so far it seems to be functioning correctly. Haven't had a real-world test yet, but I can't imagine how it could go wrong. It's pretty simple stuff really, just nice to have it all laid out like this (and without all these papers evidencing my poor math skills crowding my desk). Thanks for all your hard work!

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  3. This is everything but its not simple:/ Man come on,... you must be programer or something because your brain thinks this is the simple as it could get:/ Its confusing, not very good sort out, everything is marked with time zones, there are no simpler things like City1,city2,travel time00:34:56...you made a mess that only you can understand:/..some wise man said, you are not smart if you have a lot of knowledge ,you are smart when you know how to transfer you knowledge to everyone:/...I respect your effort you put in this but...:/

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    1. I dont know why you have to refer to my intelligence here, its low... anyway I will answer your post:
      When I was playing Grepolis I needed a lot tool that would make all my calculations instant, so I dont have to spend hours planning all my attacks. Ive created an excell sheet to help me with that - it worked. Then decided to help other people so I "upgraded" my oryginal sheet into this one here.

      I put effort and time, colored boxes, wrote instructions what to do point by point etc so other people could save some time. IF this is not simple/clear enough for you then just dont use it but please dont refer again here to my "smartness", its rude and you disrespect my effort by making such comments. In all honesty, I think you didnt put enough effort to try to understand the sheet, read instructions and there are no ready solutions/pills for that. Why I think that? Cus many people used these sheets and thanked me for them and they were not programists (maybe had basic knowledge of excell).

      Last thing - I dont know how "simplier" I could put City1, city2 (these are names of cities) or travel times 00:34:56 (time is counted in hours, minutes and seconds), time zones are there cus people play in this game from different parts of the world, there are australians, americans, europeans...Time zones are there to make things easier for them so they see it in their real life time and not server time which confuses people - I know it, as I organised many operations and people were sending waves at the wrong time killing our own units.

      Bottom line, you cant figure it out then just dont use it and find your own way to organise your waves. I made this blog to help players, not to please everyone...

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  4. OK, first of all, AM SORRY in general.Second, am sorry because i refer to your intelligence(..actually i didn't, but nevermind am sorry)Third thing, yes you were right, i didn't put so much effort to understand, and sorry again:/..Last but not least YES i wrote comment like a total JERK!:( am not proud:(...After reading your comment i thought a little bit and wanted to see why did it hurt you so much(i understand now don't worry)i run your sheet one more time... After 2minutes of reading i figure it out that it was very simple....BUT......man,first reaction is first reaction!!! ..it just isn't pleasant for eye:/...you will maybe now think:"It's not pleasant for eye?" hahahha he is so stupid"":/ but for someone, and for the first reaction it is the most important thing which will decide is this what i should be trying to figure out or not:/...your table for calculating isn't rounded with border so you could know what is what, where it starts, where it ends:/...as a matter a fact when i opened sheet for the first time i was suspicious:"wait was the download successful or should i try to restart excel" ....This is what cause me to write such a comment(but i shouldn't put it up that way i know)...am just trying to say to you now, that stuff like that make big difference and are very important, especially when you make introduction like this:(quote:*I made it very simple, marked correct boxes/cells with colors*) and when someone opens it: *BAM(thinking:numbers, letters, where is what, where is the table, borders,???)!!!...ou wait it didn't load up so good, let me try again...BAM o.O...ou i see:( it's just put up that way o.O.... well it's not "marked correctly" as he said:/*...........but yes, when you know it(better like i did the first time) it is extremely useful!...I will pass on link to your blog and this sheet, first of all because it is useful and also because i want to see how many people will have the same reaction like me(am curios):/

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    1. Your comment didnt hurt me at all - I just found it "trollish". Regarding the first impression someone might get from seeing my sheet, you might be right, that for some people it will look "messy", however as you realised if you look closer its organised in such a way that you dont have to scroll 100 pages to get information you need.
      People who are organised like me, will always try to find a quicker way of doing some repetetive tasks and I assumed that if I was ready to spend extra time to prepare this sort of help, other people like me would not mind spending extra 30 minutes trying to figure it out - after all its an investment which gives us back lot of time (which otherwise we would waste in the future). If it was a "product" that i try to sell I would spend more time making it "customer" friendly, but its not the case. Practical side was more important to me than how it looks.

      Hope other people will find it useful as well.

      Delete
  5. Replies
    1. Try to make a full sentence and I will answer your question.

      Delete
  6. This is so easy to use. If you have played Grepolis for a while and manually worked it out then this sure does come in handy and is very easy to understand. I figured it out within 2 minutes without even reading the instructions. Good Job

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  7. Just another thing I picked up. From city 2 onwards the GMT-5 and all other minus time zones actually adds then and does not substract them. I manually fixed it. Not a big problem

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    1. Thank you for making me aware of that! Only the first row was calculating gmt-5 (and other GMTs as well). I fixed all of them, added some extra few lines of instruction and set up again ETA box as some people were getting "wrong value" message.

      The problem was that some people try to input date and time in the wrong field (Insert Function (Fx)) instead of provided Yellow box/cell. Also if date was typed in the wrong format it would produce error (dd/mm/yy).

      Now you can download fixed version and there should be no more errors. I tested many different combinations, adding 24,48 or 76 hrs and everything works perfectly.

      PS make sure to use the Sorting tool as it also saves quite a lot of time

      Delete
  8. IS GMT the same as UTC?

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    1. Just in case if sombodey missed my answer below:
      In casual use, GMT is the same as UTC

      Delete
  9. As much as i admire everything you were doing in grepo, and still are doing for grepolis, i never came to love your travel calculator.. I'm using the one originally shared by jimmyisoff2camp, with some modifications made by datester and myself: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As2CghhTKUwrdFJqeWZMaW15T1NRbXNxWUNWTDdKSFE#gid=0

    If you ever wanted to discuss it, you know where to find me ;)

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    1. @Anonymous
      In casual use, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the same as UTC

      @wellagain
      We had a nice talk today on that thingy. You know all my concerns. Just make people aware that they need to be logged on their google accounts to be able to save it.

      Thank you for providing an alternative tool, maybe some people will find it more practical for them. However I must say I dont see much difference between these two - jimmyisoff2camp is almost the same. Yours can be seen online while mine demands moving it over (by saving in attachments in mailbox) if you want to use it at work or at phone.

      I remember jimmyisoff2camp first version when I was still playing and it was bad, it didnt have many of the options this version has - you made it better? This is why I decided to make my own one. Now I see its fixed but looks like mine...

      As you explained your version has an extra function and as we agreed :D you will writen an instruction how to use it and we can post it here so people have alternative and decide which tool they feel more comfortable with. So Im waiting... :)

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    2. As i hate to make other people wait, i've just emailed you my instructions ;)

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    3. Ok its done I will post it on my page in the Advanced Guide tab just next to my planner. Thanks :)

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    4. I am glad my earlier work was useful in helping create a new tool.

      -jimmyisoff2camp

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  10. Your a big help G.R.O.M! Are you still active in Grepolis?

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    1. Thank you. Im not really active at the moment - real life duties dont allow me just now. I only have 1 little city which I use to observe how things change, inlcuding 2.0, which never came to my old server. So atm Im more like a sim city player somewhere there ;)

      Delete
  11. hello GROM .I've just downloaded your spreadsheet and as i was testing and learning it i thought about how times in grepolis are not exactly accurate as they seem sometimes to go back or forth of the ETA by +-10 sec maximum.Does your time calculator gets this factor in account?

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    1. Hi,
      no it does not. The anti-timer mechanism can add or take up to 30 seconds and its a random factor, no real point of adding it to the calculator. The spreadsheet will help you to get times like "hour:minute" which is close enough to plan your attacks and organise them - you just need to log into the game few minutes before.

      If you are interested how I used to deal with this randomizing factor read my guide "Conquering cities Part 1 - Timing waves"
      http://grepolis-pro.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/conqering-citites-part-1-timing.html

      Delete
  12. Now i know i never knew how to play.

    so much thanks!

    -an dutch grepolis player

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  13. Handy little spreadsheet, thanks :)

    One possible improvement: in the table with the list of cities and there start times. Instead of referencing the cities using =B25, =B29, etc, you can put the following formula in to cell N30 and then just copy it down:

    =OFFSET($B$25,(ROW(A1)-1)*4,0)

    This returns the list of cities, you can do something similar for the times. These makes adding extra cities less tedious, especially when you have a lot of cities.

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  14. Greetings,

    Just downloaded this tool and on first look i thot it was gonna take a long time to understand the tool and I need to do a lot of work to get it working..but reading it thoroughly with your instruction set..oh man..this is a bloody simple tool..i dont need hours to plan..i have cordinated an attack on this one with 5-10 mins..bloody good..appreciate it

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  15. As a new player I really really appreciate all the hard work you've put into organizing this tutorial! You rock!!

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  16. Thanks so much! incredibly helpful!

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