Army Lists, Imported the Easy Way: A Quick Look at New Recruit Formats
A small quality-of-life win for army building
Sometimes the most exciting hobby news is not a new model or a dramatic battle report, but a tiny quality-of-life improvement that saves us time. This was exactly one of those moments.
While talking about army-building tools, Stas pointed out that a list format we were looking at was not some kind of free-form export — it was simply how New Recruit can generate rosters.
He dropped in an example like this:
Bert D'Huyvetter (Tsjagatai)
149 - Orc Bigboss, Great Weapon, Light Armour, General, Orc Boar Chariot, 2x Orc Crew
55 - 5 Goblin Wolf Rider Mobs, Shortbow, Reserve Move
120 - 18 Orc Mobs, Warbow, Light Armour, Shield, Boss, Standard Bearer
42 - 7 Orc Mobs, Warbow, Light Armour, Shield, Skirmishers
134 - 6 Orc Boar Boy Mobs, Cavalry Spear, Heavy Armour, Shield, Big Un's, Boss, Standard Bearer
And honestly, that kind of output is exactly the sort of thing we like to see when passing lists around between friends: readable, compact, and easy to copy into chat.
Why this matters
If you build armies with a group, you know the problem. Everyone uses slightly different tools, slightly different export styles, and sometimes a roster that makes perfect sense in one app becomes a wall of text everywhere else.
What caught our attention here is that New Recruit supports a whole bunch of popular formats. As Michał mentioned, it handles several of the most common ones. That is a very practical feature, especially when we are:
- sharing lists for feedback,
- checking whether a roster looks right after import,
- moving between tools,
- or just trying to post something readable in a group chat without formatting it by hand.
Good enough to test, good enough to use
Michał also mentioned that if some list does not fit well somewhere, we should let him know. We always appreciate that kind of approach: ship something useful, then improve it based on real lists and real edge cases.
That is especially important with Warhammer army building, because list formats are never quite as universal as we would like them to be. Different systems, different communities, different expectations — and then one weird unit entry appears and breaks the neat formatting.
So seeing support for many common formats is great, but seeing openness to fixing mismatches is even better.
Our takeaway
This was a short exchange, but a very relatable one for anyone who spends time tweaking rosters.
The headline for us is simple:
If a list export looks surprisingly clean, it might not be a custom free-form writeup at all — New Recruit may just already support that format.
And if something does not import or display properly, it sounds like there is room to improve it.
For us, that is exactly what we want from an army-building tool: not just making lists, but making them easy to share with other people.
Final thought
Army building always gets more fun when the tools stay out of the way. If New Recruit can cover a dozen or so popular formats and keep roster sharing painless, that is the kind of feature we will happily appreciate — even if it is not flashy.
Sometimes the real hobby upgrade is just spending less time wrestling with text exports and more time talking about whether that Orc Bigboss really needed a chariot.