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Rill 
Postmaster General
Player Council - Geographer
Joined: 17 Jun 2011
Location: California
Status: Offline
Points: 7078
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 Posted: 23 Jan 2013 at 20:20 |
I don't have an opinion one way or the other about the ability to slow down trade units. However, I think giving the ability to slow down military or diplomatic units might be a bad idea.
In particular, use of slowing (or speeding up) military units would seriously compromise ability to plan defenses against attacks. It might be fun to have this ability (personally I think it would be fun the first 2-3 times and thereafter a giant headache), but to link it to prestige and make it a pay-only option doesn't seem consistent with the way prestige is usually designed to work in Illy.
Being able to slow down diplos is more of a meh -- slowing them down would mean it would be harder to track them on the way home, potentially, although there are ways to plan for that. I would love to be able to slow down scouts to just below the speed of my armies sometimes, to be able to send them at the same time and be able to get a scout report on what's on the square thereafter. Since diplos have limited visibility ranges anyway, the ability of a defender to time their arrival is not as much of a factor in gameplay.
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Eddy
Wordsmith
Joined: 29 Sep 2012
Location: Oslo, Norway
Status: Offline
Points: 122
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Posted: 24 Jan 2013 at 17:13 |
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When I'm in the city looking at a building or resource plot, I either get an "Upgrade" button or a text saying "Insufficient Resources". In the latter case, I have to look at the resource costs of the upgrade and compare them to my currently available resources to work out which are lacking. This could be made easier by, for example, greying out the ones that are sufficient or making the insufficient ones bold (or red).
It'd just make it that little bit easier to quickly assess what I need to do in order to be able to do the upgrade, or whether to forget about this one until later. Might also make me less likely to notice one lacking resource, send out vans to collect more of it and not notice, until later, which other resource is lacking !
Presumably, the code that worked out that the resources were insufficient did all the needed comparisons, so all that's needed is to propagate information from there to the styling. Might involve changing a boolean function "do I have what it takes ?" into a list-returning function "which resource-types are short ?" that returns an empty list for "we have all we need"; or a list ['wood', 'iron'] of those that'll need the "insufficient" styling.
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Eddy.
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Eddy
Wordsmith
Joined: 29 Sep 2012
Location: Oslo, Norway
Status: Offline
Points: 122
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Posted: 17 Feb 2013 at 12:45 |
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In Trade Markets, I'm shown which goods are available or sought; I can select one to see what offers to buy and sell are out there; but I can't find out what something is. For example, I see "Baleberries" in the tree-view on the left. I can select it; I'll be shown, in the split big box on the right, who's offering to buy and sell; but clicking on the picture of a cluster of baleberries doesn't get the drop-down saying what they are (I've never heard of them before), that I'd get anywhere else I'd see that picture (e.g. a scout mail, the Trade Movement tab).
Where the picture appears in the tree-view of possible goods, clicking already means "select", so it'd be unwise to complicate that, but once the item is selected a picture of it appears above that column, outside the box, which has no on-click action, so could sensibly be used to obtain the details display.
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Eddy.
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Eddy
Wordsmith
Joined: 29 Sep 2012
Location: Oslo, Norway
Status: Offline
Points: 122
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Posted: 18 Feb 2013 at 17:04 |
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One thing I'd really like, in the equipment tabs of the inventory, is a check-box to include equipment, that's currently in use by my military, in the totals shown in the inventory. (I'm not fussed whether this is limited to military at home or also includes those on manoeuvres.) I realise that stuff's not in the store-house, but keeping track of how much I have of what would be a lot easier with this. I'll probably change what my armies are equipped with before next I send them out, in any case; the totals with the check-box enabled wouldn't change while I'm doing so.
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Eddy.
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Eddy
Wordsmith
Joined: 29 Sep 2012
Location: Oslo, Norway
Status: Offline
Points: 122
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Posted: 18 Feb 2013 at 17:07 |
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In a not entirely dissimilar vein, I routinely lose track of how many diplo units are attached to my military. It'd be nice if the diplomatic orders tab (which is the actually useful table of what diplomatic units I have) had a column for "in army" along with the columns for "travelling" and "building".
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Eddy.
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Eddy
Wordsmith
Joined: 29 Sep 2012
Location: Oslo, Norway
Status: Offline
Points: 122
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Posted: 04 Mar 2013 at 11:10 |
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Another (very minor) improvement to the Fill Levels diagram in the Inventory of Resources tab: it can be a bit hard to keep track of how many zeros there are on the numbers along the y-axis, at the left. Is that "five followed by a lot of zeros" 50000 or 500000 ? The simple use of thousands-separators ("%'d" in printf() and derived APIs) would help (and be consistent with how you display numbers generally, at least in the Inventory): it's much easier to distinguish 50,000 from 500,000.
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Eddy.
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