Wording glitches in some in-game texts
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Topic: Wording glitches in some in-game texts
Posted By: Eddy
Subject: Wording glitches in some in-game texts
Date Posted: 01 Nov 2012 at 21:43
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Ceramic Magic completion mail: "... he is happy to drop of a hefty pouch of coins ..." that use of "of" should be "off" ! Miner's Guild, Skinner's Guild, etc. (any building with an apostrophe in its name); if I select the building, my browser tab displays its name in the title bar; and you've used ' instead of a plain old apostrophe - which really is the legitimate semantics of ' in ASCII - so I see "Miner's Guild" in my title bar instead of "Miner's Guild". (Just in case this web-form digests character codes; that's "Miner's Guild", with the "ampersand hash thirty-nine" clearly visible.) Tormand information mail: on the legend's surrounding the founding of the mine, the mail says "Their story has many fanciful details about wresting mountain trolls and securing the land by ..." and I can believe "wresting" (with no ell in it) the land from its former owners involved "wrestling" (with an ell in it) some of them, but I think you have a typo ! Your spell-checker didn't spot it because the error leaves a valid word, just not the right one to use here. A Herd Day's Night (2/2) Completed: Gregor pays "with 6 of his best heads of cattle" - I'm fairly sure rural usage of "head" would phrase that as "with 6 head of his best cattle" - as if cattle were a continuous resource rather than a discrete one, and "head" doesn't go to a plural. Ask an actual farmer or stockman, though. (Alternatively, "with 6 of his best cattle" is definitely just fine.) Foundry, Kiln, Carpentry: "Increasing the efficiency [...] will see a steady increase in [resource] production at the rate of 2% per hour per level." If only that were literally true ! Increasing it by 2% (not per hour, just one-off) means increasing the hourly production by 2% of what I'm producing each hour; the rate of production is in units/hour, so 2% of it is also in units/hour; doing that *each hour* would be a rate of *acceleration* of production. [If a vehicle's speed is increasing at 10% per hour, on a base speed of 10 km/hr, then it's accelerating at 1 km/hr/hr; the speed is 10 km per hour, 10% of it is thus 1 km per hour; 10% *per hour* of it is thus 1 km/hr/hr, an acceleration, not a one-off change in speed.] Say I'm producing the relevant resource at 100 units / hour; if I increase that by 2% (e.g. by having the relevant facility at level 1), I'll be producing at 102/hour. If I increase it by 2% *per hour* then, after the first hour, I'll have 102/hour; after the second 104/hour, after the third 106/hour, etc.; after fifty hours, I'll have doubled output, without even getting past level 1. You actually just mean that leveling up the facility increases production by 2% per level. Skip the "per hour" ! (... or change the phrasing to "at the rate of 2% of the hourly production per hour per level" ... nah.) There are similar spurious uses of "% per hour" elsewhere. ------------- Eddy. |
Replies:
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 01 Nov 2012 at 22:02
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Sure enough, the web-form did interpret the character entities; the just-in-case version of the "Miner's Guild" is what I actually see in the browser-tab as page title. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Chaos Armor
Date Posted: 01 Nov 2012 at 22:03
| If you haven't already I would suggest that you fill out some petitions. These grammatical errors and misspellings are considered low priority as far as petition ranking goes, so I wouldn't expect an answer anytime soon. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 02 Nov 2012 at 13:38
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I considered them so low-priority that I didn't want to clutter the petition system with them - if they get picked up here, that'll be great. If they go unnoticed here, meh, I'll live. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 02 Nov 2012 at 14:59
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Thank you for helping us proofread. ;) Petitions won't be necessary. This is fine. Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk 
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Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 02 Nov 2012 at 15:18
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May I be ultra-pedantic and suggest that the cited example be Miners' Guild, because "Miners" is plural. -------------  |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 11:42
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(I'm not so fussed about whether a guild belongs to each miner or to all of them. An inn called "Traveller's Rest" is indeed a rest for any traveller to come along; while the "Travellers' Rest" is equally validly announcing that all travellers are welcome. If you're a miner join your guild, the Miner's guild (you are a a singular miner and it's yours); all miners are members of their guild, the Miners' guild.) One more: on creating a new city, I get a mail that tells me (inter alia) "To switch between your cities, you will now have a second city listed on a City drop-down menu" even when it's my third city. Replacing "a second" with "another" would work for all. On the other hand, the wording is kinda funky. "To switch between your cities, use the City drop-down menu" situated where it is; and maybe add a next sentence saying "Each city you found gets added to this menu." but I'm not convinced it's needed; calling it "the City drop-down menu" covers that just fine. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 14:42
| If it is a guild FOR miners rather than a guild BELONGING TO miners, then miners is an adjective describing the guild rather than a possessive and there should be no apostrophe at all. E.g., there were multiple merchants guilds in the Middle Ages. The miners guild is a place where miners hang out. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 18:17
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I dunno, a sty for pigs is a pig-sty, so perhaps a guild for miners is a miner-guild, but I make no sense at all of a "miners guild" with neither apostrophe nor hyphenation. I can invent (grammatically valid) justifications for both "miner's guild" (the guild calls itself that to remind each miner that it's her guild as much as any other miner's; it belongs to each miner) and "miners' guild" (the guild calls itself that to emphasise its collective nature; it belongs to the miners, all together), expressing the two aspects of the guild belonging to the miners "jointly and severally"; but a "miners guild" just looks ungrammatical to me. I'm fairly sure it was more usual, historically, for a guild to take the collectivist view of its nature, hence to be called "Miners' guild"; but I'm not going to tell someone they're "wrong" to call it a "Miner's guild" if they want to; as I say, I can see what justification they can come up with for that, entirely within the grammar I'm used to, so I see no reason to grumble at their doing so, even if they are being unorthodox. You might be able to point to lots of usage (that'd probably make my old school-teachers spin in their graves) matching your approach, to render "miners guild" (with no apostrophe) a valid usage (from the linguistic pragmatic perspective - if your readers understand you, you've committed no foul); but that doesn't make "miner's guild" invalid (indeed, I'm sure all players understand that just fine), it just increases the number of valid ways of saying the same thing (and arguably declares use of the apostrophe for possessives to be getting archaic; get with the time's, grandpa, apostrophe's are used for plural's these day's, possessive's don't need it). Feel free to write "miners guild" when you write it, but I can't agree with you telling others they're "wrong" to use "miner's guild" if they so wish. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 18:21
Anyway: another glitch in wording, this time in the description of Break Trade Embargo. After a preamble, it says:
So the market contributes 1.5% per level; the first Trade Office contributes 1% per level; the second .5% per level, the third .25% per level, etc.
I entertain the delusion that I understand you so far; 20 levels of Market worth 1.5% each yield a total of 30%.
Here's where it all goes awry. You haven't said anything about what level the Trade Offices are (or, indeed, the Market; but I can assume it's the same one just mentioned). To pick up the remaining 52.5% I need all of my Trade Offices to add up to nearly twice what my market contributes; but infinitely many Trade Offices would still only contribute 2% per level, so can't get beyond 40%, for a total (with the Market) of 70%. With just three of them, all at level 20, I see 1.5+1+.5+.25 = 3.25% times 20 for a 65% (not 82.5%) chance of getting past the blockade.  Did it in fact mean that we get an extra 1.5% per level of Market, on top of the 1% that Blockade Running gave us; and, likewise, an extra 1% per level of Trade Office on top of that from Blockade Running ? That'd give 2.5% per level of Market, so 50% from 20 levels, with 2%, 1% and 0.5% from each of the Trade Offices, which can easily account for the remaining 12.5% if they're of suitable levels (e.g. 5, 2 and 1); but the text quoted above says quite clearly that the increase leaves us with "a total of" 1.5% per level of Market and 1% per level of Trade Office. So that doesn't seem plausible. If these were compounded interest payments, I might believe you apply factors of 1.3 (market's 30% increase), 1.2 (first Trade office's 20%), 1.1 (second, 10%) and 1.05 (third, 5%) for a grand 1.8018, but that's still only 80-and-a-bit percent, not 82.5% and these aren't compounded increases on a base value, so that doesn't seem to be what you mean. Perhaps what you really mean is the probability of being intercepted is a product of 0.7 (1 minus 30% from the Market), 0.8 (1 minus 20% from the first Trade Office), 0.9 (1 minus 10%) and 0.95 (1 minus 5%), but that gives me 0.4788 = 1-.5212 so a 52.12% chance of getting past. Or 0.7 (1 minus 30% from Market) times 0.65 (1 minus 20%, 10%, 5% from three Trade Offices) = 0.455, a 54.5% chance of escape. So neither of those matches. I can't work it out, so I've no idea what's going on with this example: before I read it, I thought I understood how this worked, after reading this example I'm confused ! The example should definitely say how much the market and each trade office, separately, is contributing to the total; that would be clearer ! As it is, you haven't shown your working, so I can't see what I'm misunderstanding and have to suspect you've worked it out wrongly. ------------- Eddy. |
This raises the chance of getting past a hostile Blockade to a total of 1.5% per level of Market and 1% per level of Trade Office. (If you have more than one Trade Office, each subsequent building provides only half the effect of the previous one.)Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 18:35
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Oh, and I notice you speak of "multiple merchants guilds". I always cackle at such use of "multiple. It is well-established (i.e. as valid as anything in this lovely creole we speak) but I rather regard "multiple" as the generaliser of "double", "triple" and so on; so a multiple merchant is a double merchant, triple merchant or so on (whatever that might mean) and a multiple guild is a double guild (perhaps of quarrying and masonry), triple guild, etc.; each is a multiple guild and more than one such would be multiple guilds; indeed, several multiple guilds. The generaliser I'm used to for two (as opposed to double), three (not triple), four and so on is "several" (which, just to be archaic, used to have another meaning we'd now express by "separate", which is how the legalese "jointly and severally" comes about) rather than "multiple". The only "multiple language" I know of is "double-Dutch" (a mythical language even harder to make sense of than Dutch), so that's what I think of when someone claims to speak "multiple languages", although I can only think of this one multiple language. ... but that's just how I use and read the words, I'm not going to claim you're "wrong" to use it that way. I just reserve the right to cackle out loud at the imagery your choice of language conjures up in my warped mind. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: DeathDealer89
Date Posted: 12 Nov 2012 at 18:38
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1.5% per lvl of market place, lvl 20 market place = 30% 1% per lvl of 1st trade office = 20% .5% per lvl of 2nd trade office = 10% .25% per lvl of 3rd trade office = 5% Yea I get 65% but honestly I had no idea what you were you were saying until I did the math myself.
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Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 20 Nov 2012 at 18:38
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DeathDealer89: algebra is my zeroth language - I have an unfortunate tendency to take for granted that readers shall do any math that may be needed, without me having to labour the point. In this case, the target audience is developers; I'm guessing they can cope. More wording glitches: Blights claim to act "at this city". Geomancy spells come in sets of three, conferring benefits "to this city", "in another city" and "in any city". It's clear what that means. However, with the exception of Carrigen's Infestation (which says nothing about which city it affects) all the Blights describe themselves as acting "at this city". It might be better to phrase that as "in any city" or "in targeted city" or similar, rather than reusing phrasing that, for geomancy, is clearly used to mean the spell affects the city that casts it - blights would be pretty useless if that were their only use ! (I know it can be beneficial to cast a mild blight on one's own city, affecting a resource of which it has a surplus anyway, to obstruct enemy attempts to blight a critical resource; but this would be valueless if the enemy couldn't cast the blight on my city in the first place, because it's not their city and their cities can only cast the spell on themselves !) In a mail reporting the outcome of a battle in hilly terrain: "Large hills such as this are difficult for attacking mounted units, but provide opportunities for ranged to unit to show their worth." There's an extra "to" in there. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 29 Nov 2012 at 09:16
Not so much a wording glitch as a communication oddity: on upgrading to sovereignty II, I get two mails:
Sending two mails to say the same thing is, in any case, silly; but having one of them talk about "re-establishing" a claim makes it sound like that claim was lapsing, or something. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Darkwords
Date Posted: 04 Dec 2012 at 14:27
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Trying to claim sov without the research gives the following message To claim Sovereignty you must (at least) have both the skills <i>Serfs</i>, <i>Landholding</i> and <i>Socage</i> - all of which can be found in the City research category. Other than the use of 'both' for three research skills, these skills are found in teh Sovereign research category, not the City one. |
Posted By: Darkwords
Date Posted: 04 Dec 2012 at 14:28
At least learn to spell if you are criticising the devs wording...... idiot  |
Posted By: Kabu
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2012 at 22:41
| Spotted in a report: "Green Anacondas" but "Yellow Anacodas" (missing 'n'). |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2012 at 21:03
A fine malapropism in a battle report, on Small Forest terrain:
Now go look up "provenance" in a dictionary. It's where something comes from. I suspect you meant "province", although it's not quite the word I'd have chosen ! ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Kabu
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2012 at 22:56
| Maybe they meant the best footsoldiers come from wooded areas? |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 07 Jan 2013 at 03:12
In the Research Discoveries (Eye) page, when a category has no discovery yet, it says so: except that, in the last, it gets the name wrong, reusing the previous one's text verbatim:
I suspect a cut-and-paste should have been followed by an edit ... ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 15 Jan 2013 at 14:02
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In the text-box that pops up when I click on an image of a cotter in a mail (it probably shows up in other places, too), there's quite a nice discussion of what they can do and the perils attendant on them; but it neglects to mention that they can (with the right research) gather military equipment from a battlefield. I guess that text didn't get updated when you added that feature. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 15 Jan 2013 at 14:26
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When I'm putting together a Trade Order, if I've typed too big a number for one of the types of goods I'm sending, once I try to send the consignment, I get a pop-up that says "Unable to complete request" and "You do not have this quantity of goods to send from this location." When the order consists of a dozen different kinds of things, each with different quantities, this is an unhelpful message: the code that decided to send it surely does know for which type(s) of goods I've typed too big a number, so it could actually tell me that, rather than leaving me to read through the list checking every single one. Better yet, the form could (as I'm typing it) put a red box round any number I type that's more than I have of the relevant resource, just as it makes the number of vans needed go red when it's more than I have. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 15 Jan 2013 at 18:27
| This topic seems to have veered into the range of "suggestions and enhancements" rather than "technical support." I suggest posting in that area. |
Posted By: Kabu
Date Posted: 15 Jan 2013 at 22:32
| Maybe one of the devs could move the whole thread there so we can keep it all together in the same place? |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 15 Jan 2013 at 22:40
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It's fine. It can stay here. Thanks. Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 17 Jan 2013 at 19:51
I attempted to claim sovereignty on a square (one step East of my third city) having only researched Serfs and Landholding, not Socage. The message displayed was
in which the names of the researches did not appear in italic; they appeared with the would-be italic-tags as plainly visible text (less than, i, greater than, etc.; preview faithfully shows the quote as it appeared in-game). The phrasing "both the skills" followed by a list of anything but two skills (three are listed here) would upset my old English teacher. This use of "both" is superfluous. This message would, naturally, be better if it explicitly identified which of the researches involved I've missed out. In a city (my fifth) with none of these researches, if I go to the City Map's Sovereignty tab, I'm told (inter alia)
------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 21 Jan 2013 at 18:11
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Another cut-and-paste suspect: Trade Overview has two boxes at the bottom for "Top Import Trade Partners" and "Top Export Trade Partners". When a city has yet to do any trade, they both say "You have no Trade Imports" where, presumably, one of them should say "Exports" rather than "Imports" at the end. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 24 Jan 2013 at 01:27
When I send an army to occupy a square: on their arrival, I'm sent an in-game mail whose Subject is:
The noun "occupation" starts with a vowel, so the appropriate indefinite article is "an", not "a". ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 24 Jan 2013 at 13:13
When I complete an upgrade to a sovereign structure, I get a mail reporting the structure's new level in digital form, e.g.
------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 25 Jan 2013 at 16:05
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In the "Sovereignty Held by this Town" tab, with my Armourer's fold open, the "Sovereign Structure Details" tell me the upkeep includes as much food as any of the other basic resources. Below this, the "Sovereign Structure Build Options" box shows what an upgrade would cost me, along with the upgraded structure's resource costs: but it doesn't mention the food. While the cost of building the upgrade may involve no food, the cost of running after the upgrade certainly does: this should surely be shown ! ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 26 Jan 2013 at 06:12
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In Notifications: When my herbalists are interrupted, I'm told they "were interrupted at [X|Y] in Region and were unsucessful in their mission and are returning home." This misspells unsuccessful (the "c" should be doubled) and over-uses "and"; the first could sensibly be replaced by "so". When my trader's city sent a suit of plate to the city my trader's in, I got two (identical) notifications of its arrival. (Furthermore, their mention of the Hub's location is a link whose menu includes "Send Army", among other options I don't normally get in connection with a Hub.) ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 30 Jan 2013 at 12:14
Sovereignty Held by this Town, under Location Details:
The phrasing appears to mean the +5% doesn't apply to the Bowyer (rather, to all other structures) when, in fact, it does (the Bowyer gets 8% per level, I now know from experiment). Simply dropping the word "other" would make this more truthful. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2013 at 13:35
When I demolish a cottage:
A cotter can't be in a town offer or in a hub, so mentioning those in the text is rather pointless. For that matter, mentioning the 0 building is also pretty pointless. If the text only mentioned the activities with non-zero counts, it'd be terser and thus easier to read. In python, with suitable datastructures, I'd write a function along the lines of:
------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 15 Feb 2013 at 23:18
In a similar vein to my 2013 Jan 17 at 20:51 follow-up, and almost certainly from the same root cause, I see that attempting to claim higher level sovereignty, when reporting that I haven't done the relevant higher level research, displays angle-bracketed text around the research name instead of formatting it:
------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Mayflower
Date Posted: 16 Feb 2013 at 10:29
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I had failed to notice many of these errors before reading your posts. Now that you've pointed them out, they seem rather obvious. Thanks for bringing them to light! ------------- http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/a/p/105635" rel="nofollow"> 
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Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 17 Feb 2013 at 12:17
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@Mayflower: sorry if making errors more visible causes pain ! Another "HTML leaking through" instance: Trade Hub Inventory, when I have selected a hub in the drop-down, the description of the hub has visible HTML in it, instead of actually acting on the mark-up:
It is, in any case, better (as it accurately expresses the semantics) to use P rather than (any number of) BR to split text into paragraphs. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Mayflower
Date Posted: 18 Feb 2013 at 13:43
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Eddy I was just thanking you for trying to make the game better :) Though it's true that whenever I play Illy now I'm always trying to spot the mistakes :P ------------- http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/a/p/105635" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 02 Mar 2013 at 11:50
On the Military Commanders tab, I'm always offered the Create New Commander box; and, even when I can't create more commanders, it either tells me
When I need another research before I can recruit another commander, this form should tell me that, rather than offering me the means to promote a commander, only to disappoint me with an "I'm sorry, I can't do that" message when I try. When I've got five commanders, it should say that I can't recruit more commanders. When I can recruit a new commander, the present message and form are appropriate, although they would benefit from a simple line of text telling me "You can currently recruit %d new commanders." with the appropriate number in place of %d. The message quoted above, furthermore, neglects the other way I can get a unit to promote: namely, returning one to the city's pool from some army. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 11 Mar 2013 at 17:50
OK, not so much "wording", this one, but consistency about use of icons. In the diplomatic reports on quests that kill scouts, the text ends with the death-toll, expressed like (e.g. from Where Did All The Children Go?):
------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 23 Mar 2013 at 13:47
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On a sovereign square with no structure, the "Sovereign Structure Build Options" box gives times in seconds, e.g. 180 or 600, instead of using the usual days-hours-minutes-seconds notation used everywhere else, e.g. 3m or 10m. There is no indication that the times are in fact in seconds (it just gives a number in a column headed "Time", it says 180, not 180s), so I only discovered this by experiment. It would clearly be better to use the same notation for times as is used everywhere else in the game UI. Once a sovereign structure has something built on it, the corresponding box is somewhat reorganised (it no longer needs radio-boxes to select which structure to build, there's only one structure so you can either build it up or knock it down), but it still has a Time column, in which it does use the usual notation. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 23 Mar 2013 at 14:39
Further investigation reveals that, in fact, there really is no food cost to the upkeep of sovereign structures, regardless of what the Details box claims. On the "Resource Production and Consumption" tab, the other basic resources have a deduction for "Sovereignty Upkeep" (along with similar for (at least) Trade Office, Runemaster's Grounding and Geomancer's Retreat, when applicable; all of these get mentioned in the "Others" box, which has no entry for sovereign structures), but food does not. In one of my cities, I'm currently building up a Renderer, which claims to have a food upkeep cost: but the city's food deficit stood at -154 before I started building the Renderer (this city has enough food stored to endure a few hundred in deficit for years) and that hadn't changed when Renderer I completed (with an alleged food cost of 150, that should have taken my deficit to 304). So I think the the "Sovereign Structure Details" table is simply lying, probably as a consequence of matching the form of the "Location Details" table immediately to its left. It's nice and pretty and all, but it's wrong. Either that or you have a bug and are failing to take into account the food costs of sovereign structure upkeep. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 26 Mar 2013 at 07:00
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On sending a messenger to recall an army, I get an IGM whose first line looks like: "Your messenger from City arrived at [@l=123|456|7." It fails to close the square brackets, so the @l token isn't rendered as the location-link that was intended. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 10 May 2013 at 13:18
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There are inconsistencies in how different buildings report the benefits that result from upgrading them. It's OK that some say "this much per level" in the text (when it's that simple) while others state the present and next levels' benefits in the summary table, but I see at least two ways (that look the same but have different semantics) of doing the latter's "at next level" part and several buildings that do neither. I'm upgrading my Cancery of Estates from level 3 to level 4. It says: "Decrease cost of sov by +6%" and "At next level +4%". (Elsewhere, another that's not being built reports "At next level +2%".) First, a decrease by "+6%" is oddly (though technically validly) phrased; a + usually means an increase. Worse, because it has the same form as the next level's value, the latter appears to mean "we'll be decreasing cost of sov by +4% at next level" which isn't as good as where I am - why am I levelling up ?! - where I suppose it means we'll be decreasing the cost of sov by 10% (i.e. (6+4)%) at next level. Giving the change, relative to present level, in the decrease in cost is confusing and different from other buildings, e.g. the Flourmill reports "Food production bonus +18%" and "At next level +20%" (not the +2% difference, as the chancery reports). I think it would make sense to say: "Decrease cost of Sov by 6%" and "Decrease cost of Sov by 10%" without the + and giving the final value: that's closer to what other buildings do for increases, except that I think it's best to drop the "+" when talking about a decrease - it's superfluous and, in this case, confusing. Alternatively, simply omit this information from the summary area: the text above makes quite clear that the benefit is 2% per level, in any case. I see the Geomancer's Retreat and Runemaster's Grounding (both increases) do also report the change from level to level, instead of the benefit I'll enjoy at the next level. I can hazard a guess that the various units' quarters (rest, repose, somnolence, etc.) might do the same, but I've not build them to know. I find the flourmill's way of reporting this (also seen in storehouses, warehouses, basic resource production plots and the other basic resource enhancers) more intelligible ! The Spearsmith, Bowyer and Swordsmith don't tell me how much they improve the speed of production of fancy weapons; nor do the Leather and Chain armourers for fancy armour. They probably should, either in the text or at the top right of the summary. The primary production facilities tell me about their 4.5% per level, in the text. As an alternative to the specialists all saying they improve at 2% per level (if I've got that right), the production facilities could mention this where they explain about specialists increasing the facility's repertoire. The Consulate and Barracks tell me that they decreases the time to train units, but not by how much. It looks like speed of caravan recruitment depends on market level, cotter on number of cottages, guild harvesters on level of relevant guild; but none of these says anything to that effect. The unit production pages for Marketplace, Consulate and Barracks tell me the level of the relevant building. The equipment production pages (Book Binder, Blacksmith, etc.) don't; it'd be nice if they did. (The Item Production summary page does tell me each facility's level, but the facility's own page doesn't.) The production speeds for weapons and armour come with helpful (?) icons (in the Info column) that I can hover to get an explanation; but the Marketplace, Consulate and Barracks don't do the same for their unit production rates. They probably should. The Info icons' on-hover displays talk about "Effective Building Level"; it might be better to say which building is relevant, in each case, e.g. "Effective Chain Armourer Level", at least for the Blacksmith's texts, where swordsmith and chain armourer are variously relevant for different items. In any case, this would make clear the distinction between things where the relevant level is the production facility and things where it's the associated specialist. For primary production facilities, I can only build one of each in a town, so "Effective" is irrelevant: that only applies where I can have several of a specialist. So "Blacksmith Level" but "Effective Chain Armourer Level". The on-hover for Sword in my level 20 Blacksmith tells me the "Production Time Breakdown". It has columns "+%", "p/h" and "Time". The Base is 1 p/h, a time of 1h. The effective building level is 20, for a 90% improvement. This is in fact a 90% decrease in the production time, not a 90% increase (as the "+" in "+%" might make one think) in the rate of production (it's actually a 900% increase in the rate of production, although 100*(1/(1-x/100) -1) isn't usually equal to 10*x). For small f, an f% decrease in time is (to a decent approximation) an f% increase in rate, but once f gets into two digits it isn't small any more and 100*(1/(1-f/100) -1) becomes discernibly distinct from f. Placing a "+%" column (suggesting an increase) next to the p/h column (which does indeed increase), creates the impression that the p/h column should increase in the given proportion, when actually it's the inverse of the Time column, which has decreased by the given proportion. It would be better to have "−%", "Time" and "p/h" columns (in this order), since Time is indeed reduced by the indicated percentage; and rate (p/h) is merely a derived quantity, inferred from the (suitably reduced) Time. This would even have the bonus of placing the Time and p/h columns in the same order as the Time and Per hour columns just to the left of the Info I'm hovering. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 10 May 2013 at 13:55
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… but, of course, it's more complex than that. Production bonuses from the facility are reductions in the time taken to produce, whereas those from sovereignty are increases in the rate of production. So, to work through an example, my cattle production on a level 19 common ground with 76% of sovereignty support looks like: Base: rate 0.86/h, Time 1h 10m Time reduced by (level = 19)*(4.5 per level)% = 85.5%, to 14.5% of base time, is 70m*.145 = (7+2.8+.35)m = 10m (60*.15)s = 10m 9s. (Note that increasing the rate by 85.5% to 1.855*0.86/h = 1.5953/h isn't the same thing.) This implies a rate of 5.91/h, which is then increased by 76% to 1.76*5.91/h = 10.4/h. (Again, not the same as reducing the time by 76% of what remains (so to 24% of 10m 9s), to 0.24*(10m 9s) = 2m (24+1.8+.36)s = 2m 26.16s for a rate of 24.6/h.) So each cow takes 1h/10.4 = 5m 46s to produce. So some of our modifiers are reducing the time, others increasing the rate; and I see the one that the modifier actually acted on is rendered bold in the on-hover table. It might be better, then, to have a table with p/h and time columns in the middle and separate +% (on p/h's side) and −% (on time's side) columns. ------------- Eddy. |
Posted By: Eddy
Date Posted: 17 May 2013 at 22:32
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Glitch in giant beetle images: [@c=337] is the giant beetle heart, but has the appearance of an exoskeleton or carapace; while [@c=338] is the giant beetle carapace, with strange curved shape with knobs on it that's the same of various other critters' hearts. So I think you have the heart and carapace images swapped ! ------------- Eddy. |