I agree with patteki on long term material problems, but I know, the team has that on the agenda in one way or another.
to add to my earlier ramblings about increased maintance costs to actually run CLR, ELP and SCA, the production time should also be increased. this would increase the opportunity costs and so keep CM at a reasonable price even when the cost for the construction materials falls significantly.
last but not least, I would like to remind another player of the suggestion of the profile of “trader”. maybe he cares to elaborate, as it would fit nicely with the new szenario (on what I can guess).
I agree! The costs to feed the workforces is one of the factors to make progression slower or more difficult. Increasing manufacturing times is basically the same. For the third test I increased the workforces needs a bit. We’ll see where that leads to
I also agree. So far we have thought of one strategy to mitigate, but it is not implemented yet: The efficiency of reactors decreases over time making them more and more expensive to run since it blocks the same amount of workforce. One of the unsolved game-design issues is how to integrate that with the current production view. We could either have the efficiency on a per reactor level or on a production line level. What I don’t really want is to have to micro-manage reactors and orders in a way that I have to decide for every order in which reactor with what efficiency it runs.
In the current test it is possible to demolish buildings by the way!
I find the material transfer between holds irritating. the increments in which I can transfer at keeps changing. sometimes it is 1, half, all, sometimes 1, 10, 100, half, all, etc. with items apparently changing order (the “half” and “all” can be either at the beginning or at the end.
we will have to see how the good transfer works out, but right now, I have to think of that “trader profile” again. I could imagine a server setup, where traders are a new profile. they have basically nothing, but a couple of ships and some spare fuel. they would actually be the only ones with ships, however, with a few more. they would have to take care of all the transfers, until a big producer finally decides to invest into a ship himself.
we would need a feature that allows to rent “space” on a cargo ship, as to allow the trading company to take over the entire shipments for another company.
in such a scenario, the resources should be spread out over even more systems, so that only a few things can be constructed on a certain planet. the starting resources would have to be bigger, to allow for any production in the beginning until the traders can set uo their transfer lines.
I like the setup right now. I think, resources could be spread out even more evenly. with miners starting with two CM and everybody having four ships, transport shouldn’t have been a problem.
it would be great of “screens” would be saved for server starts. I know, sounds uncessassry, as there will be only one final server start, however, for right now, it would be awesome.
I really love the flexibilty the UI is granting me as a user. I have some screens set up to manage certain aspects of the game. some quirks here and there where I would like to do even more, but what you build is amazing.
would be nice if CXOS in a specific market would only show orders at that market. that could help until you have a final solution to the entire thing.
I changed that behavior: The drop targets are now sorted by amount, so ALL is always on the right, HLF in between the others.
While that is a good idea implementing it would mean a lot of work for us. Right now we just through away all data from the old server and start with a blank database. Keeping parts of the database is difficult and since we don’t need it for the final game I don’t think we will implement it.
Transport won’t be a problem as long as there is fuel
I would like to have a short info line as of where the ship is or what it is doing. maybe just a “Vallis” if it is in orbit or a “Vallis -> Montem 12d3h” if in transit.
with growing logistical work in a later game, keeping an eye on all operations will become increasingly difficult.
right now, I am experimenting with a “logistics” screen showing the individual cargo holds next to inventory at base to keep an eye on what I have in total.
If I want to send a specific ship, I have to go to the fleet overview, then find the correct ship and send it via a third window. and if I want to always know where every ship is, I also have to keep a buffer open showing the fleet list at all times, taking up space.
Bug:
In the production line buffer, when it gets horizontally smaller than the content, the scrollbar
will only move the innermost table, header and footer stay, so that in the end, the header column doesnt match the content, see screen
improvement:
A notepad style buffer to help with scribbling shopping lists and stuff
In the base inventory screen, add another sorting option by type,
so that raw materials, intermediate and final products can be seperated
first of all, thank you for the change. much better already.
may I make a suggestion: I think having a fixed option at a constant place would be preferential, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 5, half, all
when you hover over one of those options, a second row appears offering multipliers of let’s say: 10x, 50x, 100x, 1000x, …
this should allow to be more precise then right now, while covering a broader spectrum overall. since it’s hover-over, technically, it’s not even an extra click
Sorting and filtering tables is an often requested feature and we will implement it at some point. I am talking to @martin to see when it fits our schedule
setting a “default” screen when logging in.
after accidently deleting my former base screen, the next one in line is now the finance screen, which I get after every login. I know about the “undo delete” function but it would be nice, in general, if I could set a default screen. if it were to be saved client-side it would be even better, as I have a “mobile screen” to use on my cell, while I’d like to have another screen using my computer.
it would be nice, if you could collapse the headers of some buffers (what term do you use for the actual content of a buffer when in use?). I am referring to all the information on the CX, for instance, telling you about its location, operator and stuff. with more exchanges available, creating a “market screen” allows only for a limited amount of displayed CX pages for certain products on certain markets as the headers keep using up space. if, with a checkbox, you could collapse that information, you would be able to stack up more buffers with usable information on one screen.
same goes for ships inventory. I set-up a screen for logistics, where I sort my ships in columns depending on the planet they are at. when fitting four ships in a column, the volume, weight and options to sort the list take up about half of each tile while leaving a lot of unsused space to the right of that information. could that become collapsable, as well? maybe next to the expand-button, the weight and volume could still be displayed but numbers only
it would be amazing if it was possible to always add a tile at either edge of the screen. when I accidently close a tile at the edge of the screen ( yeah, I am clumpsy like that :-/ ), I can’t recreate the tile-layout without having to close and re-open several other tiles. it would also help to update a screen, when you realize you need some more information there.
maybe, a small icon in a very small stripe of tile at either edge could do the trick. or this the stripe takes up to much space, just the button?
I already commented on the sidebar and I know you guys are thinking about alternatives. could you maybe make the cash balance available as a buffer? the contracts info basically already is, so you could just make the entire sidebar a tile with those two buffers pre-selected. it would basically look the same, but allow for a great bit of increased flexibility.
If you select a screen the id changes and you can use a bookmark to this adress to return to this exact screen.
I get why you want to make the information part collapsible but I am not sure if I agree. At some point we have to stop making everything super compact and expert-y or else the UI might become unusable for beginners. @martin what’s your opinion on that?
The ships tile will change in the future and most likely split into multiple tiles. Maybe we can optimize a bit there.
What is your intent with that? You want to know how much cash you have lying around but you don’t want to open the sidebar all the time?
How about we add an optional parameter to the FINBS tile? For example FINBS LA would only show the liquid assets (cash) part of the table and FINBS EQ only the equity part and so on…
and no, I was not aware I could simply bookmark the correct screen. thanks for that, as well.
one option would be to just make it expanded by default and it will look the same. by adding the option to collapse for those actively choosing so, beginners won’t have problems and “experts” have the alternative available. the setting should be saved, then, though.
I do hear where you are coming from. I am trying to think ahead when you have an actual fleet with maybe 20 ships or so.
I wasn’t really thinking about that. I just meant it as part of “make the entire sidebar a tile and have the current information shown in sub-tiles”-idea.
however, I like your idea with the LA EQ options.
Because @molp asked for my opinion: Another round of UI optimizations will surely happen at some point and I do see some of the issues @yukawa has mentioned, mostly concerning UI elements that are not needed once you know what you are doing but take up a relatively large amount of screen real-estate (basically all of the static info that is usually displayed at the top of tiles). So having more advanced UI features to allow to customize and optimize this is something I definitely want to do at some point.
But at the moment, the goal lies in the opposite direction: We need to figure out what needs to be done about the UI (and the user experience as a whole) to make it not completely impossible for beginners (that aren’t enthusiasts/testers/family) to get started with the game and loading the UI with more features probably won’t help in that
Re cash balances: I think a dedicated cash balances tile would be appropriate, especially because you might want to have current book and market values of (foreign) currencies in there at some point.
regarding making it more beginners friendly, you might probabaly want to add a short summary of basic economics and demand and supply relationships. that should help with fundamental decisions
on a more serious note, and if you don’t mind asking. what is your target audience? is PU supposed to be for a broad and young audience or is it a niche product for those really into economic simulators? of course, it’s not going to be either extreme, but can you give us a rough idea of the ballpark you’re playing in? what “level of pre-existing knowledge” in economics do you anticipate them to have?
or do the UI concerns merely lie with the usability of the UI?
In this particular case it is twofold and has little to do with economics at all
Where does the interface (and the fact that it gives little to no guidance to users what to do) keep people from finding into the game? Example: If you play a browser-based game like, say, Grepolis, you basically start with an empty island in front of your nose and some flashing pointer that tells you exactly what to do and in what order. The former is hard to do in PU and the latter is something we probably don’t want in this extreme fashion.
How does early-game content allow players to have “easy successes” while still be challenging/interesting enough for people to stick around.
The second item is essentially what the current test program is mostly about, so what I’m most interested in is suggestions concerning item #1. But with more completely new players coming in now, we hope to be able to gather some feedback in that direction soon
I made several mistakes when starting out before I realized that buffers do not always open in a way that displays all the information inside. Having the scroll bar a bright color and changing the scroll bar track to a color that contrasts with the background might help.
CXOS always displays a maximum of ten trades per page? This is a buffer that could default to always open large enough to display all the information inside without scroll bars.
CXL looks as though it might also display a max per page and could also default large enough to display everything
POP opens a buffer slightly too small to display all the information
Add a View Inventory button to BS baseID alongside sections, construction, population, production
Add a CXL button to the quick link menu on the left
The colon button : used to redefine tile configuration could automatically highlight the relevant text so that the user can begin typing immediately instead of deleting the existing text first
BSC baseID may be the only command that opens up a buffer with a menu inside(or would you call them radio buttons?) This may cause it to be more easily overlooked. I certainly did not notice it immediately. Perhaps color the menu options more like big colorful boxy buttons? Or use a dropdown box instead of a menu?
New Functionality:
Can the game suggest auto complete of valid properties after typing BS space? For example I define a new tile, type BS space and then I am presented with a list like the one when entering a partial location into the SFC destination box
INVP, MS, POP, PROD, USR and others could also benefit from auto complete when configuring tiles
