your thoughts on Dominions II

[licker]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:


Heard you before, but loudness isn't always bad. You actually got my attention again.

Did you prefer the old hotseat mode?

Perhaps if there was a 'SP-unsavable' mode (the old hotseat renamed SP for those that prefers quick hosting without ingame saves).

Not sure if JK would like this. It was very difficult to persuade him to remove the hotseat mode.

Actually just adding hotkeys for the host command would probably satisfy a lot of people. Hot keying the nations would be cool too, but maybe confusing? If you did it numerically it wouldn't be that bad maybe, but then you are limited to 10 nations being hotkeyed that way, unless all nations got a unique letter for their hot key.

Removing clicks with hot keys is usually an improvment...

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by licker:
Just a lock to freeze the research points going into a school. For example if you want 20 points in alteration you set that bar to 20, and lock it, now whatever other bars you play with alteration will not change from 20.

Aha. That sounds useful.

[Kristoffer O]

You can use + and - (IIRC) to adjust the research bars a few points if you hover above a school.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
Not sure if JK would like this. It was very difficult to persuade him to remove the hotseat mode.

WOAH there, tiger!!! Don't you DARE take out hotseat mode and blame it on me - people would have me drawn, quartered, and evicted from the forums!

No, I'm just suggesting that in addition to the current main menu selections, and additional selection is put in, for a pure singleplayer game, so you can click on that, and never see the main menu again. If you wanted to play a hotseat game with only one human player (the current DomII singleplayer mode), you would still be able to do that.

And, yes, for your reference, I thought the original Dom I singleplayer mode was more straightforward. But my primary issue with the interface is not that you have to click "host" in between each turn... rather, that there are a whole bunch of steps you have to go through to start a new singleplayer game, which is the first thing that anyone will do upon installing the demo.

-Cherry

[ October 28, 2003, 17:29: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

[Dekent]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

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Originally posted by Kristoffer O:

quote:

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Originally posted by Dekent:
Could yall streamline the single player interface a bit then Kris?

In what way? We are open to suggestions, but make it concrete.

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I'm thinking, something along these lines...

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=74;t=000180

I'm just crosslinking it in case it was overlooked, as you did ask. Well, you didn't ask me, but I'm loud

-Cherry

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Yeah it's basically all in that topic heh

[MythicalMino]

ok, something else I really like, is when you go to view the battle....you see where the battle is taking place, with the map zoom in....helps me keep track of where and what I am trying to do

ok, back to playing

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by licker:

quote:

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Originally posted by cpbeller:
perhaps this is already there, and i just cannot see it....but could there be added a "lock" function in the research screen, where you choose what schools to research? It seems that it would make it easier to have certain points going to certain schools...like more than 2 schools being researched at the same time...

perhaps not, but I am just wondering....

you know, like the tech research points lock in some other games (the only one that I can actually think of right now is MoO3...and that is not a good game to use as any example of how to do something....)

Heh, especially since the lock feature in MoO3 didn't even work correctly

EU2 has a lock feature though I think, you could reference that game instead.

I'd like to see this lock feature myself, or a way to enter the value from the keyboard (not +,-), but it's not such a big deal really.

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Well, the lock feature worked fine in MoO1. Chalk it up to technological progress, I guess.

Basically: each bar can be either locked or unlocked (there's a checkbox or something). Locked bars can't have their values adjusted. When adjusting the value of an unlocked bar, research points are never transferred into or out of locked bars. This may mean that you may be unable to adjust any bars (if all your research points are in locked bars), or unable to adjust beyond a certain level, which would require some extra coding.

Example: I have 20 rp, currently all in Alteration. I notice that it will take only 7 rp to finish my Alteration research, so I lower Alteration to 7. The extra points are dumped into some other school (let's say Conjuration). Then I decide I want the extra points to go into Construction instead, so I lock Alteration, then click near the right end of the Construction bar. The game would transfer as much research as possible to Construction (up to the point where I actually clicked), but wouldn't take away points from the locked Alteration bar to do so. The end result would be Alteration 7 (locked), Construction 13, everything else 0.

This is much more convenient than the current system where I have to estimate about where I want Construction, then see if it took points from the right place, put them back in Alteration if necessary, etc - which could take several adjustments. It would be worse if I had a lot of RP (say 50), was close to finishing a level in one school, wanted to research only one level of another school, and put the remaining points into a third school.