Playability Wishlist

Psientist · #1 December 22nd, 2007, 04:12 PM

Some items that would seriously increase playability, IMO:

1. "shirts vs skins" or "Red vs. blue" tagging via hotkey / shortcut key in the battle screen / tactical view: when a battle descends into melee, or summons start appearing, or mages start casting "control", "charm", and "enslave mind", it gets really hard to tell which units belong to which nation in battle. It would really help to be able to quickly color code or otherwise mark such units in battle... or at least, in the unit view screen.

2. Scripted Spell Redundancy Detection: When mages are in a battle and start casting battlefield-wide spells like "mass protection", the same expensive spell can get cast over and over and over by spellcaster AI. If the spell isn't stackable - it seems most aren't - it's just a waste and an irritation, and the only alternative is scripting micromanagement. It would be nice if once a nonstackable spell is cast and still in effect, it would not get recast. Spells like "fog warriors" which can get cancelled at the unit level might be allowed to be recast without restriction.

3. UNIT SORTING!!!!! When you are assigning units to commanders, and there are LOTS of different types of units, it gets REALLY LABORIOUS and painful to peck-and-hunt similar units to assign to groups. If only the unassigned units at the top of the screen would auto-sort so that similar units are grouped next to each other, it would help out immensely!

Maybe some of these things are implementable for the next patch?!?!?

Jazzepi · #2 December 22nd, 2007, 04:17 PM

3. I know this is an issue. What you can do is if you find a particular unit type that you want to gather into a group, double click on that unit. All the units of the same type in that single line of units will be highlighted.

Jazzepi

Ironhawk · #3 December 22nd, 2007, 04:24 PM

1. Would be handy. Maybe you could make the grids blue/red in the wireframe view?

WraithLord · #4 December 22nd, 2007, 04:48 PM

I also think 1 would be nice.
2 I think is very important. I have seen many battles lost due to this irritating AI quirk.
3 is nice though double click a unit will choose all of the same type so this helps some.

Endoperez · #5 December 23rd, 2007, 01:37 AM

1 should be doable. The codebase for red higlights for units' graphics exists already. It's seen when you hover your mouse over a unit in some screens, like the army selection. Adding a key that highlights all friendly units when a key is pressed might be easy to do.

Loren · #6 December 23rd, 2007, 01:58 AM

Quote:

Jazzepi said:
3. I know this is an issue. What you can do is if you find a particular unit type that you want to gather into a group, double click on that unit. All the units of the same type in that single line of units will be highlighted.

Jazzepi

Unfortunately this sometimes doesn't work if there are hundreds of units there. Think freespawn races.

Jazzepi · #7 December 23rd, 2007, 04:18 AM

Quote:

Loren said:

Quote:

Jazzepi said:
3. I know this is an issue. What you can do is if you find a particular unit type that you want to gather into a group, double click on that unit. All the units of the same type in that single line of units will be highlighted.

Jazzepi

Unfortunately this sometimes doesn't work if there are hundreds of units there. Think freespawn races.

I actually haven't ever noticed this fail even with hundreds of units. I've played LA Ermor, and LA R'yleh in quite a few multiplayer games.

Jazzepi

vfb · #8 December 23rd, 2007, 10:26 AM

I have had to do a weird "triple-click" when I have both many pooled units and also around a hundred commanders all with armies in the provinces. A double-click just leaves the unit hilited and also hilites the commanders and armies where the unit can be placed. But the "triple-click" selects all the units of the same type from the pool. Linux, windowed, if that matters.

Shovah32 · #9 December 23rd, 2007, 09:23 PM

Jazzepi, I'm not sure if it is what Loren meant, but, when you have a huge number of units in a province some units just get hidden because it can't show that many. You can't double click them if you can't see them.

Aapeli · #10 January 3rd, 2008, 10:05 AM

About the sorting, could there be any use for a way to select all your diseased units? I mean when you notice your army has starved for long you might want to know how many will be dead in the next few turns. Its goos you can sort the wounded and that helps lot but the disease is a lot more important affliction than for example weakened.