DeletedUser73
Guest
Here's a general concept layout of some improvements that can be made to the troop manager. I still intend to work in a 'build priorities' feature into there somewhere, but the main gist is there. Am I overlooking stuff? Am I missing a possible improvement?
Disclaimer:
This was written assuming the readers have some grasp of the current workings of the Troop Manager.
Yes, this is what Typhi has been working on instead of chatting you guys up. :'[
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Troop Manager
Functionality Improvement:
Identifying the issue:
This is a troop manager - the ideal outcome is for players to be able to easily fill in their troops numbers and know that their village is on its way to being "done".
> 1. A problem currently is that players know how many troops they want of a certain sort in the village total. As it stands, they're left to figure out how many more troops they need in order to reach that mark on their own. That frankly makes the Troop Manager marginally useless for the task most players will want to use it for, since villages will nearly always have a different number of troops already in them, rendering the ability to apply a blanket number of additional troops irrelevant.
> 2. Secondly, players really don't want to enter the same values again and again every time they add more villages to a certain group in order to bring it up to speed - it's a useless hassle. Sure, they'll make scripts to input predefined numbers of troops, but we don't want to encourage script reliance.
Proposed fixes:
> 1. Modify to make it possible to fill in a desired total troop numbers, much like in the Village manager you can fill in a desired total building level. Instead of the empty white boxes we currently have, we could have the number of troops currently in the village, including those currently being recruited (those would be coloured in green). Desired troop levels could be filled in the generic boxes along the top of the screen, with a button to apply those along all villages shown below.
A tricky part is how and when the Troop Manager is supposed to add the troops it is supposed to build to the queues. My initial proposal would be to do it in groups of 50 or so, as that does not represent a large investment of either time or resources. When a particular building is scheduled to recruit multiple unit types, it'd vary the frequency with which it queues the groups of units in order to reach the desired levels at around the same time.
(Example: the Troop Manager is ordered to build a total of 6k spears and 2k swords while 0 of both are currently in the village. It'd queue 3 groups of spears to every 1 group of swords.)
One problem with 'desired troop level' building is of course the matter of Farm Space. There obviously isn't a concrete upper limit the way there is with buildings. Tricky. Hm. What comes to mind is colouring the queues that have been paused - due to not having enough farm space - yellow or something similar. Hovering over the population stats of a village would show a tooltip of the relevant information: what troops are currently present in the village and what the desired amount is. In a column next to those, it'd show the farm space required by both those values. If players want to make changes to the village in order to accommodate the troop numbers they want, they can click into the village on the village name which is already available - if not, they can hit a 'done/satisfied' icon (a small checkmark?) off to the side, which would cancel the sets of troops the Troop Manager did not (and could not) queue.
A second problem is how powerful this would be if it would always keep trying to build to the desired troop level - think of villages being attacked, and then rebuilding themselves without any kind of player input. That'd be taking things a step too far, I think, so rather than a constant desired troop level per village, the 'desired troop level' info filled into the various boxes on the Troop Manager screen would have troop losses subtracted from them, meaning players would need to run another 'sweep' of the Troop Manager on any villages in order to fix the troops. This would still allow players to set up a queue of say 100,000,000 axes for example in order to get infinitely refilling queues, so the amount of troops submitted would need to be checked for compliance with the maximum population possibility (24,000). When totals are submitted, the troops that would bring the population above 24,000 should be shaved off in equal proportions.
> 2. Customizable troop-number-fill-in templates are definitely something to look into. I'm thinking that players would get a popup containing the input boxes for the various unit types and a name field. The names of the various templates would then be available along the side somewhere and clicking them would fill in their values.
Summary:
- Allow for filling in Desired Total Troop levels in order to make it an easier and more efficient tool.
- Add troop-number templates.
UI Improvement:
Identifying the issue:
Many players seem to be experiencing difficulty with understanding how to make the Troop Manager do what they want. This is easily mended by including detailed instructions as done here, but that the instructions are necessary in the first place indicates that the current implementation simply isn't intuitive enough and overcomplicated.
Proposed fixes:
> 1. Move the main input boxes (currently all grouped together in the top left) into a row slightly above and in line with the village input boxes.
> 2. Assuming we make use of the 'desired troop levels' idea, we can scrap 2 of the 3 troop insertion options we currently have and instead replace them with a single "down arrow" icon that would have a functionality along the same lines as the current "earmark queue" button. (See Fix 1. above for more information on how that would work.)
Summary:
- Move input boxes down to a row parallel village input boxes.
- Scrap the unnecessary insertion options and replace with a single icon.
Concept Image of everything combined:
[spoil]
[/spoil]
Disclaimer:
This was written assuming the readers have some grasp of the current workings of the Troop Manager.
Yes, this is what Typhi has been working on instead of chatting you guys up. :'[
----
Troop Manager
Functionality Improvement:
Identifying the issue:
This is a troop manager - the ideal outcome is for players to be able to easily fill in their troops numbers and know that their village is on its way to being "done".
> 1. A problem currently is that players know how many troops they want of a certain sort in the village total. As it stands, they're left to figure out how many more troops they need in order to reach that mark on their own. That frankly makes the Troop Manager marginally useless for the task most players will want to use it for, since villages will nearly always have a different number of troops already in them, rendering the ability to apply a blanket number of additional troops irrelevant.
> 2. Secondly, players really don't want to enter the same values again and again every time they add more villages to a certain group in order to bring it up to speed - it's a useless hassle. Sure, they'll make scripts to input predefined numbers of troops, but we don't want to encourage script reliance.
Proposed fixes:
> 1. Modify to make it possible to fill in a desired total troop numbers, much like in the Village manager you can fill in a desired total building level. Instead of the empty white boxes we currently have, we could have the number of troops currently in the village, including those currently being recruited (those would be coloured in green). Desired troop levels could be filled in the generic boxes along the top of the screen, with a button to apply those along all villages shown below.
A tricky part is how and when the Troop Manager is supposed to add the troops it is supposed to build to the queues. My initial proposal would be to do it in groups of 50 or so, as that does not represent a large investment of either time or resources. When a particular building is scheduled to recruit multiple unit types, it'd vary the frequency with which it queues the groups of units in order to reach the desired levels at around the same time.
(Example: the Troop Manager is ordered to build a total of 6k spears and 2k swords while 0 of both are currently in the village. It'd queue 3 groups of spears to every 1 group of swords.)
One problem with 'desired troop level' building is of course the matter of Farm Space. There obviously isn't a concrete upper limit the way there is with buildings. Tricky. Hm. What comes to mind is colouring the queues that have been paused - due to not having enough farm space - yellow or something similar. Hovering over the population stats of a village would show a tooltip of the relevant information: what troops are currently present in the village and what the desired amount is. In a column next to those, it'd show the farm space required by both those values. If players want to make changes to the village in order to accommodate the troop numbers they want, they can click into the village on the village name which is already available - if not, they can hit a 'done/satisfied' icon (a small checkmark?) off to the side, which would cancel the sets of troops the Troop Manager did not (and could not) queue.
A second problem is how powerful this would be if it would always keep trying to build to the desired troop level - think of villages being attacked, and then rebuilding themselves without any kind of player input. That'd be taking things a step too far, I think, so rather than a constant desired troop level per village, the 'desired troop level' info filled into the various boxes on the Troop Manager screen would have troop losses subtracted from them, meaning players would need to run another 'sweep' of the Troop Manager on any villages in order to fix the troops. This would still allow players to set up a queue of say 100,000,000 axes for example in order to get infinitely refilling queues, so the amount of troops submitted would need to be checked for compliance with the maximum population possibility (24,000). When totals are submitted, the troops that would bring the population above 24,000 should be shaved off in equal proportions.
> 2. Customizable troop-number-fill-in templates are definitely something to look into. I'm thinking that players would get a popup containing the input boxes for the various unit types and a name field. The names of the various templates would then be available along the side somewhere and clicking them would fill in their values.
Summary:
- Allow for filling in Desired Total Troop levels in order to make it an easier and more efficient tool.
- Add troop-number templates.
UI Improvement:
Identifying the issue:
Many players seem to be experiencing difficulty with understanding how to make the Troop Manager do what they want. This is easily mended by including detailed instructions as done here, but that the instructions are necessary in the first place indicates that the current implementation simply isn't intuitive enough and overcomplicated.
Proposed fixes:
> 1. Move the main input boxes (currently all grouped together in the top left) into a row slightly above and in line with the village input boxes.
> 2. Assuming we make use of the 'desired troop levels' idea, we can scrap 2 of the 3 troop insertion options we currently have and instead replace them with a single "down arrow" icon that would have a functionality along the same lines as the current "earmark queue" button. (See Fix 1. above for more information on how that would work.)
Summary:
- Move input boxes down to a row parallel village input boxes.
- Scrap the unnecessary insertion options and replace with a single icon.
Concept Image of everything combined:
[spoil]
