[Freeciv-Dev] Re: What we can learn from MOO3

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 06:16:06PM +0100, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> On Thu, 1 May 2003, Raimar Falke wrote:
> 
> > My summary: they took a good game and made it more complex. Since this
> > game was than too complex they added features which enabled the player
> > to cope with the added complexity. This however made the added
> > complexity rather useless and also descreased appealing of the game.
> 
> Yes that basically sums up what I heard about the game.
> 
> There must be a balance somewhere.
> 
> For e.g. in Millenium 2.2 you got really annoyed (at least I did!) at the
> level of micromanagement I had to use for mining asteroids.

> The Dune 2 equivalent, spice harvesting, was not as boring because the
> harvester did everything automatically once directed to a suitable suite.
> Then carryalls speeded up transport automatically.

Yes.

> Deuteros (the sucessor of Millenium 2.2) also automated a lot of
> activities like mining and transport just when you started to get annoyed
> at it.

Yes.

> This is akin to getting a "worklist" or CMA tech in Freeciv at a suitable
> point in the game when you are getting lots of cities. e.g. "bureaucracy".
> However I don't think this would help much except to hide mostly unnecessary
> dialogs in the beggining of the game.

Since freeciv is a client-server game you can always do these things
without the tech without support of the server. So while an enabling
tech may be realistic it isn't needed in the technical sense.

> The game I am currently playing, Ascendancy (MOO like), annoys me
> seriously because planets produce things in 2-3 turns at a certain point
> in the game yet I still need to go to the planet list, click on the planet,
> then choose production from the list.

No workqueue or "repeat foobar"?

> Freeciv does not have this problem because of that wonderful city report
> from which you can easily change the city production for all cities.

If you at some point you need to build building a lot in freeciv I
would like to see another feature: prepend and append to the worklist
from the citylist. You need this a lot in MOO2. You have researched
Research Labs and you want to build this on every planet now. You want
to append a Battle Base because it is expensive. There is another
difference here: in MOO2 all buildings which increase the relative
output (+15%) do also add an absolute increase (you get 5 shields for
free if you build foobar). This means that almost all buildings are a
win.

> === Suggestions for improvements
> 
> We should have an armies report like in Master of Magic or Alpha Centauri.
> Sometimes you need to hunt for a unit and you just take forever.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

> It should be possible to multi-select a group of units in the map and give
> the same order to all of them. If we did this we should not need groups as
> much.

This is the warclient. Real stacks may still needed. Especially if
auto-attack is implemented.

> It should be possible to have tile-markers like in SimCity.

> The help needs to be consistent. That RMB idea is good

RMB is also used by a lot of games as close-dialog. Settlers1 comes to mind 
here.

> (Ascendancy uses CTRL+LMB IIRC).
> We currently use all sorts of different methods for getting help. Which is
> very annoying. I propose we use CTRL+LMB for help everywhere.

CTRL-LMB and SHIFT-LMB are usually used for list selection. So I would
suggest ALT-LMB or something with RMB.

> The worklists and city dialog still need some rethinking. There should be
> more integration of worklists in the city report. A button to open a city
> dialog with the worklist pane selected, viewing worklist contents in the
> city report, etc.
> 
> There are some usability improvements in the GTK+ 2.0 client:
> * Tooltips for all those cryptic little icons near the turn done button.
> * You can get help on buildings via CTRL+LMB (or is it SHIFT+LMB?).

Another point is the cityreport. Currently we have one line per
city. This leads to a rather wide dialog. Another problem is the
sorting of the current dialog: we had to split the surplus into 3
columns to get this right. If you look at MOO3
(http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/february03/moo3pc/05.jpg) you see that
they have rather complex line per planet. Also note the sorting at the
bottom. I found this rather nice except that I have no idea that the
arrow at the left wants to tell me.

        Raimar

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