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

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

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.
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.

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.

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

=== 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.

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.

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

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

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?).

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa