Taking Sins' interface to the next level

Reduce frustration, increase fun!

from Sins Forums

Hey all,

 

I've been thinking about this one for a while.  There are a few modifications to Sins' interface that I'd like to see, and I'm pretty sure they'd all improve playability without needing balance testing.  They range from relatively simple to really complex.  I've selected my top 3 to share with everyone.  Difficulties ratings for implementation are just rough guesses based on how much might have to be changed and tested to get them to work.

 

1) Always show the presence of my ships in the "summary" view when zoomed out.

Problem: I hate loosing track of my ships!  When you're zoomed out at the solar system level, sometimes allied ships will hide the presence of your own.  Having to run around highlighting planets to find where I left ship X isn't much fun.

My solution: There should ALWAYS be at least one tick-mark with my colours at a planet where I have ships.

Difficulty: Easy.

 

2) Improve manual targetting

Problem: Part of the allure of the empire tree is that it makes manual targeting easier... in theory.  However, when units in the tree are changing, the whole thing becomes a jumble.  This means when queuing up a set of attack orders you might miss your intended target... and have to start all over again.  That's no fun!

My solution: I think the easiest way to improve here is to allow players to target ships as a class, just like alt-selection works in the empire tree for your own units.  A fleet behaviour toggle to specify focused fire or "default"-fire would give a pretty good spread of behaviours, as long as it sticks to units when different fleet elements are given different orders.

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard.

 

3) Improve fleet maintenance

Problem: When fighting on multiple fronts, you have to keep track of not only your fleets, but the factories supplying them.  This means you have to split your attention.  Having to dart back and forth between fleets and factories just to add reinforcements is no fun.

My solution: Make fleet composition work more like carriers.  You set the fleet composition much like fighter/bomber counts on carriers, and either automatically assign factories to keep your fleets reinforced, or use rally points to set up up factory -> fleet associations.  Now when you're worried about your fleets, your focus stays on THEM, and since this is probably a bit more automatic, you'd have more time to manage combat or your empire.

Difficulty: Hard.

 

So, that's my two cents.  Over to you guys.  If you had to pick THREE things to change about the interface, what would they be?  What would your solutions be?  If you think the problems I've mentioned are worth correcting, would you use a different solution?

13,974 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
  1. Theres always the show allied ships in the UI options. I'd guess you could bind it to a key to turn it on/off. Play around with some of the other settings there, as I'm sure you can get what you're looking for.
  2. I would suggest queing up kill orders if you want that much focus fire. Personally, I generally only focus fire when a ship is nearly dead anyhow (to finish it off and reduce chance it will be healed and reduce the damage output of the opposing fleet). Consider using the empire tree stacking feature for targeting. I believe the same ship stays at the top of each stack until it is dead. The only jumbling that may occur is if your opponent had multiple stacks of the same ship and you target and kill stuff from stack #1 of that ship. it would then take a ship from stack #2 and move it into stack #1. so start with the stack closest to the end.
  3. I believe you can assign planets to number keys. If you make up a system, it should be a breeze to order reinforcements. eg. I assign a fleet to #1, the planet that supplies it to #2, another fleet to #3, etc. (And you can easily see that odd numbers are fleets, planets are even. I'm suggesting this, but I do not do this. I change my fleet's supplier based on distance. the closest supplier to the fleet gets the job. If I need reinforcements at a rate higher than what that can provide, I allocate additional suppliers.

If I were to change any 1 thing, I'd make some way to control fleet formations. Every other idea i have is much more complicated.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Those aren't bad ideas.  I like your first idea about the tick marks.

I would add to that that every planet of yours that has a Superweapon needs a special small button on the side of the planet so that you can simply click it when zoomed out and order the superweapon to fire on a target as though you had zoomed into the gravity well and clicked the weapon's icon itself.  The button should depict readyness of the weapon, say red for cooling down and blue for ready to fire.

The bouncing Empire Tree problem also needs to be fixed.  I like to order groups of ships to fire on enemy ships one by one, and I like to set that with the Empire Tree as opposed to picking them out of the gravity well.  However when there are lots of ships around the tree bounces, making it harder to do.

Some other ideas:

  • Give the game an optional built-in voice comm function like many first person shooters have today and allow players to easily mute other people.
  • Allow players to pull up a chat-log in game, say by pressing one of the function keys (as the default).
  • Allow players to be in multiple chat rooms, even while in game, and let them toggle between with with tabs.
  • Of course, allow Galaxy Forge-made maps to auto-download.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

SithLordAJ:

That's a good point about using hotkeys.  I suppose I could just manually reassign hotkeys based on distance to make picking the closest factories out faster.  It still feels a bit backwards to me though.  I want to be able to manage (ie. add & remove) ships from the composition of my fleet in one place.  I also don't want to have to baby-sit the build queue as fleets take losses... just re-build according to the composition I set out, and if I need to change the kind of reinforcements coming in there's no reason not to do that from the fleet end.  Just like managing fighter & bomber production.  Fire & forget!

 

DirtySanchezz:

My feeling is that stopping the tree from bouncing is a very tricky problem.  The best alternative to class targeting I could come with is as follows:

Have the tree go in to different update mode when you've moused over it.  First, lock the position of the list (ie. the start of the list) for whatever gravwell (in the list) your mouse is in.  Update everything in that well by adding graphical overlays for updates, like putting a big red X on destroyed units, a blue arrow on ones that have left the gravity well etc.  Add new ships and structures to a section at the end of the list.

 

But then you have to mouse out and back if you want the tree to update... I'm not convinced it would be better to go about things that way.  Plus, it would probably be more work.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I can only think of one thing that really annoys me.

What Dirty already mentioned, the bouncing empire tree. I just think that the POSITION of the tree should be frozen. The scroll bar could grow or shrink or move around, but what you see is stuck.

TheEvidence's idea would also be great, but if a ship was destroyed, or jumped out, you really would not like to accidentally send your fleet off on a wild goose chase after a jumped scout, and who would really care about orders for a ship that no longer exists? That was just my thought.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Well, one simple thing that could be done to greatly reduce the 'bouncy-ness' of the tree would be to move the ships-that-are-phase-jumping section to the bottom of the tree; if you're engaged in a battle and send in reinforcements, the tree flips out. I kinda like that pause-on-mouse-over idea, sounds promising.

About the production: There are some production options I think would be nice to have (like making a factory dedicated to producing 1 type of ship, maybe giving a speed bonus because of it or just constantly produce them), but you're always going to have to 'baby-sit the build queue'. Its an RTS. everything about RTS's is about micro-mangement. I have never played, though I would like to, an RTS that is pure tactical micro-ing and no non-tactical micro-ing.

I'm not sure how your having a difficult time replacing losses. You're in a fight, you see your LRF about to die, check to make sure your orders are queued up appropriately for the next few seconds, press the 5 key (or whatever), order a LRF, press the key corrisponding to your fleet and continue on. if that's too much back-and-forth due to heavy losses, you'll have to queue up a big order before you need all of those ships because you're currently too evenly matched. If you're thinking that you can't pre-order your ships, I'd say you're either not pre-ordering the right ships for the job, or you're worried about production speed (in which case, I'd say build more factories). In any case, the big order allows you to focus on the fight; which, if you're taking heavy losses, you will need due to a fairly even matchup