baddl

Join Date 12/2012

[WISH] User Interface

When playing through the campaign, I found that the UI held more surprises than the tactical battles. It's mostly small things that make using it quite cumbersome.

A double-click on a city should rather open the "details" screen than build the first available building. (The latter really is the last thing I want to do without even looking.) With the "details" screen open, I would like to be able to remove things from the build queue. And, above all, it want to open the "build" or "train" tab with one mouse-click. For some strange reason, the "details" screen is not a tab which is connected to the city panel in the bottom left corner. The "build" and "train" tabs are much better. Well, maybe they could be merged.

EDIT: Sometimes the city view (90° perspective) does not slide back to the normal view (45° perspective). Triggers seem to be: (1) Ending the city view with ESC, or (2) Using the arrow keys to move to another city and then clicking "done".

Can I see somewhere which groups/parties of units still await orders? "Pass" (on the strategic map) does not seem to have any effect. (EDIT: Something more obvious than the green frame should be used, like the "ZZZ" for idle cities, and the green frame should be reserved for the currenly selected unit.) "Explore" is not easy to cancel when the unit(s) is/are sent back to normal duties.

Switching between "equip" and "shop/trade" is not easy (the same as with buildings). (Most of "equip" can be done on the "shop"/"trade" panel - but not "use".) "Shop"/"trade" mostly ignores selected units within a group. I would expect tabs in the bottom left corner, not buttons on the top right corner, when switching dialogs.

It is not easy to predict which units will be affected by a command. Some tactical battles only take eight units out of a group. When units are moved out of a city, the group size is much more constrained and it is not clear which units will fit in. Sometimes (when "equip" or "trade" was used) the champions move separate from the rest of their parties. In short, it should be easy to reorder the units in a group and move units between groups on the same tile. Maybe there could be global groups assignable to number keys 1, ..., 0?

EDIT: -deleted-

And a minor last thing: Can I see which rings and other items take up two slots before I purchase them? (Why would a ring do that anyway?) Why can I equip, for example, a compass and a scar stone at the same time although either of them cannot be combined with other items?

That's all which comes to my mind at the moment. Thank you for listening.

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Kongdej

Yes the UI is not good enough, thats what I feel anyways

Lets not forget the tiny tiny arrows used to scroll through detailed menus

Aaanyways,

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Indeed.

But altogether it is a worthy successor to "Fall from Heaven 2". "Kael", do you get commission for attracting new customers?

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My list is still not complete. I forgot to mention the following BUG.

Sometimes the production queue of a city gets reordered (i.e. messed up). I have not yet figured out exactly when that happens. Apparently it has to do with the addition of more than four buildings to the queue (more than fit into the visible area on the "build" tab) where some of them are external tasks from improvements on resources. It happens that during the following turn the build queue looks differently from what it used to be before.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

Is there a way to assign spells, special abilities and items to those seven action slots a unit has, i.e. override the automatic assignment?

Assigning spells is easy. To rearrange spells, for example, cllick on [Spells] underneath the 'action slots' and a popup will show all your spells. Find the spell you want in 'slot-1' click on the circular 'slot icon' to the right. Then click on action slot-1 and you're done. Follow the same procedure for the rest of the spells, and then do the same for items. I usually put the spells on the left side, and the items on the right side of the action slots. This information is in the manual.

I am a fairly new player but I have not seen the procedure to avoid this problem anywhere in the rules or on the forum. What usually works for me is the following:

[If the queue is 5 items or less] Left-click on the item you want to move, and drag it to the new location. You must be very precise though. You must exactly cover the item originally on that spot or your move will not take. Sometimes when you start to drag your item to the left it is swapped with the item immediately to the left. If this happens, just try it again.

[If the queue is 6 items or more] When this happens, you will see a 'right arrow' to the right of the queue. Click on this arrow to display the next 5 items. Right-click on the item you want to move, and drag it to the left. This will usually display the first five items. Continue dragging your item to exactly cover the item where you want to place it. You may have to do this several times for it to work correctly, but is will eventually succeed. Yes, I know the operation is rather 'clunky.'

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Quoting Ambermonk,

reply 5

Assigning spells is easy.

You are referring to a part of my posting which I deleted (presumably) shortly before yours became visible. I am sorry for that. The question was whether there is a way to reassign spells, special abilities (skills) and items to the seven action slots belonging to a unit (on the tactical map). I figured it out myself after reading the hint (there is also a hint describing the procedure) again and trying a bit harder than before. Then I wanted to remove that (now) stupid question before anybody had a look at it...

For the second part of your posting - do we understand each other correctly in that the rearrangement takes place without my consent? The procedure you describe, however, is very helpful to put the tasks back in place. I was not aware of the fact that items in the production queue can actually be dragged. Thank you and have nice holidays!

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Quoting Ambermonk,

reply 5

Honestly I always agree with these points, even though it is possible for a simple reason, it is very difficult to figure out why or how to assign now spells in the quickbar, and that in my opinion could use improvement, or mentioning in the tutorial.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Even if the optimal solution (drag and drop) may be out of reach, it would help if the slots weren't hidden by the dropdown lists (of spells, skills, items). How about reversing the assignment? A rightclick, for example, on a slot could bring up a dropdown list of available things (spells, skills, items) to fill it.

But I tend to give this a lower priority than, say, the city interface.

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One other point to note when dragging items around in the queue: if you're in the 6-10 group you need to use the right-button drag technique (as described above) but I neglected to mention one key point; After you 'right-drag' your queue item to the left, you usually need to 'left-click' on the left-arrow while still holding the right mouse button down. Interestingly, this is the only case that I know of where you use the left-button & right-button simultaneously!

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Quoting baddl,

reply 8

But I tend to give this a lower priority than, say, the city interface.

True, but in my opinion all interface upgrades are important

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Yes, but there are so many important things to fix: general stability, very basic things like movement, quite a lot of more or less subtle bugs, UI uniformity and efficiency, additional features like augmented tactical battles or multiplayer, ... that I ask myself where they are going to start. It seems to me that they hurried to get in the features first - and those are almost overwhelming. Working on such an application to improve it isn't fun, however.

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Enchanting units is very tedious. (1) The selection box should allow multiple selections and double-click. (2) The spellbook should remember the page where it was last opened.

EDIT: Reverse assignment should be possible as well, i.e. the unit is selected first and the enchantments are chosen from a (dropdown) list. This would be the preferred way for newly recruited champions. (Same for cities.)

A screen listing all my champions (and henchmen), including the garrisoned ones, would be nice. It should allow enchantments and it should be able to bring me to their group with one mouse-click.

EDIT: To see their magical abilities, specialization(s) ("path"), faction ("blood") etc. at one glance would be useful too.

EDIT: When I am at it, there are even more properties which I would like to see at a glance: level (goes without saying), injuries, ... I am aftraid this could get out of hand.

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On the tactical map, there is no uniform way to cancel an action (spell/skill/item), like pressing ESC, and sometimes it can be really difficult to succeed.

If it is a ranged attack, you may be able to target an enemy unit which is out of reach. You get an error message and you can try again. (Actually this behavior is inconsistent. You should not be allowed to execute an illegal action, and in other places the left-click is just ignored.)

Sometimes a right-click will cancel the action. You have to try several alternatives before you give up: Target an empty tile, target an enemy unit or target the active unit itself.

Sometimes the best/only way is to select a different action that you know how to cancel.

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NaytchSG

Join Date 03/2006

+19

Quoting baddl,

reply 3

My list is still not complete. I forgot to mention the following BUG.

Sometimes the production queue of a city gets reordered (i.e. messed up). I have not yet figured out exactly when that happens. Apparently it has to do with the addition of more than four buildings to the queue (more than fit into the visible area on the "build" tab) where some of them are external tasks from improvements on resources. It happens that during the following turn the build queue looks differently from what it used to be before.

I would further suggest that as soon as you pop up the build list on a city, the pop-up can be scrolled up and down and as you left click a building, it auto-populates the build queue. As it stands now I have to [click] Build, [scroll] to desired building, [click] to highlight, move mouse down to [click] Build. And repeat for the merchant and the cleric and the bell tower and the study and the other building that reduces unrest and ugh

In my system you would open the menu once and each left click of the mouse would plop a building onto the build order, made a mistake? Right click to remove from the build order. I think it would save some of the tedium of city building, which I already alluded to in my post on Archery-

" I would argue that the multiple unlockable buildings in the fortress cities line are super annoying busy-work. The fortress, dedicated to pumping out troops, should get those buildings/bonuses AUTOMATICALLY as the tech is unlocked, interrupting troop building to get +2 defense, -25% cost etc. is busy work.

Let your interesting decisions for the Fortress come at level-up. Save building decisions for the Towns and Conclaves and give them more cool branching paths. Also, potions available only at Ye Olde Magick Shoppe in my one conclave city is {yawn}. I could have a low level hero fetch it, but meh."

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Quoting NaytchSG,

reply 15

It's not that bad... Hit "B" to open the build menu, double-click each building to queue it. Not really all that different from single-click to queue, IMO.

The other detail is that you can turn on an option allowing you to manually select the placement of each building, which pretty much requires a "click the list to select a building, click the map to select a location" model rather than queuing it on the first click.

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NaytchSG

Join Date 03/2006

+19

It's not that bad... Hit "B" to open the build menu, double-click each building to queue it. Not really all that different from single-click to queue, IMO.

The other detail is that you can turn on an option allowing you to manually select the placement of each building, which pretty much requires a "click the list to select a building, click the map to select a location" model rather than queuing it on the first click.[/quote]

I will check out your suggestion, I didn't know you could double click to place a building!

Edit: Um, yep, I am an eediyot! Thanks, nDervish!

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