0006338: Ships in multiple systems - DEV Arcen

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0006338	AI War 1 / Classic	Suggestion - Interface Ideas - Unit Selection, Management, and Orders		Mar 2, 2012 1:42 pm	Mar 24, 2012 9:26 am

Reporter	moriarty	Assigned To	Chris_McElligottPark
Status	closed	Resolution	no change required
Product Version	5.026

Summary	0006338: Ships in multiple systems
Description	Currently if I have a trillion ships scattered across the galaxy that are all in one group, when I select that group from the galaxy menu I see exactly one big white circle highlighting exactly one system. Quite often this system only has one ship for bonus points. Anyway, suggestion - better display groups of ships. It's a nightmare to manage the things now and given a thousand+ isn't uncommon... Maybe have the big circle around the system with most ships and smaller circles around other systems.
Tags	No tags attached.

Internal Weight	New

Chris_McElligottPark Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm administrator ~0020176	A few notes: 1. That circle is where you are, it has nothing to do with ships. 2. The game does not, and never will, support selecting ships from multiple planets at the same time. 3. If you want to give orders to ships from multiple planets at once, you can do that via the Find function and order all ships of a given type around, but that's the extent of it. 4. Beyond that, I suggest that you keep your ships from a given control group on the same general planet. Otherwise things get fairly confusing. But you can triple-tap the control group number key in order to switch between planets that have ships of that group.

moriarty Mar 2, 2012 6:33 pm reporter ~0020199	Maybe you've gathered from my glut of "bugs" but its clear that this game isn't acting as I'd expect it to. For the record I've played countless strategy games (RTS, 4x, etc) and from them I've learnt that when a unit is selected you follow the unit. This method is, to be honest, extremely confusing and I'm finding it very hard to manage large groups of ships despite never having much of a problem in most other games. To such an extent its unlikely I'm going to even bother finishing my first full game (80 systems). I'm not saying your way is wrong, but its not intuitive when players are trained by just about every other slightly-related game out there to do it a different way.

Chris_McElligottPark Mar 2, 2012 7:00 pm administrator ~0020207	I'm sorry it doesn't act the way you expect it to. However, I'm not going to redesign it for your specific tastes, I'm sorry. No game is perfect, but clearly we're doing a lot right: http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-press There aren't terribly many games that have multiple battlefields at once. Inside a battlefield, this game works exactly as I think you expect it to. But what I think the core disconnect here is that your galaxy is not "one big battlefield." It's a collection of smaller ones. I'm not trying to be difficult, but you're essentially asking me to undertake a massive redesign of a game that has been out for three years and which thousands of players love and reviewers lauded. It _is_ different from other games, I'll grant you that. And if you're not inclined to learn the way to play this particular game, I'm sorry to hear it but there's not a lot I can do about that. An immense amount of thought has gone into every aspect of the game, I can promise you, and while we make changes all the time based on player suggestions -- historically and currently -- the amount of work you are proposing is weeks or months of developer time. I'm not even sure which, because the ramifications are so far-reaching in terms of the internal workings of the game.

moriarty Mar 7, 2012 5:17 pm reporter ~0020544	That's fine, I completely understand and I apologise if I seem obstreperous. I was\am just attempting to offer some constructive feedback. The issue for me is that as you noted, I don't consider it multiple battlefields (i.e., lots of mini RTS games), but just one big battlefield which is typically how its treated in 4x's (which at that scale is what its most similar to). The only game that I can think of that does have multiple battlefields similar to AIWars is "Starships Unlimited", and in that when you select a group, the entire group across the entire cosmos is selected (though a group will only have about a dozen ships in it in that game). From a play perspective I really do find it extremely difficult to manage a large fleet that has scattered across multiple systems. I'm aware of force-move-group and I realise you say elsewhere "go to the systems and coral them one by one", but to me that's far from ideal and I'd posit it is for other players too. Further, its pretty much impossible for me to find my entire fleet all of the time. Especially decloakers and tachyon drones (extremely annoying as there are only 6 total of them) because they don't seem to show up on any of the filters and I don't have any spare groups for them specifically. I'm not trying to say "you're wrong", or even that "I'm right", I just thought I'd bring this to light. Certainly fleet management is a big damper on the game for me.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Mar 2, 2012 1:42 pm	moriarty	New Issue
Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Internal Weight	=> New
Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0020176
Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Status	new => closed
Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	=> Chris_McElligottPark
Mar 2, 2012 1:45 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Resolution	open => no change required
Mar 2, 2012 6:33 pm	moriarty	Note Added: 0020199
Mar 2, 2012 7:00 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0020207
Mar 7, 2012 5:17 pm	moriarty	Note Added: 0020544
Mar 24, 2012 9:26 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	has duplicate 0006797