One of the things that I think could be improved upon is the interface used for dispatching survivors. The current one does the job, but it does have one flaw that I can see -- it forces the player to manually count how many movement squares their survivors have available. This flaw is made worse by the presence of two different movement types, plus the fact that these ranges can change throughout the game. I don't think that this is as user friendly as it could be.
The foundation of my idea is this: rather than first clicking the area you would like the survivors to go, you would instead click on the survivors themselves (a bit like grabbing a piece on a board game). I will proceed to run through the idea in more detail, but first a short recap of the current system.
Player calculates how many squares their survivors can move>click location>select Dispatch Survivors on Mission>pick type of mission (or rally)> choose survivor and view chance of success
The new system would be like this:
1) Click tile on which there are survivors or group of survivors you would like to move.
2) Choose Dispatch Survivors on a mission (exactly same menu setup as currently, embark, strategic overview etc).
3) Then some guide tiles would appear allowing the player to see exactly how far their movement range is, be that for a dispatch or a rally. Let me illustrate this with some appalling G.I.M.P skills in figure 1. The green line is a player trying to move within the correct dispatch range. The blue line is the player attempting to move within an acceptable rally range. The red line is a player trying to move outside of any possible range. The player could use this visual aid to more easily plan their movements on the map without having to count the tiles. As an added bonus, this aid could also warn the player if they are trying to enter a tile within Demonaica's range.
4) Choose a tile and select type of mission, scavenging etc. Or just rally if end location is within the blue guide.
5) Select survivor or survivors to dispatch and view success rate.
As you can see this is not a big departure from the current interface, it's just that the starting point allows for a visual aid to be calculated in relation to the end point. This also has the added advantage of de-cluttering the standard embark menus slightly by removing the need for a Dispatch Survivor on a Mission option on survivor-less tiles. I think that's about it, actually. Hopefully I've explained the concept satisfactorily and there aren't any major flaws in it. Any comments most welcome.
Note: I actually tried to post this on Mantis, but maybe it was too long or something. Said invalid security token.
