Would you consider making a system-wide mini-map in a corner or something?
Basically my concern with a minimap (which AI War Classic had in I think the pre-4.0 days) is that it takes up a fair bit of screen real estate in what can already be an egregiously cluttered interface. I absolutely loath how many warnings and text messages are all over the place in AI War Classic, because it's information overload to new players, and for existing players it's a different kind of info overload in that important things can get lost among the clutter of all those messages.
That's a whole other conversation, in the main, and certainly the interface here is never going to be what anyone would call "minimalist."
But I want it to do a better job of bubbling up important information to you when that exists, and otherwise getting out of your way -- with of course the option to dive into the important details if you actually have a given question ("what's in my local solar system right now?" etc).
That is ultimately going to be the largest portion of the work I am doing on AI War II, in terms of what likely consumes most of my time over the longest period of time. Will a minimap fit into that? Possibly. It's not technically hard to create, and goodness knows we've done a bajillion minimaps in various games over the years at this point. The "minimap" solution that we added post-4.0 in AI War Classic was made of suck, though, I'm very willing to admit at this point.
I'm not sure if a true classic minimap is a better idea now or not, but with smaller planet wells a minimap for the local planet could be a lot more feasible to show actual useful information (things not so clumped up).
When it comes to a minimap, that's not something that I'm willing to commit to, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. When it comes to the interface in general, I'm simply going to need to budget a certain amount of time for exploratory iterative work where we go through a lot of things together and see what people like and how things evolve. That's not something I really want to try to design in the design document prior to the kickstarter, except for perhaps in the barest form.
IE it doesn't have to be galaxy wide just localized on whichever solar system you are focusing on. No need for complex tracking galaxy map filter just a simple color indicator of what is generally happening.
Out of curiosity, do you mean the local planet, or the solar system of the local planet? In the screenshots there you're looking at one planet, and then its linkages to other planets and/or the sun (it might not directly link to the sun) and possible linkages via wormholes to other solar systems. Were you thinking the solar system as a whole, or just the one planet? The latter is much easier, but the former strikes me as a lot more useful... and somewhat less like a minimap, and a bit more like some sort of other indicator. I'm not sure what to call that one.
Ultimately the simplest solution might be a secondary window that you can choose to open that would show the galaxy map in a smaller view and let you zoom and pan around it to the level you want to see, which I imagine would vary. I have no idea at this point how much extra graphical load that would entail, as I haven't tested that out yet. The closer in you were zoomed, the less, for sure.
This would be good as a separate topic just to see what people want, if you want to break it out.
I have some concerns about the new control scheme (even though I'm one of the people that asked for it).
In AIW1, I usually have one or more control groups making up my main battlegroup, and space docks in those groups set to automatically rebuild any fleet casualties. It sounds like with the new control scheme the following might happen:
* I take two control groups into battle (1 and 2)
* Group 1 takes casualties
* My space dock for Group 1 builds new ships
* I switch to group 2 and give an order
* I switch back to group 1 and give an order
Result: all the rebuilt ships back on my homeworld fly out to the current battlefield... possibly directly into a fortress or other unpleasant AI defensive structure in the way.
Maybe there can be some nuances to the controls such that you can give cross-system commands but not have this issue. Ideally, while still being able to grab the whole group across multiple planets when you want to do that.
For purposes of this discussion I'm going to ignore the refleeting argument, because I don't like for these things to rely unduly on one another. In other words, I don't want the design of refleeting to be partly based on the requirements for this while the design for this is designed around assumptions for refleeting. You get into circular dependencies and corners wind up being cut because "eh it's good enough while that other thing is that other way," and then someday when the other thing evolves for some reason, suddenly the first thing sucks.
Anyway, I agree that this is a problem, and probably only one of many. One of the things we used to have in AI War Classic, as you're undoubtedly aware, were toggles through a bunch of different planets using hotkeys to activate things like "this control group on the 'next planet'," etc. I don't see any reason that we can't either a) remove those things and reuse them in some other way, such as having them say things like "activate these only on this planet" or "activate these only on enemy planets" or "activate these only on allied planets" or something of that sort; or b) keeping that ability to just select them on the current planet and loop between planets that have them.
This would also be worth a separate discussion, because I'm sure there are some other edge cases and not-so-edge cases. Ideally things like refleeting changes ease the need for this anyway, but let's assume the worst possible case on that front when designing flexibility for this one. That way this one is ironclad regardless of what is going on over there, and the other one can evolve freely without having to think of this.
Cheers!
Chris
