Highest Priority Fix [Updated for 1.012]

[ptarth]

Please vote on your top 3 concerns for The Last Federation in v1.012 and later versions.

**CURRENT POLL: Poll reopened for versions starting at 1.012**

• Added some new options to get current trends.
• Please note that previous poll results are available later in this post.
• Issue: Should a new thread be created for each poll or should we continue to update this one? I'm going to bias you by saying I think one poll is the best option, and you should vote for me because I've made 25 posts on the Arcen forums and I like cheese (except for blue and swiss which are both terrible). A single thread reduces forum spam and keeps everything in a single readily identified location.
• If someone wants to write up a history of each of the options and how Arcen has previously deal with it, I can add it to this thread or provide a link to the summary.
• The highest rated concerns in the previous poll were: RCI, Information Screens, and Race AI. (Those items are also leading the new poll.)

**RESULTS: POLL #1 for version ~1.010**
We had 32 voters in the previous poll which is less than 1% of the customers owning and playing the game.

• Race AI - Work on adding deeper Race AIs so that they do things other than declare war and declare more war.    16 (18.6%)
• RCS - Fix the enormous swings in RCS. Add min & Max limits, and reduce the impact of the larger events.    13 (15.1%)
• Information Screens - Add more mechanic information and adjust the layout of information screens so players can see why things happen.    12 (14%)
• Tooltips - Add more mechanic explanations to the tooltips.    10 (11.6%)
• Federation AI - Add an AI for the Federation which influences member races actions.    9 (10.5%)
• Quests - Add new quests.    7 (8.1%)
• Assorted Mantis Bugs - The Mantis tracker has hundreds of small bugs of various kinds.    5 (5.8%)
• Event Pausing - Add a Paradox like event pausing system.    4 (4.7%)
• Race Fleet Combat & Planetary Attacks - Work on Fleet versus Fleet and Fleet versus Planet combat.    3 (3.5%)
• Autoresolve - Autoresolve still isn't working quite right.    2 (2.3%)
• Events - Reduce the impact of events and add new events.    2 (2.3%)
• Player Combat - Improve Player Combat.    1 (1.2%)
• Player Weapons - Add more weapon options for player ship.    1 (1.2%)
• Burlust Duels - Change how Burlust Duels work.    1 (1.2%)
• Typos - There are grammatical and spelling typos in the various texts.    0 (0%)

**ANNOUNCEMENT: Original Post**
In the last patch update thread, Arcen asked what things we think should be fixed first. With the Mantis voting system, we can do things like that, however, very few use it.

Let's see if we can organize something using the forum.

You have N votes to choose from the Y issues. If this works out, we'll make these on a periodic basis or update this one depending on what works best. If you want to add an issue to future polls, suggest away. Some of these items are very vague, please specify what you mean if you pick them.

[lifehole]

Well well, very nice selection of choices! Good job. Easy way to categorize and give feedback to the devs without them having to read an essay of belligerent complaining (of which I am guilty.)

[Misery]

It's not on there, but as I'd said in that patch thread, I'm sticking with "slow everything down alot".  There's other issues... RCI values being number 2.... but I'm thinking this is at the core of the whole "I dont feel like my actions really do anything" issue that many are having.

[ptarth]

I wasn't able to come up with a concise and descriptive way of saying, "Slow down the game". The player has already been slowed down. The Races haven't, but without knowing why they are doing the things they are doing, describing how to slow things downs escapes me. Hence I resorted to breaking them into:

• "show more mechanic explanations", which will then allow us to state and complain specifically on what is going too fast
• "Better Race AI" which will hopefully lead them to doing something other than declare war all of the time.
• We also have the ever popular - Paradox-style event-based pause system, for the literal slowing the game down option

If you've got a better way of phrasing it, please share.

[x4000]

It's not on there, but as I'd said in that patch thread, I'm sticking with "slow everything down alot".  There's other issues... RCI values being number 2.... but I'm thinking this is at the core of the whole "I dont feel like my actions really do anything" issue that many are having.

Those two things in particular are coming in tonight's patch --  I am just testing that stuff now, and it is indeed feeling a lot more sane.  I may have gone too far in the other direction on a few things, we'll see, but I think it is a lot better.

[GC13]

The tooltips are hugely important. Would it be helpful for you if I recorded a short video of me playing Victoria 2 and showing you all of the information in tooltips that I use all of the time, and the information it comforts me to have accessible? It completely puts TLF to shame, and significantly reduces the "wiki game" aspect of the game, making it more a matter of strategy and less of puzzling out game mechanics.

[lifehole]

The tooltips are hugely important. Would it be helpful for you if I recorded a short video of me playing Victoria 2 and showing you all of the information in tooltips that I use all of the time, and the information it comforts me to have accessible? It completely puts TLF to shame, and significantly reduces the "wiki game" aspect of the game, making it more a matter of strategy and less of puzzling out game mechanics.

Well it'd be nice, but considering he implemented this stuff on a few hours notice that's already probably more than what can be done right now tbh. Maybe by end of friday? dunno.  But yeah, tooltips would be nice. (Honestly you could just make that video for new vicky 2 players, haha. I knew I had trouble learning that game, but it was mostly the pop system.)

[Mick]

Awesome! Thanks for making this post.

I voted for (in order of importance):

1) Tooltips - Need more information!
2) Information Screens - Pretty much goes along with #1. Better layout would be great, but would probably require a lot of iterating to really get right.
3) RCS - Kinda a distant third in my priority, because I feel I really need #1 and #2 to judge things further, but the huge swings in RCS do kinda make the player feel a bit powerless so it probably needs at least some attention.

[GC13]

Oh, I know I was scared by the POP system. However, I was thinking of it specifically when I mentioned that it comforted me to have access to it. It's not something I refer to often, except to see if there's anything I can do to drop militancy down.

I'm just thinking... There's so much information the player uses all of the time in Victoria 2, and so much of it is in tooltips. I could easily bang the video out tonight if I wasn't lazy, so Chris could watch it tomorrow if he decided Friday was the day for the Tooltippening.

[Misery]

It's not on there, but as I'd said in that patch thread, I'm sticking with "slow everything down alot".  There's other issues... RCI values being number 2.... but I'm thinking this is at the core of the whole "I dont feel like my actions really do anything" issue that many are having.

Those two things in particular are coming in tonight's patch --  I am just testing that stuff now, and it is indeed feeling a lot more sane.  I may have gone too far in the other direction on a few things, we'll see, but I think it is a lot better.

Sounds good to me.  "Going too far" is just part of the fun, hah.  At least you've certainly got enough testers to help figure out the necessary tweaks.

[lifehole]

Oh, I know I was scared by the POP system. However, I was thinking of it specifically when I mentioned that it comforted me to have access to it. It's not something I refer to often, except to see if there's anything I can do to drop militancy down.

I'm just thinking... There's so much information the player uses all of the time in Victoria 2, and so much of it is in tooltips. I could easily bang the video out tonight if I wasn't lazy, so Chris could watch it tomorrow if he decided Friday was the day for the Tooltippening.

You've also got to realize ofcourse that there is only really a couple people working on this game, while paradox has large teams that can output much more in terms of raw text, data, programming, etc. Not saying that people are like some mineral mining machine or something, just saying that I bet paradox would not be able to do what it does if it had 2 people working on the game.

[x4000]

In terms of tooltipping, I'm not really interested in looking at detailed videos of other developers' stuff to be honest, as I've seen plenty of that sort of thing.  Friday probably isn't the day for tooltipping, though.  But in general, when it comes to that sort of thing, I just need lists of what you guys want to know, and I can work it out from there.  I'm no stranger to tooltips, but developers in general are bad judges of what is being conveyed well versus not.  Ideally a single ticket in mantis for each thing or tightly related group of things you want to have more info on, and I'll figure out the best way to get it in there.

As for some of the requests for doing things like tooltips over text hovers, that is really kind of beyond our capabilities anytime in the near future.  That's not just adding some tooltips, that's a substantial GUI extension.

I know that collapsible sections for the planetary view are desired, and that's something that I do plan on putting in, incidentally.  It's mainly a matter of when.

[GC13]

You can't do tooltips over text hovers? What does that even mean?

I'll try to work on a list, but if you wanted to do me one information-related favor in 1.012, then I'd ask for you to show how many "points" of construction power a planet has on the details page. Ideally with a tooltip that shows how it got there, but I don't know how much time it would take to put together. Two favors would be then show how much progress (out of 100%) the construction points allocated to each project will advance it in the next month (or how many transports, or how many square kilometers of land). Those two things together would help me understand what's going on so much more.

[lifehole]

Well if we're coming up with a list we should probably discuss it. Things I'd like to know: what exactly RCI values are doing in % on hovering over value. Reasons for declarations of war. Monthly ship construction rate and what contributes to that in exacts (ideally all this information would be connected e.g if I want to double armada production speed It'll link the info to the decision screen, so I would know the exact effect I was having.)

Right now we know vaguely what things do, but not exacts. The thing is, we're forced to just perform actions hoping they'll do something significant, while only being given a vague description. If we had a fully developed trade UI explaining what resources various planets need, we could build mines to accomodate the various resource needs. Ofcourse, this would result in everyone having enough resources to build whatever they want, aka a more efficient economy. Which would mean that maybe people you don't want benefitting get the power to bulk up. There's a lot of interesting possibilities with player interaction that are just wasted because the player doesn't really know the full and exact effect of his actions. If I moused over minimum/maximum population growth/death I could see the current effects feeding into it, then attempt to fix it by doing something other than just blindly clicking on stuff that sounds like it would do something.

Since a TON of stuff feeds into RCI, a good improvement would to have tooltips, or info bars, or ANY information concerning the exact, current, effects of the RCI of that planet.

I know it's not an easy thing to do, but it improves the game by huge amounts. I wouldn't be able to play any strategy game without tooltips of why things do this and what things feed into that.

[Misery]

Well if we're coming up with a list we should probably discuss it. Things I'd like to know: what exactly RCI values are doing in % on hovering over value. Reasons for declarations of war. Monthly ship construction rate and what contributes to that in exacts (ideally all this information would be connected e.g if I want to double armada production speed It'll link the info to the decision screen, so I would know the exact effect I was having.)

Right now we know vaguely what things do, but not exacts. The thing is, we're forced to just perform actions hoping they'll do something significant, while only being given a vague description. If we had a fully developed trade UI explaining what resources various planets need, we could build mines to accomodate the various resource needs. Ofcourse, this would result in everyone having enough resources to build whatever they want, aka a more efficient economy. Which would mean that maybe people you don't want benefitting get the power to bulk up. There's a lot of interesting possibilities with player interaction that are just wasted because the player doesn't really know the full and exact effect of his actions. If I moused over minimum/maximum population growth/death I could see the current effects feeding into it, then attempt to fix it by doing something other than just blindly clicking on stuff that sounds like it would do something.

Since a TON of stuff feeds into RCI, a good improvement would to have tooltips, or info bars, or ANY information concerning the exact, current, effects of the RCI of that planet.

I know it's not an easy thing to do, but it improves the game by huge amounts. I wouldn't be able to play any strategy game without tooltips of why things do this and what things feed into that.

I agree, the tooltips would help alot.  The game does need more explanation in many ways, and it seems quite important for many players, so I'd agree that it's a fairly major point right now.

You can't do tooltips over text hovers? What does that even mean?

It essentially means that for now, because of the way the game engine and GUI and whatever work, coding that in would be difficult and take more time than is usual for most things.  I know it kinda sounds like it should be a simple addition, but programming can be that way.... supposedly simple things end up taking like 20 hours of coding to implement properly.

Worth the effort though, I think.