Planet Production Interface Suggestions

I figured I should give feedback focused in one area at a time, and I am going to start with the Planet production interface.  This interface is used a lot, and should be made to make setting up production fast and easy.

 

Hex selection and evaluation:

I feel that putting the "Selected Tile" information at the bottom of the screen may be the wrong place for this.  Most things in the game have tooltips, and people get used to using those to get information about things.  This should extend to the planet tiles.  This would make it much easier to look over the planet quickly and decide what you might want to build the planet to do.

If you click and hold on a tile, and your mouse moves I think more than 3 pixels in any direction, the tile will not be selected.  There is no use for mouse drag on the planet map, so I would recommend having tiles selected on the Mouse Down event, rather than a Mouse Click event.

I feel that it would also be beneficial to have some sort of indication to the type of tile directly on the map, even if it does not have a Planetary Feature.

 

Selected Hex Feedback:

While the yellow ring on the inside of the selected hex isn't bad, but I would like it to be more apparent.  The tiles are big now, as is the map, you need to be able to quickly identify what tile is selected.  If the game could remember what tile is selected even if you switch tabs on the Available Projects or switch your selection to a non-improvement, that would be good.

I also feel that when you mouse over a tile, it should not use the same effect as for the selected tile.  If one was blue, and the other yellow I feel it would be better.

Making unusable tiles easier to differentiate might be another good thing.  Given the size of the map now, the green borders are a little faint.  Perhaps a slight dimming of all unusable tiles would be a solution.

 

Building Improvements:

When you go to actually build the improvements, the method I find I use is to select a Tile, then double click the improvement on the right.  This works fine, but then the selected tile changes to the highest of the leftmost column with a selectable Tile.  With the new adjacency bonus system, I think changing the selected tile to one of the closest free tiles to the one you had selected before would be better.

The other way to build an improvement, is to select it from the menu on the right, and double click the tile.  I feel that the selected improvement should not be cleared when this is done.  If someone wants to build a clump of factories, all they would have to do is select the factory on the right, and double click tiles to fill the spaces in.  As it stands right now, to build two factories connected to each other, one has to move the mouse between the left and right windows twice, either to reselect the factory, or to select the new tile.

 

Anyone else have any thoughts on these?

2,432 views 3 replies
Reply #1 Top

I would suggest using a different colour than yellow. For me, since I'm a little red-green colour-blind I find it difficult to tell apart the green and yellow borders sometimes, especially when they're thin and butting right next to each other. It's not a huge problem since with a little squinting and concentration I can usually tell but if I'm trying to plan out things at a glance it makes it difficult. I once tried to do a semicircle of factories that surrounded a power plant for the bonuses but it wasn't until I placed everything down that I realised the central tile was unusable without a new tech. Luckily I was already researching the technology anyway but... you can see that it might cause problems, particularly when you don't want to click every tile to check what they are.

Reply #2 Top

I find the yellow selection outline is a bit confusing with the unusable yellow-outlined tiles. Though they aren't exactly the same, it makes me second guess which tile I have selected and whether I can build on it, especially if I happen to have an unusable tile selected.

That said, I'm reserving any real judgment until we see the upcoming "revamped" colony management screen--I think many of these little oddities and annoyances will be weeded out.

Reply #3 Top

Quoting trumpeter87, reply 2
That said, I'm reserving any real judgment until we see the upcoming "revamped" colony management screen--I think many of these little oddities and annoyances will be weeded out.
End of trumpeter87's quote

I think you've hit the nail on the head... can't wait for the next update  :thumbsup: