Page 1 of 1

Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Specia

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:33 pm
by godel
This might be a long term thing, but for now, a suggestion.
The specials are hard to find, sometimes hard to recall, especially if the game is broken in to several sessions.
Any total fix would be extensive. Too extensive for any quick fix. So I understand no one dealing with this.

But for a small incremental good change, if you could list the specials that are active in my empire, just so that I do not have more then one of each type turned on, that would be a kindness, and a help.

Eventually specials would have something like:
In Empire and active
In Empire and not active
Not in Empire but in known planet space
Not available in any known system, past or present.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:48 pm
by Geoff the Medio
godel wrote:...the specials that are active in my empire...
Define "active" ?

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 8:21 pm
by defaultuser
As far as multiples, you can do a Pedia lookup on one of them and it will list all the ones you know about. You can then work through those to see if you are already using one. I often switch when a new one is acquired, as a newly colonized world will have a low population and would have little population-based contribution to Industry or Research.

I do wish the list would show ones that are unowned in a neutral color, rather than "sphere of influence".

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:31 pm
by Morlic
Geoff the Medio wrote:
godel wrote:...the specials that are active in my empire...
Define "active" ?
I think he is talking about having the Growth Focus activated for the relevant specials.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:56 am
by godel
Yes 'active' would mean being currently applied across the whole of my empire, not just to one planet in one system.
So I could know a special was out there (thanks defaultuser) but obtain (colonize or win in battle) a planet and not know if I still needed to do what must to make it work for all my other planets.
This suggestion is like helping gamers with a tedious accounting issue. Yes you can and now must deal with this in some fashion. But on-click knowledge of something that the game demonstrably knows would make decisions simple.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 3:01 am
by godel
defaultuser wrote:As far as multiples, you can do a Pedia lookup on one of them and it will list all the ones you know about. You can then work through those to see if you are already using one. I often switch when a new one is acquired, as a newly colonized world will have a low population and would have little population-based contribution to Industry or Research.

I do wish the list would show ones that are unowned in a neutral color, rather than "sphere of influence".
"You can then work through those to see if you are already using one"
AS far as I know the only way to do so is to go to each kind of world that could be affected and check each stat.

Tedious, nitpicking, chore not really good game.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 11:50 am
by MatGB
The current end user UI for the Growth specials isn't brilliant, I did some work on them awhileback to ensure the Pedia articles made it a LOT easier to work out what you did and didn't have, if you use the Growth Specials entry, linked from the lookup for every growth special, you get a full list of all the specials that can then link you to the page for each special and thus list the planets you have which have those specials, sort Objects by focus setting and look at Growth only and you can see which of those planets is set to Growth.

This isn't ideal, amongst other things if you capture, for example, a Tiny native homeworld with a special, it's far more optimal to set that world to Growth than to keep your existing Large/Huge colony, but even working out where each planet is getting the growth from—IIRC I tried to setup the accountinglabels for the growth specials so they named the source planet in the same way that buildings do at roughly the same time but couldn't get it working and moved on to something else.

Having an improvement to the UI for the growth (and other focus based specials EG Computronium Moon) would be a good thing, to be able to easily and quickly find the special that is active if you've grabbed a second copy would be optimal, you can do it with Pedia lookup on the special then click the other planet but that is several clicks, takes you away from your new conquest and by necessity involves generating a habitability report for the already colonised world that both takes time (lag is reduced but not eliminated for that report) and isn't what you want anyway.

So a mouseover tooltip that includes whether or not you have the special, etc would be useful, or indeed other solutions. Expanding the Pedia entries, accountinglabels and tooltips for them would also help.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:20 pm
by godel
Wow thanks I had not realized that.
Thanks for all your good work.
And for this latest instruction. The game often consists of finding out how the game works. (now if I could have some advice what those small omegas are on the manufacturing line the ones that look like an o with a top tail.)

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:01 pm
by MatGB
godel wrote:now if I could have some advice what those small omegas are on the manufacturing line the ones that look like an o with a top tail.)
Not sure what you mean here so assuming we're talking in the sidepanel
Screenshot_20170117_165625.png
Screenshot_20170117_165625.png (91.22 KiB) Viewed 1884 times
Top line is specie icon/population, then Happiness, then Infrastructure
Line 2 is Production, Research, Trade/Influence and then Supply
Third line is Shields, Defence strength, Troops, Vision and Stealth.

Note this is a pic of a brand new colony, normally they sort based on highest number first.

Happiness only does a small number of basic things currently (colonisation source and drydock activation), Infrastructure affects various other things including defence replenishment, Trade/Influence isn't implemented yet but is being worked on, it's possible it'll be ready at some point this year, the rest are fairly obvious.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:19 pm
by godel
When one goes to the manufacturing panel, there are several wonderful things.
I long ago learned most of them. The 1x 2x etc was obvous.
The σ is not obvious to me. Not a clue.

Re: Suggestion: helping with accounting and human memory: Sp

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:27 pm
by dbenage-cx
⟳ - Should show as a circle with an arrow.

Basically, it repeats the order after the previous was finished.

(Edit: more detailed info might be found in PR #1065, at least until it is resolved)