eleazar wrote:
But still, even if all these ideas are implemented, for most of the game a significant fraction, (probably a majority) of the planets won't be valid possible targets for building stuff. The main point here is not cluttering the player's attention with planets where he can't build something. If we increase the number of places were the player can build (not just on owned planets), the logic that hides/compresses planets were things can't be built would have to be correspondingly changed. Unless that is technically unfeasible for arcane scripting reasons?
It should still be possible to compress planets where things can't be built - either planets where the player cannot currently build anything, or where the player cannot currently build the selected item. There may be potential performance issues for the first, since I think that would require evaluating the location conditions for all the producible items for each planet in the system, but that probably won't end up being a problem unless designing ships is the player's favourite part of the game, and he hasn't learned how to delete ship designs.
This is a bit different though, since when a player opens a system with no owned planets, he had to deliberately click on that system, knowing he didn't own any planets there, whereas when he opens a system with owned and unowned planets, the appearance of unusable planets is just a side effect of wanting to get at the usable planets.
Even without the ability to produce on unowned planets, the player still may want to check out enemy planets while he's in the production screen - it won't necessarily be more convenient in all cases to leave the production screen, then look at the enemy system in the side panel, then go back to the production screen to queue your ships or whatever. Clicking on a system in which you can't build doesn't necessarily indicate that you intends to leave the production screen, so it shouldn't make you leave the production screen - I'm dubious of adding unexpected side effects to the player's actions that makes some assumption about his intentions.
zhur wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:
Yeah, that's how it typically works in most cases for FO as well, but there have been ideas tossed around about having particular "factory" ship parts or whatever, that might allow you to build something in a system where you don't have any colonies, if such a ship is present. The "Gateway to the Void" building would be a use case for this, since its effect destroys all ships in the system, regardless of ownership - it might as well be unowned, in fact, or better yet, create a "Gateway to the Void" special attached to the system. Which brings me to the more generic use case for being able to select unowned planets as a production target. My hope is that the production system will be made a bit more generic, so that more stuff can be done than just build planets and ships, and the player can queue more generic "projects" that have arbitrary effects upon completion (or even continuous projects that take effect during production). A player might send a ship off to another system and queue a terraforming project, or a project to add a particular special to a planet or system. There's no guarantee in such a case that the target of such a project will need to be a location owned by the player.
I kind of get this now. Though for me it sounds like interface similar to colonization/invasion, and not through production window, is more appropriate for such kinds of tasks.
I don't disagree, and we definitely need to have support for arbitrary effects groups to be activated via the UI. There are advantages to doing it with production as well though, such as forcing the player's important ships to be vulnerable at the construction location. Constructing a starlane might be another example of this - the player might need to have a valuable and expensive ship stationed at each end of the starlane-to-be for the duration of its construction, creating additional risk when trying to create a starlane into enemy territory.
zhur wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:
The use of trade or influence will probably be done in a separate window from production, so doesn't directly affect what to do with production, but espionage or other influence projects will definitely need to behave something like the production projects I just described, and it would be nice if the production and influence screens behaved similarly or identically in terms of selecting systems and planets.
These are again different tasks. You want espionage to be like production on enemy planets? Seems strange to me, really. If I'd be a game designer I'd probably invent a new and unique espionage mechanics not similar to basic colony management task like production.
I believe that it's more important to make the things the player can
do with espionage unique, rather than giving it unique mechanics or UI - if anything, making it the same as production will just reduce the learning curve for the player.
zhur wrote:
Anyway do you agree that having more user-friendly production window now is probably more useful than potential lowering of efforts for implementing a new feature in the future?
I don't know that it is more user friendly - this patch assumes that clicking on a planet in which the player has no owned systems signifies an intent to leave the production window, which regardless of his ability to produce items there, isn't necessarily valid.