Game interface improvements (26 suggestions !!!)

[FrankJones]

Here are some suggestions, many of which have been posted multiple times in various threads. Quentin suggested keeping a separate thread for game design improvements, so here it is. [Edit: Quentin seems to have vanished, Nate seems to be in charge of these forums now]

1) The target for attack cards: Against the AI, it defaults to self (for some reason), which is annoying. Then, when playing against humans, it defaults to an opponent. This is inconsistent and has caused me on more than one occasion to switch the target to myself by accident (since I am accustomed to switching the target when playing the AI). How about just having the target always be an opponent?


2) How about showing the players' names on the end game scoring, or, if it was a game against the AI, the skill level of the AI?

3) Being able to cancel out of an undesired action would be a great idea. Until an action is finalized, there should be a simple “back” or “cancel” button. If I decide I don’t actually want to sell a patent, why can’t I reverse course? Same with anything that places a tile, adds or removes resources to a different card, etc.

4) The commercial district looks too much like a city. How about changing its appearance to make it more distinguishable? (Or make a "hover" feature where you hover the mouse over any tile and it says the name of that tile)

5) The animations are agonizing. Please add a toggle switch to simply turn them off. It’s repetitive and boring to watch them, and wastes a lot of time. Placing a city as Tharsis with Standard Technology, Rover Construction, Immigrant City, Pets, and placing it on a tile bonus next to an ocean – that’s something like 9 animations, and they all happen one at a time. It’s ridiculous. Same with playing green cards when having decomposes, ecological zone, and viral enhancers. Or any number of other similarly annoying situations. Among advanced players, most of our clock is not from thinking or planning, but from watching animations. Please, add an option to get rid of them. It’s absurd how slow the game goes ON A COMPUTER. I should be able to click “city,” place the city, click “Greenery,” place the greenery, in approximately 6 seconds. It shouldn’t use 30 seconds of my clock just to do TWO actions, especially since I may have 8 or 10 or 12 more actions THAT GENEATION.

6) The timers: Why does our timer run when it’s not our turn, or it is our turn but we have no control over what’s happening? If we are not in control of our mouse, the clock should not run. Players with a lot of effects and blue card actions should not be so severely penalized with regard to the timer. The timer, as with Chess, should be for time spent THINKING, PLANNING, ANALYZING. Computer-controlled animations shouldn’t count against us. Worse, when we click “okay” to review an opponent’s move, our timer runs while we’re forced to watch the same pointless animations that already counted against that player’s clock. This makes no sense. Also nice would be if each player’s timer were always on display (I’ve never seen a timed game before in which this wasn’t always displayed). It would also be nice if the timer displaced the actual time left in a 2H game, such as 1:43:00 instead of just saying “1H” from the beginning of the game until someone gets below an hour (which often doesn’t happen). Nobody’s timer should run during production (which is agonizingly slow), or the generation change and turn order change. And all of this should happen a LOT faster.

7) The chat interface is terrible. It takes up the entire screen, can only be exited out of by clicking the chat icon instead of just clicking anywhere on the map, and for some reason, we need to re-click the cursor area each time we type something, or else nothing types as we press keys on the keyboard. There is plenty of room on the game map to have an embedded chat box that doesn’t cover anything important, and can be used without missing the fact that someone completed a move.

8) The blue card actions are a complete mess. Why are only 6 displayed at a time? There’s no reason to scroll them when we have more than 6. This is tiresome and annoying. Why not just have them all pop up when we click “actions”? (Same with effects, and card resources). Whose idea was it to limit these to 6? Just display them all! There’s plenty of room. This is especially annoying when we need to use predators or ants to remove an opponent’s resource: We need to scroll all the way down past our own resources before even getting to theirs. WHY? Put the opponents’ resources at the top! Or, we want to add microbes to our ants card, but it’s not even visible among the top 6, so we need to scroll down to the bottom, because they are listed in chronological order played and aren’t able to be rearranged. This makes no sense. Also, it’s completely pointless to require a click to “confirm” that we are adding a resource to a card when there’s no other choice. Why waste our time? And sometimes, if it’s not one of the top 6 resources, we can’t even see how many we have anyway. Security Fleet, for example – the action should end when we click “use.” It’s not necessary for us to see a titanium float up into the air, and then click “okay” to “add resource.” Obviously that’s what we’re going to do. There’s no other option at that point!

9) It takes way too long to be able to makes moves when it’s our turn. After the AI finishes, There’s a big waste of time as it says “Your turn” but yet, I can’t actually do anything yet! If I click “actions,” they are all grayed out. Same with Standard projects. Why does it take so long? We shouldn’t be ahead of the computer by 5 or 6 seconds. That makes no sense. As soon as the AI or opponent finishes making moves, we should be able to make ours immediately.

10) Related: When the AI has passed, or all the human players have passed, please get rid of the “action 1 of 2” nonsense, and the delay between the second action and being able to perform our next action. Just go into “continuous action” mode! In the game log, it just shows a series of continuous actions. Why doesn’t the game interface follow suit? It’s incredible how long it takes to perform actions when everyone else has passed. It should be rapid fire, one after another, no pauses, no delays, no animations, no “action 2 of 2, end turn, action 1 of 2” nonsense.

11) [fixed and thus removed]

12) Being able to rearrange our own cards would be nice (and also our blue card actions). That way we could put defunct actions at the bottom (or even hide them altogether?) such as Aquifer pumping once all the oceans have been placed.

13) When selling a patent, why does it only show 4 cards at a time instead of the usual 8? This is annoying and pointless. Also, why limit the cards to 8? There’s room for 12. Some general guidelines for games, especially this one: A) Don’t make us scroll through lists. B) Show more things, not fewer. And C) Don’t require 16 clicks when it can be done with a single click. Speaking of which:

14) When using power infrastructure, or Insulation, or paying for something with heat or titanium or steel, It’s frustrating and tiresome to click 16 times to transfer 16 power to Megacredits, every time. There should be a simple “use all” or “use max” button. There should also be a “+5” button and a “+10 button.” Even one of the tabletop simulators has this feature. Why not the digital game? Repeatedly clicking one unit at a time just makes no sense.

15) In a multiplayer game it’s annoying to have to click each production board individually. How about an option to click “show all production boards” that would temporarily overlay each player’s board over the main screen, until we click out of it? (This falls under category 13B).

16) At the game end scoring screen, please show the individual awards, and allow us to view the game state. Also helpful would be an indicator of how many generations the game went, and adding the player names to the corporation/color logos. And, showing which AI difficulty level the AI was – that would be a nice touch.

17) Very important: An indicator showing which direction the cards are being passed during the draft. A simple up or down arrow would suffice.

[18 and 19 are no longer relevant]

20) In a rated game (and maybe unrated also) there should be an option to “resign” without forfeiting. As with chess and other strategy games, sometimes it’s obvious that the game is a lost cause. It’s pointless to drag it out, especially when the player who is way ahead is causing the game to take longer than necessary by continuing to run up the score instead of ending the game. But forfeiting goes down as a forfeit and (I assume) hurts Karma rating. There’s no shame in resigning a lost game, and that should be an option that is separate from a forfeit.


[Addendum]

21) An option for the game host to set a minimum rating for players to join. Pretty much every rated game has this option to help players find games against players of similar skill level. It's not really fun for anyone if a 1700 player is beating up on a 1400 rated player. This setting would help avoid that.

[Additional addendums discussed after this post was written]:

22) an improved game log (see replies below for details)

23) [actually implements, thanks!]

24) [Ditto]

25) Automatically place the tiles for Noctis City, Phobos Space Haven, and Ganymede Colony. There's no reason to require a player to click on the one and only valid spot for placement. Just do it. Too often, players think the game has locked up when they click the card and nothing happens. JUST MAKE THE TILE FALL ONTO THE SPOT AUTOMATICALLY!

26) More game timer options: 1H 15 M , 1H 30M , 1H 45M. The first one is expecially important, because in a 2p draft game that becomes an engine building game, it might go 14 generations (I've even seen 15 a few times and 16 one time), and by that point, each generation takes a very long time even when both players are making their moves instantly (because of the effects and animations and other interface issues). But 1H 15M is a perfect setting to allow for that possibility - much better than 2H, which many people won't join becasue they worry someone is actually going to use the entire 2H for no good reason.

[GothicDumka]

Unless they stop developing mobile version half of this changes is highly unlikely.

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by GothicDumka:

Unless they stop developing mobile version half of this changes is highly unlikely.

One can always hope. There's no reason all of this wasn't done in the first place.

[76561198392478228]

Thanks for the feedback, Frank!

While the team is currently focused on delivering additional bugfixes, we can already answer to two points.

Originally posted by FrankJones:

18) An explanation of Karma rating would be nice. Exactly what raises or lowers it.

The Karma system common to many games by Asmodee Digital / Days of Wonder is presented here: {LINK REMOVED}https://www.daysofwonder.com/online/en/play/karma/
And if you're curious about the ELO system: {LINK REMOVED}https://www.daysofwonder.com/online/en/play/ranking/

Originally posted by FrankJones:

19) When I play a private game against a friend, we like to talk to each other as we play. We do this by keeping open an ongoing phone call on our cell phones. A microphone option might be a nice feature to add. (along with a game setting option to disable it when creating a game among strangers, if the host doesn’t want people talking about nonsense during the game.

Steam's Voice Chat system is very solid and exactly what you need. To use it, open a chat window with a friend or a group chat window with several friends, and click the microphone icon in the lower right corner.

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by QuentinAsmo:

Steam's Voice Chat system is very solid and exactly what you need. To use it, open a chat window with a friend or a group chat window with several friends, and click the microphone icon in the lower right corner.

Good to know. Thanks :)

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by QuentinAsmo:

The Karma system common to many games by Asmodee Digital / Days of Wonder is presented here: https://www.daysofwonder.com/online/en/play/karma/

So, here it is:


This is an automatic system to rate the proper (or unproper) behavior of players.
A new player starts at 50 karma points. The maximum score is 100. When you finish a game successfully, you earn 1 Karma point. If you are the first player to quit a game on purpose (ie: to quit without resuming), you lose 5 points as a punishment.
Dots divide Karma into 5 levels:
0-19: *
20-39: **
40-59: ***
60-79: ****
80-100: *****


I have Karma level 5. This means I am in the 80 to 100 range? It's a bit confusing because when setting the Karma minimum for a game, it offers me a choice of levels 1-5. But when I see someone else's game, it sometimes says "minimum Karma 40."

I assume that Karma 40 means minimum level 3, based on that chart? and 60 means minimum Karma rating of 4?

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by QuentinAsmo:

And if you're curious about the ELO system: https://www.daysofwonder.com/online/en/play/ranking/

Also good to know. Looks like the fairly standaridzed formula that I'm accustomed to from playing Pente, another game that uses the 32 point ELO system.

[76561198392478228]

Originally posted by FrankJones:

I have Karma level 5. This means I am in the 80 to 100 range? It's a bit confusing because when setting the Karma minimum for a game, it offers me a choice of levels 1-5. But when I see someone else's game, it sometimes says "minimum Karma 40."

I assume that Karma 40 means minimum level 3, based on that chart? and 60 means minimum Karma rating of 4?

All correct.

Feel free to add another point to your list in the first post regarding the consistency of the presentation of the Karma rating :)

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by QuentinAsmo:

Thanks for the feedback, Frank!

One additional thought, and one that I think should be easy to implement, that I've heard several players mention:


An option to increment the timers by 15 minutes instead of just skipping from 1H to 2H.

This is especially helpful for 2p games, which can sometimes go 14 (I[ve even seen 15 and occasinally 16) generations if both players have a big production engine and didn't get started on terraforming until late. Thsoe last few generations take a long time, and sometimes an extra 15 minutes is needed betond the 60 minutes alotted in a 1H game.


But, setting it to 2H causes two problems:

1) Some people won't join the game,

2) A player who is losing can just disappear intentionally, and the opponent has to wait an hour and a half for the person to forfeit on time. I've had multiple people do this: The game isn't going well for them, but they don't want to forfeit, so they just don't do anything, perhaps hoping that the opponent will get bored/annoyed and forfeit.

Allowing game times of 1:15, 1:30, and 1:45 would provide more options with minimal effort.

[ArtEntre]

I confess I haven't played since the beta (been waiting for fixes, might finally be time with the recent patch), but I have been following the patch notes and discussions fairly closely, so I don't think the following areas for improvement have been addressed:


1. It'd be very nice to have a confirmation/reminder that there are available blue actions before passing out of a generation completely. It was easy to forget them.

2. More detailed game log showing attack targets and such (I've seen this mentioned often enough); but also, Event Cards (red cards) should really be fully shown in the log. It's easy to miss Event Cards popping up on the screen on other players turns. The fact that they're hidden in standard play with the physical board game is mostly a matter of convenience, saving time and space, rather than an integral rule. If you really didn't want to make the entire event history fully visible, you should at least make the events played since the player's last turn visible in the log.

---

And not a new item, but just parroting that shortening animations and other downtime would perhaps be the biggest quality of life improvement. If not given the option to eliminate animations entirely, allowing animation steps to run simultaneously instead of in sequence would be another way to shorten things.

[Messenger]

Originally posted by FrankJones:

2) A player wjp is losing can just disappear intentinally, and the opponent has to wait an hour and a half for the person to forfeit on time. I've had multiple people do this: The gams isn't going well for them, but they don't want to forfeit, so they just don't do anything, perhaps hoping that the opponent will get bored/annoyed and forfeit.

I would like to suggest an alternative approach to solving this problem. I would like to have an indicator that shows if the player has disconnected. I have to imagine that information is already being transmitted for AI substitution to work properly. Then if someone disconnects from a game without forfeiting, an option to force a player to forfeit after some reasonable amount of time, say 5 minutes or so, would make the entire process much less painful.

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by Messenger:

Originally posted by FrankJones:

2) A player wjp is losing can just disappear intentinally, and the opponent has to wait an hour and a half for the person to forfeit on time. I've had multiple people do this: The gams isn't going well for them, but they don't want to forfeit, so they just don't do anything, perhaps hoping that the opponent will get bored/annoyed and forfeit.

I would like to suggest an alternative approach to solving this problem. I would like to have an indicator that shows if the player has disconnected. I have to imagine that information is already being transmitted for AI substitution to work properly. Then if someone disconnects from a game without forfeiting, an option to force a player to forfeit after some reasonable amount of time, say 5 minutes or so, would make the entire process much less painful.

I really need to start proofreading my posts.

I'm not sure I see the drawback to adding extra incremental game length options of 15 minutes instead of just going from 1 hour to 2 hours.

Your idea has some merit, but, sometimes people need to disconnect and rejoin, and it might take a while. Suppose there is a power surge or something. It might take longer than 5 minutes for the person to get back to the game. Or any other computer malfunction that requires re-enntering the game. If a person wishes or needs to use 15 or 20 minutes of his clock for one reason or another, he should be allowed to without being force forfeited.

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by ArtEntre:

I confess I haven't played since the beta (been waiting for fixes, might finally be time with the recent patch), but I have been following the patch notes and discussions fairly closely, so I don't think the following areas for improvement have been addressed:


1. It'd be very nice to have a confirmation/reminder that there are available blue actions before passing out of a generation completely. It was easy to forget them.

2. More detailed game log showing attack targets and such (I've seen this mentioned often enough); but also, Event Cards (red cards) should really be fully shown in the log. It's easy to miss Event Cards popping up on the screen on other players turns. The fact that they're hidden in standard play with the physical board game is mostly a matter of convenience, saving time and space, rather than an integral rule. If you really didn't want to make the entire event history fully visible, you should at least make the events played since the player's last turn visible in the log.

---

And not a new item, but just parroting that shortening animations and other downtime would perhaps be the biggest quality of life improvement. If not given the option to eliminate animations entirely, allowing animation steps to run simultaneously instead of in sequence would be another way to shorten things.

Item number 1 would be a good idea for all players. In a 3p game (and even a 2p game, really), it's rather difficult to keep track during each generartion of who has done what actions. Each player's "actions" list should have an indicator such as " 3 / 8 " indicating that 3 out of the 8 actions have been performed this generation. Then, when we click that person's actions list, we should be able to see specifically WHICH ONES have ben used. This would mirror the actual board game, in which players place a color cube on each blue action card to indicate it has been used.


A more detailed game log has been suggested quite a few times, and I agree. It should be possible to review the exact result of every move. For "Regolith Eaters" it should indicate whether a resource was added or two were removed. For power infrastructure, it should show how many units were converted (insert joke here about the likelihood of actually converting power to MC using power infrastructure). And so on. The number of examples would fill quite a few paragraphs.

It would be cool if each game, upon completion, would generate a txt file "game history" similar to most chess programs, such that the game could be reviewed move by move. This would help a lot with strategy or rules posts on BGG or any other analysis site.

Also, the existing game log format is terrible. Is there a reason the game developers love scrolling so much? Just have the game log bring up a list of the generations, and allow us to click once on the generation we wish to review, and then have ALL that generation's actions show up on one screen. Why would anyone ever think endless scrolling is a good idea?

The red event cards have been mentioned dozens of times. The prevailing opinion seems to be that the red cards aren't really supposed to be "secret," but rather, as you noted, for convenience on the actual board game (and to avoid tag confusion). There's no reason to have them hidden in the digital game.

[orjan.almen]

Another thing to add to the list: remove unnecessary confirmations, such as adding an animal to the pets card when you build a city. Any confirmations that actually doesn't have a real choice should just be done. Same as building noctis city, ganymede colony and phobos space haven, they should be autoplaced, maybe (or even preferably) with just a yes/no confirmation (referencing the item of possibility to back out)

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by orjan.almen:

Another thing to add to the list: remove unnecessary confirmations, such as adding an animal to the pets card when you build a city. Any confirmations that actually doesn't have a real choice should just be done. Same as building noctis city, ganymede colony and phobos space haven, they should be autoplaced, maybe (or even preferably) with just a yes/no confirmation (referencing the item of possibility to back out)

I mentioned the unnecessary confirmations for blue card actions in item number 8 in my long list.


The placing of the three special city tiles is a good addendum. s you noted - there's no backing out anyway, so why not just auto-place it? What exactly were the designers thinking when they decided to require us to click on the ONE AND ONLY SPOT each of those three cities can go on?

[mecheng_analyst]

Originally posted by ArtEntre:

---

And not a new item, but just parroting that shortening animations and other downtime would perhaps be the biggest quality of life improvement. If not given the option to eliminate animations entirely, allowing animation steps to run simultaneously instead of in sequence would be another way to shorten things.

I've seen a lot of good improvement ideas, but all those together can't equal the need for speed.
When playing against only bots or solo there should never be animations. It should basically always be my turn - the game state just updates between passes - I can check numerous places to see changes, I don't need to watch on screen.

As a comparison, it takes 45-60 minutes to play me vs 3 AI bots non-drafting due to all these animations. It takes me 20 minutes to play me vs 3 bots of Scythe, with animations. This is far too great of a disparity.