Interface improvements

Before launching into a whole raft of idea for little changes to the interface, I want to thank the mods for a great game and especially for their active involvement in rapidly changing/making the game better...

Here are a load of quick ideas for updates to the interface for ease of use :
* "Units Present in Town" can we have a section for the units being built in the current town ?
* "Units Present in Town" can it indicate the number of units in brackets after the name of an army which is present
* "Next Events -> Trade Movements" - can we have a second link to a page which lists *all* your caravans and not only the ones from "here" [not needed if suggestions below for "click-through" links on map are implemented]
* on the trade movements page, can it say the town name rather than "here", and for the harvesting section can it put in brakets the distance (or time) from the owning city (to make timing a second caravan to arrive when completed much easier)
* can we do a review of all the titles of system generated messages to make them more useful :
    * rather than "Caravans begin gathering at square xxx|yyy", can it say "Caravans from CityName begin gathering Wood at square xxx|yyy"
    * rather than "Theft Mission to CityName Completely Successful!", can it say "Theft Mission to CityName of PlayerName Completely Successful!" (and similarly for Scout and Spy missions)
* improved "click-through" links on map (I know several updates are planned)... can these include :
    * distance to current city when click on a square (esp. resources)
    * can it indicate if *you* are gathering, not merely if your alliance is gathering
    * can it indicate if you have caravans already inbound to the square
* When you send a caravan to a square, can it return directly to the map rather than the list of trade caravans
* can the interface rememeber your prefered map resolution better/properly - from the map it rememebers correctly, but if you click on a link in a message it always chages to "radius=5" as it does from most of the "View in map" buttons on various pages (it goes to "radius=3" from a player profile). It is annoying to frequently have to click it back out to my prefered "radius=6" after using one of the shortcuts
* can we have a "mark as read" and a "mark as unread" button at the bottom of the internal e-mail page next to the "Delete" button ?
* on a wide screen, can the list of menu items on the left be the same as those you get when you click the "options" button under the Illyriad log (which has 2 more items). NB - in the list of menu items, the first one says "Log in" when it is "Log out"!
* Navigation would be easier if the "Military Summary" and "Barracks" pages were either the same or had the same set of links on them (people often have problems with commanders and armies 'cos certain manipulations can only be done off the link on one of those pages and others from the other page)
* Similarly there can be navigation issues with the "MarketPlace" and "Trade" pages...
* Please can the current maximum storage (and ideally vault size too) be put somewhere on the main display for a city ?
* I find the new NPC graphics quite hard to see (apart from the bears and the flags for the factions). Could the animal and monster NPCs be made to flash like the resources and could the factions have a different flag colour to quickly identify them ?

One extra idea, which is not about the interface concerns the NPC monsters. I think they should spawn in relatively small numbers, but every 48hrs there should be a chance that they (i) grow in number, or (ii) Spread to a nearby space as well, or (iii) Move to a nearby space (with bias to moving towards the centre of the map), or (iv) Disappear (unlikely), or (v) no change. That way one could get an "infestation" of the monsters gradually spreading in one area and moving into the central regions, which an alliance would need to actively try to contain (rapidly killing any new groups before they grow to legion size and block all resource spawning spots)... Could be rather fun !



Edited by AlDjotte - 19 Jul 2010 at 14:20

Thumbs up for your suggestions and ideas.

"ability to address a message to multiple players"

That's a big one.

This first thread is, indeed, a veritable storehouse of good things.

We'll split them up into categories of things on the change list and publish it somewhere.  Some things, like ingame mail changes, will prolly have their own thread/list as the changes are so numerous.

It's about time we sensibly updated the "current dev list" with a few more tangible things anyway.

Let's get Sov out the way and go from there.  Though I should add that the immediate "large scale" priorities after sov completion are the next 2 spell schools followed by trade changes - but there's definitely latitude for other items (esp quick wins) in the meantime, especially as the interface is reprogrammed.

tyvm all

SC