Some minor UI gripes

[st.patrik]

A couple of things which I really hoped would be different/don't like:

1. You still don't get an account of how many casualties you suffered and or caused when you take over a castle. I had assumed this would be changed in Dom II - it seems like such an obvious hole. A message to the effect that I captured/didn't capture a castle isn't that helpful; a regular battle report would be much much more helpful

2. Only one pretender for each nation at a time. You can do the same thing with a pen and paper, but it's really tedious to have to redesign a pretender every time you switch between themes. [my example here is Ulm vanilla, for which I tend to field a master alchemist rainbow mage, vs. 'Iron Faith' Ulm, wherein I use a much more magically strong pretender, to get good bless bonuses.]

3. Light background for troops - makes it hard to see which is which in the recruitment screen, and makes them have a kinda blotchy outline. Aesthetic turn-off and functional irritation. ughh!

Those are my 3 main problems. The AI doesn't appear on my list because there's a lot of talk about that elsewhere, and it may be it's a lot due to independant strength setting. What do people think? Do you agree with these points, or do you have other things that you think really need to be changed?

[licker]

I agree with those points.

I also wonder if there is a way to tell from the F1 screen which provinces already have recruitment for that turn. Its a pain to go to each province and check whether or not you remembered to recruit. Of course its easy enough to do all recruitment at the end of a turn or something like that, but even when I do that I get confused from time to time, especially when I have different and interesting mages and priests to get from my indie provs

[Jasper]

Originally posted by st.patrik:
3. Light background for troops - makes it hard to see which is which in the recruitment screen, and makes them have a kinda blotchy outline. Aesthetic turn-off and functional irritation. ughh!

Increasing the transparency of the gui sorted this out for me.

[Saber Cherry]

Unit stat numbers no longer line up in columns. It is now much harder to compare stats of two units.

What would REALLY be nice is to allow the display of two units simultaneously!!!!

[PvK]

I strongly agree with #1. More detail in the casualty reports would be helpful too. So would a way to see which men have afflictions on the army view, without right-clicking each one.

#2 doesn't bother me. I wouldn't mind the requested feature, of course, but I don't think I'd use it much - it seems pretty fast to set up a Pretender/Empire, I personally try something different in every game, and I also don't do it very often.

#3 I'd have to think about more. So far it's just seemed to me that some of the unit graphics look better than in Doms I, and some of things actually don't seem to come out as well, even with a high resolution.

I agree with Saber Cherry that it'd be nicer if the attribute values lined up in a column.

Overall, I think the strategic map and battlefield graphics look much better, but without the right hardware and OpenGL drivers, are a lot slower. So far I haven't noticed much improvement in the rest of the GUI, but I haven't gotten used to it yet, so I may be missing some things.

One thing I wonder about is the castle display - it no longer includes turret interval - have they been removed?

PvK

[st.patrik]

Originally posted by Jasper:

quote:

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Originally posted by st.patrik:
3. Light background for troops - makes it hard to see which is which in the recruitment screen, and makes them have a kinda blotchy outline. Aesthetic turn-off and functional irritation. ughh!

Increasing the transparency of the gui sorted this out for me.

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I'll give this a shot - thanks for the tip.

Does anyone on the Illwinter team have any response to these points? Johan? Johan? Kristoffer?

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by st.patrik:
A couple of things which I really hoped would be different/don't like:

1. You still don't get an account of how many casualties you suffered and or caused when you take over a castle. I had assumed this would be changed in Dom II - it seems like such an obvious hole. A message to the effect that I captured/didn't capture a castle isn't that helpful; a regular battle report would be much much more helpful

2. Only one pretender for each nation at a time. You can do the same thing with a pen and paper, but it's really tedious to have to redesign a pretender every time you switch between themes. [my example here is Ulm vanilla, for which I tend to field a master alchemist rainbow mage, vs. 'Iron Faith' Ulm, wherein I use a much more magically strong pretender, to get good bless bonuses.]

3. Light background for troops - makes it hard to see which is which in the recruitment screen, and makes them have a kinda blotchy outline. Aesthetic turn-off and functional irritation. ughh!

Those are my 3 main problems. The AI doesn't appear on my list because there's a lot of talk about that elsewhere, and it may be it's a lot due to independant strength setting. What do people think? Do you agree with these points, or do you have other things that you think really need to be changed?

1) Was technically bothersome as storming castles are generated in another phase than normal battles. Hopefully we will find the time and energy to implement it.

2) Has been discussed. Mostly a matter of priority.

3) A personal concern of mine. I got the black portrait thing at least. Light background is detrimental to my sprites, but works better with the map etc. I have no immediate solution to this one. What do you prefer (please be explicit)?

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
3) A personal concern of mine. I got the black portrait thing at least. Light background is detrimental to my sprites, but works better with the map etc. I have no immediate solution to this one. What do you prefer (please be explicit)?

externalize all the targa you can, interface panels first. It will be easy to replace them with the texture of our choice, and everybody will be content.

I already replaced the wood texture with a plain black targa file. Sorry if you liked it

[PDF]

Well, I rather have many gripes with the new UI..
The game looks much much better now than Dom1, but overall I don't find the interface has been made much easier for the moment (but Ok I still have some adaptation time to get )

I agree on
- Dark background needed for identification of units - will try the transparency tip
- Not only unit stats should be aligned, but also Province stats..
Plus I have :
- Why has r-click been disabled to exit menus/windows ? Now I have either to scroll dooooooooooooown the spell list to click Exit button, or keep a finger near the Esc key..
- The hotkey list (key "?") should be accessible directly from the main screen - having to search what is the hotkey for the list kills the whole idea :eek !
- When typing keyboard isn't properly mapped but hardcoded in QWERTY mode - a pqin when you hqve q French keyboqrd Names have no Capitals either .. too bad for a Pretender God (a pretender god is way much feeble)
- There's no way to know from the main screen how many units your commanders have under their command ? (previous Shift-s key) ?
- Please make a real "end turn" button that ends turn in a click, and not 3 ! I know this has been done to have the same procedures in SP and MP, but frankly it's a bad idea.
99.99% of TBS games have a different "Save" and "Next Turn" buttons, why not have that ? This a real step backwards from Dom1 in SP (and whatever MP fans may say, 90%+ of players of any TBS only play SP..)

[Dekent]

Originally posted by PDF:
Well, I rather have many gripes with the new UI..
The game looks much much better now than Dom1, but overall I don't find the interface has been made much easier for the moment (but Ok I still have some adaptation time to get )

I agree on
- Dark background needed for identification of units - will try the transparency tip
- Not only unit stats should be aligned, but also Province stats..
Plus I have :
- Why has r-click been disabled to exit menus/windows ? Now I have either to scroll dooooooooooooown the spell list to click Exit button, or keep a finger near the Esc key..
- The hotkey list (key "?") should be accessible directly from the main screen - having to search what is the hotkey for the list kills the whole idea :eek !
- When typing keyboard isn't properly mapped but hardcoded in QWERTY mode - a pqin when you hqve q French keyboqrd Names have no Capitals either .. too bad for a Pretender God (a pretender god is way much feeble)
- There's no way to know from the main screen how many units your commanders have under their command ? (previous Shift-s key) ?
- Please make a real "end turn" button that ends turn in a click, and not 3 ! I know this has been done to have the same procedures in SP and MP, but frankly it's a bad idea.
99.99% of TBS games have a different "Save" and "Next Turn" buttons, why not have that ? This a real step backwards from Dom1 in SP (and whatever MP fans may say, 90%+ of players of any TBS only play SP..)

I agree wholeheartadly...I found out the right clicking thing Last night while playing..having to hit escape to exit menus is even worse then the end turn thing