Suggestions for more informative messages

[Truper]

This thread is generating a lot more heat than light. Its become personal, which is hard to understand, but clearly against board rules. Unless the dicourse here gets back on topic, and becomes more civil, I'm going to have to lock it down.

[FAJ]

I think it would be easy for illwinter to have a game setting that allows you to set how much of a message is shown in the main log area.

I think a changable setting is easiest and pleases everyone? Why does the issue have to be black and white?

I would like them to bring back the right-click-closes-current-window feature. Then I could very quickly scroll through the messages anyways.

[Cainehill]

Talleyrand said:
Oh, this is lovely. I've suddenly become the bad guy.

...

Graeme Dice, I'm all for more information too. Sometimes even when I watch a battle I don't know the specifics of who got killed, etc. Can't you read?

Let me guess - you're not studying diplomacy or pol science there, eh?

[Cainehill]

Stryke11 said:
I didn't mean to demean anyone's position above and beyond disagreeing with it and I certainly don't feel my opinion is any more relevant (even less so compared to some of the folks on here with thousands of posts) than anyone else's.

I don't recall your first post that you refered to, but as one of the entities with thousands of posts here, I'd like to point out that quantity isn't quality.

[AMF]

To recap (and avoid lockdown city), the initial suggestions fundamentally were:

* CHANGE "There was a battle in Ipriscia" TO "We won a battle in Ipriscia"/"We lost a battle in Ipriscia" respectively
* CHANGE "Methone has cast auspex" TO "Methone found no/2 sites in Ipriscia with auspex."
* CHANGE "A sneaking enemy was discovered" TO "A sneaking enemy was defeated by/escaped from"
* CHANGE "An unexpected event has occured in Olypha" TO "Unexpectedly, an ill omen was seen in Olypha."

From a newbie's perspective, these suggestions seem spot on, and I could give a LOT more just from what I have seen in my games. I would dearly love more informative messages.

I think most people here are in agreement, no?

But, yes, there was a dispute. The controversy, as far as I can tell, is more about how much detail people want to see about the outcomes of battles. They don't want to lose the suspense of knowing how a battle went or watching the battle play out.

This could be solved, as suggested by the above post, by having a toggle.

Overall, it's hard for me to think of any situation where more accurate and more concise information is not desirable. And, from a newbie's perspective, I would REALLY like more informative messages. As it is, I have to hunt and peck to figure out what happened each turn, because I am still new to the game. But I doubt that is a desirable outcome, from a game design perspective. Why make people work hard for information?

I mean, it really seems like an easy and logical fix...almost as obvious as fixing some of the humorous english in the text...

[Cainehill]

I would rarely see a situation where "We won/lost a battle" would be more useful than "There was a battle". If I don't already _know_ intuitively that I'd be in a massacre, those messages are useless without information about the casualties.

Since casualties would rarely if ever fit into the summary message, I see no benefit in changing the message - only in giving the follow-up message a lot better information.

That makes it rather different from many of the other messages, where a single line in the summary could often obviate any need to click for more information, unless you wanted to view "flavor" of further messages. Example being : "Wimpy Mage cast Wimpy Knowledge revealing X sites". 90% of the time you'd then _know_ you didn't need to click further, because it would say "revealing no magic sites".

[Manuk]

Yeah, if there�s gonna be a change would be useful in the search spells jus to "go to province" instead of "go to commander" will do.
The "you won a battle" and the such are unneeded because it kills the suspense.
And for the flames of graeme & kissblade it's Ok. I don�t mind the discussion I probably will gather the the encounters in a sepparate thread.