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Topic: Thoughts while playing Widelands for the first time

Markus

Topic Opener
Joined: 2012-12-09, 19:29
Posts: 2
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Just found this site
Posted at: 2012-12-09, 20:54

I created this list of thoughts while playing Widelands for the first time. Hopefully, it gives you a view that some of you can't have any longer because you have been looking at the game for years. These points are not meant to be suggestions per se, it's just what went through my head while playing. I'm a bit sorry that I only put down negative points. Be assured that Widelands is amazing!

Beware: These are rather direct quotes of my thoughts. Not meant to sound demanding or mean. face-smile.png

  1. What do all these buildings cost to build? I want to see the build costs before I build a building.
  2. I'm constantly hovering several buildings in the build menu to read their names until I find the one that I want to build. I can't differentiate all those buildings just by their pictures. I want a tabular list of the buildings with the picture, name and building costs. Maybe even with icons for each ware input/output of each building.
  3. The font is very small on my display (141 ppi), but I can't find an option to increase the font size.
  4. I want to auto-fill my military buildings. Near the border I want them to be fully staffed, away from the border just with one soldier. Doing this manually is cumbersome. Didn't Siedler II have such a feature?
  5. I want to recycle this military building in-land, but I have no idea how my border will look afterwards. Will I see less afterwards? Where will my border be? I want a preview of the resulting border before destroying a military building.
  6. German Umlauts aren't "correctly" sorted. The order is "A..ZÄÖÜ" instead of "AÄ..OÖ..UÜ..Z".
  7. Depending on the terrain, paths are hard to see. Why aren't paths on bright tiles dark and paths on dark tiles bright?
  8. I've trained my soldiers well, but my military buildings at the front don't automatically get filled with my improved soldiers. That's risky as I can easily lose a substantial amount of buildings even though I have better soldiers in-land where I don't benefit from them.
  9. Soldiers within my military buildings won't be trained. I want to automatically swap untrained soldiers for trained ones to allow the untrained to be trained as well.
  10. How am I supposed to remember which buildings I temporarily changed the supply settings for? I want a tabular listing of all buildings with non-default settings. Otherwise, I'll just forget and for the whole game some building somewhere gets more or less wares than it should.
  11. I want an option to auto-fill paths with the maximum number of flags after building. I don't want to double click hundreds of times.
  12. Recycling buildings does not give the wares back that are in the building. Nobody would destroy a building without getting the valuable wares out beforehand. I feel cheated.
  13. When I attack an enemy building, I want my best trained soldiers to attack in order to minimize expensive losses.
  14. I have a deep mine with two master miners that only needs one of them. Right next to it, I have a deep mine of the same type that is missing a master miner. Why doesn't one master miner go to the other mine so that both can operate?
  15. The ware stats are useless after opening as nothing is selected. How will I know which ware is missing? I don't want to click through all of them and I want to see +- by default. After opening the stats, I want to see a table of all wares telling me instantly how much was produced (+), how much was consumed (-) and how the ratio was (+-). I also want to sort it by the biggest deficit to instantly know what has to be done first. To be even faster to parse, wares with a surplus should have green up arrows, wares with a shortage red down arrows. Three red down arrows should mean huge shortage, three green up arrows a huge surplus, two/one arrow for slightly more/less surplus/shortage. I constantly miss some wares because I find the stats dialog to be cumbersome to use.
  16. Generally, I want dialogs to be bigger (or resizeable), more tabular, more ordered and faster to visually and mentally parse.

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wl-zocker

Joined: 2011-12-30, 16:37
Posts: 495
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Tribe Member
Location: Germany
Posted at: 2012-12-09, 22:17

I cannot answer all the points, but at least some of them:

  1. In the latest unofficial build (link to the download at http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/DownloadPage/), the build cost preview is implemented.

  2. Have a look at http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/BarbariansPage/ (same thing for the other tribes). You will find there an overview over the dependencies of the buildings, and lists of the buildings, wares, and workers.

  3. no idea (I had to add this as a dummy)

  4. I do not think that can be automized easily. New buildings in no man's land will be fully staffed (because there is a border), while buildings in the second row towards an enemy will be emptied. I think only you will know how the soldiers should be arranged.

  5. As long as no enemy claims the land (what is normally the case if you destroy a military building in-land), you will still own it. But it might be that you do not see it any longer (the area will be covered by fog of war) if there are no other buildings.

  6. Where did you find the wrong order of the letters? I have never watched that.

  7. Dark paths indicate that there is a lot of traffic and that a second carrier (e.g. ox) is needed. This problem has already been pointed out at https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/992598

  8. That has already been discussed at http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/381/

  9. see 8

  10. I think you as the player also have to do a bit and either leave the building open in an observation window (will not reopen when the game is loaded), or write it down on paper, or check your buildings regularily.

  11. When you hold down Ctrl while finishing the road, flags are automatically placed from the end to the beginning (shift+Ctrl places flags from the beginning to the end).

  12. see http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/1093/

  13. I think there has been a discussion about letting the player choose which soldiers shall attack, but I do not find it at the moment.

  14. see https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/536482

I think it is good that you say directly what you think so that the developpers see where there are still problems and how Widelands can be improved.


"Only few people know how much one has to know in order to know how little one knows." - Werner Heisenberg

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Markus

Topic Opener
Joined: 2012-12-09, 19:29
Posts: 2
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Just found this site
Posted at: 2012-12-10, 16:06

Thanks for the reply!

6) If I remember correctly, the wrong sorting was in the buildings stats for some tribe. Obviously a tribe with umlauts in the building names.

Regarding the military management versus economic management. If the goal is to focus on economic management, then I see only one way to achieve this:

Automate or remove most military micro-management. If there is no way for example, to manually rearrange troops, then the gameplay won't focus on it. As long as it's possible to gain an advantage by doing such things, it will cause players to do it and by this shift the gameplay away from the economic management.

Edited: 2012-12-10, 16:06

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