Recommendation: Speed as an inverse function of average remaining player level

I had exactly the same thought earlier, and I think it'd work well in theory - but it might seem a bit odd from a gameplay perspective, for everything to slow down.  I mean, if it was the way the vanilla game functioned, I feel like it would at least need some kind of believable reason to be happening... That was my main concern when I was considering this.

Having said that I definitely agree that late game is a problem.  Like I said in my thread further down, with the amount going on in late game you can easily spend 2-3x the time paused than unpaused if playing single player.  It's kind of more fun being able to pause and actually work things out correctly, because otherwise - as you say - it becomes all about just making sure you don't delay a launch, and a few other broad things - instead of truly managing to the vast extent that the game lets you.

The conclusion I came to was that the best thing for the game would be to just have a far more usable UI.  Part of the reason late game feels so rushed is because getting stuff done takes longer than it should do.  Need to turn off a bunch of factories?  First you have to physically locate them, click them, click the button at the bottom.  Sure it doesn't sound like much but it's all these little things that add up.  What if there was simply a button on the market window that let you disable/enable all of a resource's production buildings directly from there?  Iron is $100, steel is $50 - better click that nice big button next to steel's price for "freeze production".

Infographics drawn onto the map (think SimCity 5 style, one of the few things that game did well) that highlight other players production buildings so you can immediately and clearly see who is producing what, and how much, would also speed things up.  Yeah you can click a HQ to see what's getting sent to it, but to actually see factories you need to zoom in pretty close (in some cases) to identify them.  I'd like to be able to zoom out and get a clearly presented overview of what people are doing, and then be able to zoom in to get more detailed information. 

Stuff like this would allow players to make so many more decisions - much quicker - in the lategame that I'd be interested to see if we even really needed a time dilation mechanic.  Getting the UI to the level I'm imagining would certainly be a lot of work, but this game, I'd say, would benefit more than most from having a really excellent UI.

Finally, hotkeys: not having decent hotkeys makes the game seem much tougher than it is.  I've never tried to play SC2 in a high level game using just a mouse, but I imagine it would be hell.  Once good hotkeys are added to this game, I think a huge amount of the problem will be lifted.

doublepost derp

Hey Cerzi,

Thanks for the feedback on the interface. We have a long way to go and you gave us a lot of good info on how to fix things.

Could you point me to a SimCity 5 display like you were describing? I'd love to see a good example of what you're describing.

Thanks!

-Scott-

Happy to help!  This is what they did with Sim City:

As bad as they messed the game up, they did a really nice job with this.  You can select from a massive load of options on what to display, from stuff like happiness levels, land value, employment rates, crime etc etc.  It's basically a combination of a sort of ground 'stain' effect that puts blobs on the ground to show area effects, plus these 3d bar charts representing numebr of people.  So the pic above might be number & location of criminals (and the big tall bar is a jail).  Maybe something like that would work for production values across the map - the player sets it to display, say, iron - and a load of bars appear showing where iron is produced, the tallest bars being the places that are producing the most.  So you can zoom right out and immediately see where a resource is mostly coming from.

Think this one was for education, shows where students are and how many, and highlights all homes green.  Again, combination of bars showing location and volume, as well as highlighting related buildings - the rest washed out white,  Imagine if you could have a view like this for energy production that you could get by just hitting a hotkey, then hit another hotkey and in a second you've sabotaged the most productive cluster of solar panels.

Personally I reckon something inspired by this wouild suit the game perfectly!  And, importantly, give players way easier access to the state of the game, letting them focus on their gameplan.

Thank you for showing me this! I'll share this with Jim and Soren.

We do have a balance in the game of not overloading the player. If this was a turn-based game or something closer to Anno or SimCity, we'd have more room for all these features because players would have more time to dig through them. As a multiplayer game, helping manage the player's attention is key and we don't want to give them too many options and things to fiddle with, but point them to the most important actions as well.

I do agree that things need to be improved and we'll talk about these charts as a way to improve things.

Thanks again!

-Scott-

Yeah, I totally get that.  If something like this was implemented it would have to be for the sake of letting the player get the important info they need as easily & cleanly as possible (again, all in the name of opening up the late game by providing the tools to get more done in the same amount of time) - you definitely don't want something that encourages the player to stop what they're doing and peruse a load of arbitrary game stats while their base falls apart*.  So the main thing would be, I guess, "what does the player want to do" -> "how can the information be displayed to make them do it as easily/quickly as possible".  And the immediate thing that jumped to mind was toggling neat looking 3d bars to make it obvious if lots of a certain resource is being produced, and where.  It's a nice alternative to looking at a traditional table of data (which I guess would be the other option, and as you say far more suited to something like civ etc), as it keeps you engaged with the map.  The kind of overlay I can imagine flicking open for half a second (maybe just appears when you hold down a certain key) to take in a snapshot of, for example, how much glass is being produced across the map, so I immediately know a)juicy sabotage targets b)whether it's worth building/scrapping my own glass production c)who I should be moving to buy out first, etc.

Having said all that I'm probably going off on one a bit - plenty of low hanging fruit to grab that will have a lot of positive impact on the gameplay, like those few extra hotkeys,, shortcuts, etc!

*those kinds of graphs/stats are great after the game though, I'm a big fan of the insane resource graph! Would love to see more like that, such as production rate graphs etc to match up with the market price graph, to help see why something crashed/boomed at a certain point in time

I got to second the OPs suggestion! It would be great if we had a MP option were we could set that would slow the game down at a certain point/threshold. It gets really really crazy late game. 

To add to the rest of the thread my biggest suggestion (so far from my games) is to fine tune the UI. The game seems solid and I'm enjoying myself though!