The most annoying thing for me at the moment is the limited and sporadic shortcut keys. This game REALLY needs a key bindings tab in the options and a heck of a lot more shortcuts for things like euip items and various windows. I would also dearly love to unbind the guard and auto explore shortcut keys since I use these the least and buttons would be ok. Also you did this great new city window, but it is a pain to get to... more shortcut keys!
I really hope you have something planned for 1.1, and if not, at least put more keys in even if we can't change them.
Shortcut keys are good. I know from personal experience. They're better than my ex-wife, and she was good.
Bindable shortcut keys are not in my opinion essential, but they are certainly a nice to have and shouldn't really be a huge effort to add. That said as a nice to have I don't think they should try to squeeze them into 1.1 at this stage, but they would certainly be welcome in a future patch.
I would rather have more magic, buildings, and tech than short cuts. The changes that I have heard about for 1.1 seem to address this.
Since it's a TB game shortcuts frankly aren't important. With very few exceptions, the only time I use shortcut keys are hand-eye type games where you need to group & move units quickly in a real-time environment, games like age of mythology, otherwise I can't think of any cases I need a shortcut key.
The game defintely needs some more windows. The city list should include what's in teh city, and there needs to be a caravan listing. Cities without their one caravan need to be easily flagged.
This is true most of the time, for well designed interfaces do not need shortcut keys; however there are a few situations where the shortcuts are needed. An example of this is Black and White 2. Normally its interface is so intuitive I only need the mouse, but on a laptop I needed to use the keyboard for zooming when using the built-in mouse that does not have a mouse wheel.
In the end, adding bindable shortcut keys should not take long, Windows deals with implementing them leaving Stardock only having to tell it what keys thay are and what to do when they are pressed.
I agree with both parts. Hot keys are more important in a RTS. Warcraft you use a lot of hot keys, particularly in battles. I wonder if Elemental they could change the battles. I know they are going to an iniative based combat. But I wonder if they could add a turn clock for battles. Have a button to turn it off or on if you like or don't like it. But give each "character" 15 seconds (what ever the time is) to perform an action. They mention something similar for multiplayer.
Those additions have already been talked about. Rather than content I am talking about UI as separate, not instead of.
I guess from my perspective TBS don't have to be arduous to complete simple tasks. I hate clicking the mouse 4 times for something that one keystroke could accomplish is all.
I guess I haven't come across any tasks that I find arduous. But I also play pretty methodically. This could be simply a difference in playing styles.
I want more UI updates in general - I want to know where a stack that's already assigned to move is going, I want a button to move all people who already have routes designated so I can then tab through just the people who don't have routes designated... etc. I want more hotkeys. I want more smarterer UI, really - city list is a great start.
As I want all this, I don't want to diminish the game in general. I love the potential I see for this game more than any stardock game to date, and I own a number of stardock games.
I use shortcut keys constantly in TBS games. I find it very convenient.
I haven't discovered any shortcut keys yet! But in my game, the only persistent control problem i have, is finding cities that don't fit in the side queue. I have to use the mini map to find them - if i remember where they are, or I'm screwed until one of the constructions is complete and i get a report that will take me to it and or the next idle city button will now take me there (if it is not building something).
Me too. The decline of that sort of convenience in many forms of software make me suspect that there's an evil dev conspiracy to make software in general favor folks who prefer fondling pictures to ones who appreciate complete sentences.
I wish I'd taken a screen-cap of the Keyboard tab that was briefly in the Options for the betas. It's certainly at least a bronze medal winner in the race for Best Feature That Didn't Make It.
AutoHotKey works fine for re-binding keys, thought not mouse buttons. So if it is really that annoying just use AutoHotKeys for now and hopefully one day Stardock will let us rebinding keys (both keyboard and mouse), as well as switch mouse axes from the Options menu. Good UI control is needed to make the player get immersed and feel like their game is really "theirs."
When I do a middle-wheel drag camera rotation with the cursor in the top half of the screen and the screen moves in the opposite direction I expect, I'm reminded that the game is Stardock's, not mine, and I'm just renting it.
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