Something occurred to me a moment ago while testing out the new 1.09s Beta patch. When the game first came out, I recall that a lot of people had serious difficulty understanding exactly how food works in the game, which I suppose is reasonable enough as it's not exactly obvious at first.
It just occured to me that citizens as a resource act in almost the exact same manner, in that you have a constant supply that is "reserved" for certain functions, though in food the only function is building houses to increase population capacity. This is illustrated with population as a x/y metric in the resources pane, where x is the amount of citizens being used and y is the amount of total citizens you have at your disposal.
So, why not display food that way? List the amount of food being used, and the amount of food production available total. It's simple, intuitive, and consistent in the UI, and there has to be some kind of code written to display this already as population uses it! It gets the user thinking about food as what it really is--a capacity--rather than a resource in the sense of the others.
Being as a demo's going to be out based on 1.1, and being as I forsee an influx of new players once 1.1's out because of this, it'd be a nice little tweak to the UI.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
This seems like a nice idea. Intuitively it makes sense, has no affect on gameplay, but helps people get used to the game functions.
edit: gah crux beat me to it because i was talking with my wife about Christmas pictures (waves fist at wife)
Most importantly, displaying food as an "X used of Y capacity" creates consistency with the population which improves the usability of both indicators.
Very nice idea - it 'feels' a lot better. You know, in my head. Wait, why is everyone looking at me like that?
Seriously, in addition to interface consistency (to the better of the 2 interfaces) it gives 'weight' to the food - currently it feels like the food just blows away. With this you can see that it's there, you're just using it (and you also get to tickle the accumulation impulse of the player, which is a big win for a lot of strategy gamers).
Yep good idea .. could also do something akin to that regarding mana, add mana upkeep, income / mana pool
As long as you don't change hte way it works, more info is always more fun.
And I choose to ignore stuff added my mods.
I think this is a good idea, except that I don't think this is a good way to display food, or population. It should be "X available of Y capacity". Same way other resources with a maximum capacity are normally displayed (e.g., hit points). The current display is counterintuitive and confusing (there were some posts asking about it back when the beta first came out), and it doesn't display the value that's of actual interest (how many citizens do I have left? how much food is available?).
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