• Founder TripleA Admin

    The arrows are pretty cool. However, I’ll see a few arrows pointing to a territory, thinking everything is okay, hit “End Phase” (I never read that laundry list), only to discover that I messed something up.

    What I would like is to look at the map without the arrows but what it will look like when I finally say, “okay ready for the next phase.” It gives me a chance to scan the board and find things like:

    • sending a transport instead of a cruiser into battle
    • not filling a transport completely
    • not unloading a transport completely
    • realizing the auto-selection for the SZ chosen by the software for amphibious assault is not the SZ I wanted (happens in Australia a lot)

    Even if the preview is just a button on the dialog with the moves summary, it would be super useful to me. This also makes a little more sense than an “undo” button.

  • Founder TripleA Admin

    Actually, the preview doesn’t even need to be after your done with your moves. If I could just have a toggle that shows me a preview of my moves, that would help immensely.

  • 2024 '22 '21 '19 '15 '14

    I brought this up a while back, mostly because I find laundry lists of text describing the “moves” written out in words pretty useless when playing at a steady clip (which is probably saying something for me, cause I’m notoriously long winded with my A&A rambling and lists of lists on the forums lol), but I think what most would want is a visual representation of the moved units on the game map that is as easy as possible to parse at a glance. Diamonds and Arrows are only marginally better than lists at the final prompt in my view, since they hide a lot of the relevant information behind another click to view type graphical element. Last time I checked the diamond was updated to a black circle with crossbar riffles, its got a little circular colored meter now showing which units are involved, yellow for ground, red for aircraft ect, which is a bit of an improvement aesthetically over the diamond though functionally its much the same. The arrows have definitely been improved over the past few months, because now the ‘moving’ units don’t shift position within their starting territory to a spot along the border anymore, which was kinda confusing sometimes before, but still, a lot arrows going on.

    The optimal method for usability I’d think would be like an inter-phase step, where the units actually move into the relevant territories/sea zones and are displayed clearly on the map in their ending locations rather than with arrows from their starting location (like where the moved unit appears as a ghost or semi-transparent version of itself or whatever ‘while its moving’ in the actual spot where its meant to end up, similar to the way other map games work.) But I’m pretty sure Cody described in discord that something of that sort with a preview was basically impossible given the way the game was designed. In my layman’s way of understanding it there’s no real intermediate game state to save/preview, until the phase is actually completed and then the stuff actually happens, after which point there’s no going back. Which I think is also why there’s no time machine or simple way to access or export a gamesave or to view a previous turn/phase in a game history? I don’t know how it works exactly if it overwrites as it goes maybe, or something like that to ease the load? I do wish there was a way to save games though. Even for something sort of ephemeral like a really killer A&A match, sometimes its cool to have something other than a screen capture that you can look back on later to study, or just show off haha.

    I’m not a big fan of the vestigial movement arrows myself, since I think they clutter up the map view and wouldn’t really be necessary if the units just moved into the relevant space with a “to/from” for each unit involved listed in a sidebar when you cursor over the spot haha.

    I try not to bring up comparisons too much anymore since I don’t think its particularly productive, but I kinda just wish the map display for movement looked more like TripleA. Like I guess its one of those 'why reinvent the wheel, when you could just take a sleigh, or cross country ski there instead?" heheh. I mean I don’t know, maybe that’s a little harsh, but yeah. I feel ya dude. It’s a bit rough, mild panic sets in immediately after clicking the “End Phase” button.

  • '12

    Yeah, the current system is pretty annoying. Even after having worked a management-level position in a game development company I’m still amazed by the odd UI quirks that end up in games. I’m always running across things that make me think ‘how did the developers themselves not find this immediately annoying and try to fix it’?, like having your ships decide to move to the ‘wrong’ (from your view) SZ by default.

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