Ship Combat More Awesome

[fallen]

I am spending the day working on making ship combat more awesome.

What kind of additional details and data do you want to see?

I know that we need to add:
- Visual indicators for each advance / retreat / escape / boarding orders
- Indicators of critical hits
- Your captain's HP
- Warnings about death of crew and officer
- All sorts of beautiful animations, explosions, special weapon type stuff

I am considering finding a way to jam the HUD elements (understaffed, low morale, low health, etc) into the combat screen. Would you find it useful?

[grävling]

I badly want the warnings about the death of crew and officers, but more importantly I want the indications of how ill some of my not-dead-yet crew and officers are. i.e. something to tell me 'No more Evasive Maneuvers! Put Out the Fire!' or 'Better Get that Doctor Talent working NOW, they won't last until the end of battle!'

I want to know when my crew stops working due to low morale, and how bad it is -- 'Do I need to use one of my morale boosting talents now, in the middle of battle?'

Understaffed is less of a concern -- because there isn't anything you can do about it. But if the understaffed is Pilots, well that I want to know because if you ever get out of Pilots you have lost the battle -- and it might even be time to run away. So its more 'how many of these do I have left' that I worry about, and wish I knew, rather than 'are we understaffed?'

However, before I want this stuff I want 'weapons sorted so that ones you can fire at this range are first on the list' and talents are sorted so that 'ones you can use now are first on the list' to cut down on the scrolling. I also think that the talent icons are too large -- at least for my screen. I'd rather smaller icons -- so I wouldn't have 4 rows of talent icons to scroll around with. Reducing the number of rows and sorting them so things I can use are up front would make things much more pleasant.

There is another problem in that if you cannot use a talent, you cannot stick it into the slot, and if it isn't in the slot, then info doesn't work, because that only shows you information about the talent in the slot. Which can be a problem if you want to know what the talent you cannot use _is_ in case you want to reposition the ship so you can use it. Eventually you learn all the icons, so aside from the ones where the icons aren't done yet, you have less of a problem, but it makes ship combat rather harder to learn than is ideal.

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback. While I mentioned understaffed from the HUD, it would also display counts of low morale and low health crew.

Added better sorting and auto-disabling Talents / Weapons you can't use to the list.

[grävling]

I'd also like hi-lights of how badly the enemy is fairing. The combat log has a lot to read, when I just want things like ---

'The grav cannon landed a critical hit on an officer cabin in the enemy ship and killed an officer there.'
'The enemy crew is panicking and is in disarray.'

I want to know if my shot was any good or not, beyond a red numerical value.

[fallen]

Jun 24, 2017 13:37:22 GMT -5 grävling said:

I'd also like hi-lights of how badly the enemy is fairing. The combat log has a lot to read, when I just want things like ---

'The grav cannon landed a critical hit on an officer cabin in the enemy ship and killed an officer there.'
'The enemy crew is panicking and is in disarray.'

I want to know if my shot was any good or not, beyond a red numerical value.

Yes, I think we want to display deaths on both sides of the line.

[fallen]

Additional question - if lots of extra details were available after a turn ran, would you be interested in a "don't proceed until I tap" option? Allowing you to review the full results of the turn, Talents used, damage dealt, officers dead?

On one hand, it sounds like a hassle, on the other there is so much data!

[grävling]

Deaths, and morale too. Sometimes the best thing to do when fighting is to stop damaging that valuable ship you want to salvage, and just let the enemy stew in their own juices for a bit. They're going to surrender, if not this round the next, anyway.

Sometimes this is stupid -- they are alive and fighting mad, and you need to keep whacking them.

I find it hard to know when I am in each situation. Something that would help with this would be good.

And an indicator that would help you decide -- lay off the torpedoes unless you really want to blow this ship up, try a different sort of weapon that does a different sort of damage -- would be good.

[grävling]

Jun 24, 2017 13:49:29 GMT -5 fallen said:

Additional question - if lots of extra details were available after a turn ran, would you be interested in a "don't proceed until I tap" option? Allowing you to review the full results of the turn, Talents used, damage dealt, officers dead?

On one hand, it sounds like a hassle, on the other there is so much data!

Yes, would be good. I would also like it if there was a 'brief' 'longer' and 'everything' version of the data to view, which you could select.

[ntsheep]

Just joking at the moment, I'll be serious later, but I would like a white flag to pop out of the enemy ship when they lose

[fallen]

Jun 24, 2017 14:44:33 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

Just joking at the moment, I'll be serious later, but I would like a white flag to pop out of the enemy ship when they lose

Currently, there is no pause or acknowledgment of victory before the screen transitions to the Ship Victory / Defeat screen. That, we will change

[athios]

Perhaps it might help to have a simplified table of Turn results and ship/crew conditions after each turn (if you choose to view it).

e.g.

Our Ship Name	Enemy Ship Name
Attacks Weapon 1 - hit Weapon 2 - miss	Attacks Weapon 3 - hit Weapon 5 - critical hit
Ship Components Component A - XX% dmg Component B - destroyed	Ship Components Component Z - XX% dmg
Crew Status Officer "Job & Name" - xx/xx HP, xx/xx Morale "Job & Name" - xx/xx Morale "Job & Name" - dead	Crew Status "Job & Name" - xx/xx HP "Job & Name" - xx/xx Morale
Ship Movement / Crew Action Retreat & Escape - success	Ship Movement / Crew Action Advance - failed

[fallen]

Jun 27, 2017 14:31:55 GMT -5 athios said:

Perhaps it might help to have a simplified table of Turn results and ship/crew conditions after each turn (if you choose to view it).

e.g.

Our Ship Name	Enemy Ship Name
Attacks Weapon 1 - hit Weapon 2 - miss	Attacks Weapon 3 - hit Weapon 5 - critical hit
Ship Components Component A - XX% dmg Component B - destroyed	Ship Components Component Z - XX% dmg
Crew Status Officer "Job & Name" - xx/xx HP, xx/xx Morale "Job & Name" - xx/xx Morale "Job & Name" - dead	Crew Status "Job & Name" - xx/xx HP "Job & Name" - xx/xx Morale
Ship Movement / Crew Action Retreat & Escape - success	Ship Movement / Crew Action Advance - failed

Maybe something like this would actually trump the desire to have a historical combat log? A turn report that had all the details really nicely laid out seems nicer than a giant stream of text.

[athios]

If this kind of display is desirable, would also be good to have certain text a different colour. Like green text for things improved by Talents, red text for things worsened from attacks or crippling conditions.

[grävling]

I'd like a historical combat log. Or maybe 3 -- brief, longer, and everything.

[grävling]

Jun 27, 2017 14:48:41 GMT -5 athios said:

If this kind of display is desirable, would also be good to have certain text a different colour. Like green text for things improved by Talents, red text for things worsened from attacks or crippling conditions.

Love the idea of different colours. Hate the idea of red and green since our poor red-green and green-red colourblind fellow players won't be able to see the difference.