Working out a new Economy GUI for Demo 7+

[LDiCesare]

Here are a few gripes which amount to "I must open the econ interface panel too often":

Currently, everything is expressed in percentage, but as the economy grows, values can change. If I want to build 1 unit per turn, I would like the absolute spending to remain constant, and not the %. Basically, I would like to be able to order based on the expected result instead of a %, and the percentage would adjust itself accordingly. The number needn't be accurate. For example, I want to build 1 chariot per turn, not put X% into chariot, because I have to lower the %age every two or three turns as the econ grows (or shrinks).
I would also like an "everything else up to 100%" option: Say I spend 30% on military supplies, 30% on some tech, 10% on farming. I have 30% left that I want to spend building f.e. units. Next turn, military supplies proportion will have changed, and I want no longer 30% but (100 - the rest). So I have to change the orders every turn again. This one is probably more important than the previous one. If you know MoO, the spendings were bars, and you could fix some of them. Changing another bar would change the %age spent in another category. That is what I want.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for the suggestions Laurent. I think the "what's left" suggestion is excellent! I need to think a bit more about the other details, of whether I'd like your suggestions better than the way it is now. Perhaps one should be able to do it both ways. Lets see if we can get some more comments on this before committing to something solid.

[LDiCesare]

It would be good to have more feedback, yes. I think Richard had said something in the D7 comments thread and he is on vacation so can't post here.
Since you mention feedback, it would be good to make some announcement early september as D7 seems to have had little downloads (little feedback anyway). Probably due to holidays + lack of advertising.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

Yeah Richard said a little on econ gui, but mostly the things Gary mentioned IIRC. Like letting the player know What of their 200% investments would actually get spent.

I'll get some advertising out soon. RL has just been very busy. I also have to admit I kind of gave up advertising for team members since for like the last 6 months the ones that showed up just mostly wasted my time and never produced much of anything. But we certainly need more comments on the demo, so I'll slant the advertising that way.

[Gary Thomas]

Needing to go to different guis to change different types of econ orders seems cumbersome to me. Research investment is not meant to be a permanent part of econ (except for education and similar things). Eventually there should just be a separate tech gui that handles that.

I do feel that it is the present system that is too cumbersome. When I said different guis, I really meant just different buttons on the task bar: there is already a tech one, which would also handle research spending (at present it just gives a list of technologies). The main one would be a build units button which would produce a small dialog giving a list of available units (and a comment on supply status) with various means of ordering them. infrastructure expenditure (probably never used) would be through the existing economics button. The switch beween civilization level and provincial level should be by a button on the dialog (whose setting should be remembered from one invocation to the next).

As far as supplies are concerned, I feel they should come off the top, before any other expenditue, and should not be able to be changed by the player (or AI). Allowing the possibility of deliberately undersupplying the army seems to me to add nothing whatsoever to the game except a consideable opportunity for confusion. In this categary I would also like to see administrative costs, depending on the number and size of provinces. In history these costs were a very real factor.

All other expenditure would come out of what is left over after the maintenance costs are met.

Laurent's suggestion of spending what is left over is a good one, though I would perhaps prefer that the residual could be proportionately divided among a number of items.

One thing I would like is a much better system for building roads. As I have said elsewhere, having to mark 20 segments to get the roads around the starting square going is extremely irritating.

In fact pretty much all the squares around Rome, down to Capua, had military roads connecting all squares. So I repeat my preference for just marking a square as having roads, a la Civilization.

It is currently not at all clear what happens when you have resources set aside for road building, but no roads planned. Are the resources lost? diverted to other purposes? saved for later road construction? Personally, I think I would rather have road building in the same category as population expansion, that is automatic and run by the AI. It should not be too difficult to figure out a system to implement this.

One of the problems with the present economics gui is the amont of irrelevant information available. This kind of information should be presented only if requested. Also, searching, by eye, up and down the list of possible expenditures to find "roads", or "chariot" is irritating.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
I do feel that it is the present system that is too cumbersome.

Hi Gary. Thanks for the details comments and ideas.

I didn't mean to imply that the current one wasn't difficult. Its clearly not something we want long-term. My question was whether your approach of two distinct gui elements was better than what we were talking about earlier in this thread. Specifically where we were headed was a high-level gui that had the top level view of all the important economic elements, and then allowed the player to drill down to something like what you're proposing. It may be what you want is the best first step on the way there. I haven't much against the specifics of your proposals, I'd just been picturing building the higher-level all-inclusive one first.

As far as supplies are concerned, I feel they should come off the top, before any other expenditue, and should not be able to be changed by the player (or AI). Allowing the possibility of deliberately undersupplying the army seems to me to add nothing whatsoever to the game except a consideable opportunity for confusion. In this categary I would also like to see administrative costs, depending on the number and size of provinces. In history these costs were a very real factor.

Governments througout the ages have spent funds on other things that should have gone to pay the army. Whether this is something worthwhile having in Clash is certainly debatable. I think it is, since otherwise you are reducing the player's righful decision space. "Should I pay the army or give money to my allies who may collapse without it?" Is an interesting strategic quandary I'd like our players to experience. I agree with you that administrative costs are Big, and would certainly like to include them as soon as practical.

All other expenditure would come out of what is left over after the maintenance costs are met.

Agree except that the player should be able to direct underfunding of army and admin costs at their discretion.

Laurent's suggestion of spending what is left over is a good one, though I would perhaps prefer that the residual could be proportionately divided among a number of items.

Sounds like an Excellent idea to me!

One thing I would like is a much better system for building roads. As I have said elsewhere, having to mark 20 segments to get the roads around the starting square going is extremely irritating.

In fact pretty much all the squares around Rome, down to Capua, had military roads connecting all squares. So I repeat my preference for just marking a square as having roads, a la Civilization.

As I said by email, I prefer the directional ones, but I don't feel strongly about it. I've got no big problem with your proposed change. Laurent, do you care one way or the other?

It is currently not at all clear what happens when you have resources set aside for road building, but no roads planned. Are the resources lost? diverted to other purposes? saved for later road construction? Personally, I think I would rather have road building in the same category as population expansion, that is automatic and run by the AI. It should not be too difficult to figure out a system to implement this.

Unused road building funds are presently saved indefinitely. Handling it automatically like the Army Supplies sounds good to me. We just need to come up with the rules.

One of the problems with the present economics gui is the amont of irrelevant information available. This kind of information should be presented only if requested. Also, searching, by eye, up and down the list of possible expenditures to find "roads", or "chariot" is irritating.

Agree we need something better overall. I also think the Info should be cut down significantly and the more detailed stuff made optional to be pulled up when needed as you said.

I've already proposed on the first page of this thread:
Hide unused orders. We will only show orders that have non-zero spending selected for them. We will need a button, choice, or some other GUI element to allow the player to insert a new order type into the interface.

We also already had the idea for orders broken down into types that could be expanded at will. How does the stuff on the first page of this thread mesh with your current thoughts?

[LDiCesare]

About roads: I think if Gary experiences trouble with them becasue he wants to build many roads, he won't be the only one, so I'd rather have them civ-like too for gameplay reasons.
A tree view of the econ remains the view I prefer.
I must say I utterly hate things like "most commonly used" user interfaces. I keep wondering if there is a way to disable that feature in Windows XP where it doesn't show all the menus but only those you used recently. I systematically click on the arrows to get more because I do not want someone else to decide automagically what I am supposed to be wanting to see.
So if you want to hide unused orders, at least provide a way to choose the first time which you want to show. Also make it known when new orders become available and ask whether they should be shown directly or not.

[Gary Thomas]

I didn't mean to imply that the current one wasn't difficult. Its clearly not something we want long-term. My question was whether your approach of two distinct gui elements was better than what we were talking about earlier in this thread. Specifically where we were headed was a high-level gui that had the top level view of all the important economic elements, and then allowed the player to drill down to something like what you're proposing. It may be what you want is the best first step on the way there. I haven't much against the specifics of your proposals, I'd just been picturing building the higher-level all-inclusive one first.

My problem is getting something useable in the reasonably near future. Once I have completed the structural refactoring, a tree structured gui will be much easier to write. On the other hand, at that point, I will probably think that finishing the social model and adding better AI will have a much higher priority, at least in my mind. Accordingly my proposal is not intended to be the final answer. It is intended to be available for D8. What happens after that is a decision for later. Polygons...

Governments througout the ages have spent funds on other things that should have gone to pay the army. ... Is an interesting strategic quandary I'd like our players to experience.

I don't mind this option if it isn't something that (as at prresent) forces you to recalculate all your expenditure every turn. When playing Dawn, about 80% of my time is spent doing paper calculations and using them to adjusting the economics orders. Micromanagement?

Unused road building funds are presently saved indefinitely. Handling it automatically like the Army Supplies sounds good to me. We just need to come up with the rules.

My idea here is to use the computer controlled AI to build the roads, though the player could over-rule that at will. A very important aspect is that roads must be maintained or they deteriorate.

Hide unused orders. We will only show orders that have non-zero spending selected for them. We will need a button, choice, or some other GUI element to allow the player to insert a new order type into the interface.

I really do not like this at all. It has too much possibility of potential orders being overlooked.

How does the stuff on the first page of this thread mesh with your current thoughts?

As you know I am not too impressed with great ideas that nobody does anything about. If somebody wants to code it, by all means. As I said, it is not high on my personal priorities.

Laurent's post seems pretty much in agreement with my ideas on roads and "unused orders".

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

HI Gary:

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
I don't mind this option if it isn't something that (as at prresent) forces you to recalculate all your expenditure every turn. When playing Dawn, about 80% of my time is spent doing paper calculations and using them to adjusting the economics orders. Micromanagement?

Paper calculations... Whatever For??? We obviously have vastly different styles of play. I spend maybe 1-2 minutes out of a 20-30 min dawn game in the econ interface. If you need mil units in a hurry you set the rate to like 80% for those units. What takes all the time?

My idea here is to use the computer controlled AI to build the roads, though the player could over-rule that at will. A very important aspect is that roads must be maintained or they deteriorate.

Yeah, road maintenance is good. I was more worried about the specifics of what the AI Does in terms of allocating road funds. Especially balancing with other orders. I don't want automatic road building orders to preempt a vital military build FE.

Laurent's post seems pretty much in agreement with my ideas on roads and "unused orders".

Ok, I'll go along with the two of you. Roads will be one-per-square, and no orders will be hidden (except for simplification purposes in the tutorial). BTW somehow right before the release of D7 somehow most of the econ orders we carefully worked to have hidden showed up again.

[Gary Thomas]

Paper calculations... Whatever For???

Primarily to try and make sure that the army is not undersupplied, and no production resources are unused. Since the army supply level is expressed as a percentage, this changes every time the population changes (that is, every turn) as well as every time a new unit is built or an old one destroyed. So I have to calculate how much expenditure is actually available, and allocate it, every turn. This I do with pencil and paper.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

This thread has come up in several contexts recently, so I thought I should bring it back to the top. I'll start by answering some points made by Gary about MM in the current interface quite a while ago.

[He said he needed to mess with the econ interface nearly every turn. sometimes even using pencil and paper calculations because. . . ]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
Primarily to try and make sure that the army is not undersupplied, and no production resources are unused. Since the army supply level is expressed as a percentage, this changes every time the population changes (that is, every turn) as well as every time a new unit is built or an old one destroyed. So I have to calculate how much expenditure is actually available, and allocate it, every turn. This I do with pencil and paper.

Well, first of all I don't think this level of attention is required. I don't do it. If a little money should build up, you can use it by investing in one of the tech categories. Investments well over "100%" can be made in the techs if you have cash.

For Demo 7.2 I have made the implementation order fixed as it is in the econ orders frame. So Army Supplies (which are set Automatically) always get first priority, and then on down the list. So if all you want is Supplies and Units you can set the Legion or whatever orders to 100% and you will get whatever is left after the needed supplies are generated. You can also have a "backstop" tech investment at 100% and fine-tune the stuff above knowing that any extra will go into the tech of your choice. (Food is always a good choice seeing as much of your economy in the early game is agriculture. Even small efficiency changes can pay off big, especially with a Market economy.)

But please don't take what I say above as defending the crappy existing orders interface. Something much better is needed, and Soon!

Lets hear your ideas on what it should be like, and please say which ideas above you agree with, and which you don't!

Thanks,

Mark

[LFS]

As I have sort of taken up the econ gui I have had a scan through this thread - Here are my initial thoughts - I could save myself a lot of typing by simply saying I agree with most of what Gary says at various points.

I think the first screen of any econ gui should give really high level info, then buttons/tabs whatever allow you to go to each category (military,reasearch etc) . These extra screens (or a version) should also be available from other areas (military screen should allow access to the miltary econ, tech to the tech econ etc)

% allocation is not really very good for many aspects (army upkeep, production of units etc) but is for other things like reasearch.

priority of expenditure needs dealing with to cope with over 100% expenditure - even army supply can do down the priority list, many armies have been neglected and this can form part of/ be basis of attrition (is attrition in ? ) as well as impact on morale/chance of rebellion.

I note there is a button for square level economy - I thought this game was abou removing micro-management.

I think we should ditch decimals in the gui (even modern economists cant get things that accurate ) it will reduce the accounting/micro-management appearance and be more accurate in it's inaccuracy

I do like idea of only introducing things as they become relevant (and removing them after they lose relevancy)
On tat tack I would prevent province level management until a certain 'admin' tech had been reached.

Icons instead of text are a must (a picture conveys a thousands words "what the &*^ does that stand for" usually ) plus they will help reduce textual clutter.


I will carry on thinking/reading/ trying to me little one off the keyboard.

[LFS]

trying to me little one off the keyboard.

better clarify that before i get censored

I've got a 15 month old daughter who loves leaning/banging on the keyboard.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Lee:

Originally posted by LFS

trying to me little one off the keyboard.

better clarify that before i get censored

I've got a 15 month old daughter who loves leaning/banging on the keyboard.

LOL, Good thing you're not here, there are several states in the US that would arrest you for that sort of lewd behavior.

Originally posted by LFS
As I have sort of taken up the econ gui I have had a scan through this thread - Here are my initial thoughts - I could save myself a lot of typing by simply saying I agree with most of what Gary says at various points.

Thanks for being willing to work on the econ GUI, I think it'll be a big improvement in people's playing experience when we can get past my crude testing GUI!

I don't have big objections to the direction you'd like to take things. And one rule I try to abide by is that the person doing the work gets a Big number of votes on the exact direction taken. I can't remember what Gary said, so I will reread the thread, and then your comments before addressing many details. Just a few brief comments for now.

% allocation is not really very good for many aspects (army upkeep, production of units etc) but is for other things like reasearch.

I differ a bit in that the high level gui should be putting different fractions of your resources into different categories. That seems to me the best way to do a flexible GUI. So at the highest level I think even military needs a %age. At lower levels I agree there is no need for the player to mess with %s except if they want to dictate force composition. (30% infantry; 30% tanks; 20%airpower; 20% naval FE)

priority of expenditure needs dealing with to cope with over 100% expenditure - even army supply can do down the priority list, many armies have been neglected and this can form part of/ be basis of attrition (is attrition in ? ) as well as impact on morale/chance of rebellion.

Agree, no attrition in yet. We should put that in soon. But I want to have a way for units at home to auto-heal first or it will lead to micromanagement (MM).

I note there is a button for square level economy - I thought this game was abou removing micro-management.

MM is Allowed but should not be Required. Different people like to do different things in a game. If someone wants to micromanage the economy of the biggest city in the empire, distinctly from the province that its in, I think we should let them. Though it is not a top priority.

From the intro blurb on the web page:

Our goal is to develop a fast, entertaining, and realistic game which also gives players the option to "drill down" into any area they choose, there to exert a fairly fine level of control. If you want to play everything at its finest level, you’d have an intense, detailed 400-hr game!

[q]I think we should ditch decimals in the gui (even modern economists cant get things that accurate ) it will reduce the accounting/micro-management appearance and be more accurate in it's inaccuracy [q]

Tough to do for some categories like prices. But I agree with the general sentiment.

I do like idea of only introducing things as they become relevant (and removing them after they lose relevancy)
On tat tack I would prevent province level management until a certain 'admin' tech had been reached.

A possibility so long as it doesn't lead to early game dissatisfaction. Need to playtest it, but I'm game.

Icons instead of text are a must (a picture conveys a thousands words "what the &*^ does that stand for" usually ) plus they will help reduce textual clutter.

Agreed!

Obviously we need a bit more discussion first, but once we're a little further along. . . Do you want to sketch out the interfaces you envision, or do you want me to try? There is already a fair amount of good ideas here. Just let me know what you need me to do to help out your progress.

[LDiCesare]

I do like idea of only introducing things as they become relevant (and removing them after they lose relevancy)

Note this is already the case.
You can play the Romans in Delenda scenario, and increase Military Tactics. When it reaches 15 (starts at 10), cohorts become available instead of legions.
(and that can cause the game to "crash"(freeze- can't finish turn...) if you still funded legions ).