Working out a new Economy GUI for Demo 7+

[Gary Thomas]

I could save myself a lot of typing by simply saying I agree with most of what Gary says at various points.

How can I do anything but heartily support anyone with such a devastating degree of perspicacity.

On the other hand "most of"?

Cheers

[LFS]

perspicacity

I Looked it up

[Richard Bruns]

One thing that has been mentioned several times is the possibility of linking the economics GUI, and other types of intreface as well, to the tech system. I think that this can be done now, with one new technology and some applications.

I propose adding a Tier 1 technology called "Organization" to the tech tree. The civ´s knowledge of this technology determines what can be done with the interface. This would be done by applications described in a seperate xml file.

I think that we can test this now, starting with one small change for the next demo: Disable the Build Roads button and the associated fund allocation in the econ GUI until the civ gets an Organization knowledge of 2. Since the knowledge level no longer falls, we don´t have to worry about what happens if orders are disabled.

What do you think? How hard would this be to code?

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I propose adding a Tier 1 technology called "Organization" to the tech tree. The civ´s knowledge of this technology determines what can be done with the interface. This would be done by applications described in a seperate xml file.

I think Ipersonally would find this Very annoying. But I will admit it could be a good flavor aspect for the game, and also give players big milestones to shoot for, which is good. It seems also that it'd be relatively easy to code. If that's the case we could certainly try it. Lets see what Lee thinks on the difficulty. I'd say at this point that this possibility should be kept in mind while coding the interface, but that we should wait for the first version of the interface to be in the bag before experimenting with this.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
I think Ipersonally would find this Very annoying.

Which part do you find annoying? It seems axiomatic that tech will have to affect the interface at some point. Remember the comment about manipulating mammoth belly futures? If a single Organization tech is the annoying part, we can replace it with something like a Road Building tech that turns on at a Production knowledge of 2 or 3.

[LFS]

I was hoping to have a prototype or screen shots up by now, but work commitments have prevented any real coding. So instead I will quickly say in words what I am currently thinking of (please feel free to criticise, I'm not a GUI expert), I have picked up on several points made previously and tried to incoporate them.

I am looking at providing an initial screen that provides information/input on just a few high level areas - say 'infrastructure', 'research' , 'military'. the info/input would be % allocated to each area and would be altered by the user with sliders (text boxes look to 'spread sheety') the sliders could auto adjust so all areas displayed would be 100%.

Each of these areas could be opened up tree fashion to reveal the detailed areas underneath them ('roads', 'mines' , 'phalanx' ), again sliders would allow input of the % allocated to each of these areas, but it would be by % allocated to the parent category. ie 30% to military -> 50% phalanx would mean half of the 30% in military goes to phalanx (15% of overall).

(Although this may need some extra work) I would expect eventually that setting the lower levels of detail would not be needed unless the player wanted to, I would like to see the player allocate resources at the high level of 'infrastructure' and some sort of minister AI sensibly allocate this budget to lower levels.

I intend on removing all other fields except the readonly field of expected production (ie expected to build 3 phalanx or 250 road for this % allocation). Although eventually the player could see all fields if he desired (some sort of econ view options with check box next to 'display ROI')

Needless to say, no area should be displayed if it not appropiate to the tech or other circumstances.

All comments good and bad welcome.

[vovan]

I like the idea of hierarchical structure of the econ gui controls. The sliders instead of textboxes would also be very welcome, IMO. Although you would need real numbers next to the sliders (i.e. the percentage of budget allocated).

What I am not sure about is how the sliders are going to work with the tree-like structure of controls. It just seems that they always look so stationary and immobile that having them appear and disappear as the sections are collapsed or expanded would look a little .... odd. But since I don't have a better idea, I think you can go ahead and code it that way. After all, the GUI probably can't be much worse than it is now.

[LFS]

Another alterntive to a tree structure I was toying with was more !! dialogs - ie clicking on infrastructure would popup the infrastructure only dialog. Other wise it would be the same.

The advantage I considered to this (apart from a tree maybe looking odd) was that made it more apparent that allocation at this level was relative to infrastructure budget and not the overall income.

[vovan]

Originally posted by LFS
Another alterntive to a tree structure I was toying with was more !! dialogs - ie clicking on infrastructure would popup the infrastructure only dialog. Other wise it would be the same.

Actually I like that idea. I was thinking along the same lines, also. That would also go nicely with the spirit of the game, which is to allow the player to choose the degree of control over the different aspects of the nation he wants to exert.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Which part do you find annoying? It seems axiomatic that tech will have to affect the interface at some point. Remember the comment about manipulating mammoth belly futures? If a single Organization tech is the annoying part, we can replace it with something like a Road Building tech that turns on at a Production knowledge of 2 or 3.

The part I think I would find annoying is having some "fine control" details unavailable at the start of the game. This could lead to inability to do important things and/or micromanagement to work around the gui limitations. As I said, I'm willing to try it and see.

Overall Interface:
Lee and Vovan, I am comfortable trying it the way you have evolved to in the discussions above. I'd like to see a crude mockup of each of the two overall approaches first. Although if that is too much work I'm willing to go along with what we think is the best way and then just evaluate it when ready.

Lee, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but there is already a fairly nice slider implementation available. You can see what we have by pushing the 'Ruler' button.

[LFS]

You mean the MultiSlider. I've just spent the evening re-factoring it. The existing class didn't provide any control over the gui (ie adding extra stuff on the same line as a slider etc, so it is now split into two parts - the existing class (fully backward compatible) and a new 'model' (no gui stuff) class which contains all the event handling routines.

I can now use the model and it's auto balancing routines on any sliders I create, so I retain full control of the layout.

I said it at the beginning of last week but I am looking good for a mock up fairly soon (I have acually been doing some of the coding this time )

[Richard Bruns]

GUI Proposal/Request

One thing that can get annoying about this game is that I know that there is such an excellent model underneath, but I have no good way of interacting with it. In the current implementation of the game, my economic decisions are limited to blindly throwing money at things with no idea of what I will get. If I want to do more than that, I have to do a frightening amount of work.

For example, consider the very simple question: How much will it cost me to build a Legion?

To get the answer, I first have to dive into the xml files. I look up the Legion unit and see that it is made of 3500 Heavy Spearmen, 1000 Skirmishers, and 500 Engineers. I then look up each of these elements and find the following:

HeavySpear defaults to warrior, and costs 3.3 times as much production and 4 times as much training.

Skirmisher defaults to warrior, and costs 1.66 times as much production and 2 times as much training.

Engineer defaults to warrior, and costs 4 times as much production and 3 times as much training.

Warrior costs 0.004 food, 0.048 production, 0.008 services, and 0.002 training.

This means that, after working at it for a while, I can calculate that my Legion will cost me the following, assuming that I can build themn all in one turn so there is no decay:

Food: 0.004 * (3500 + 1000 + 500) = 20
Production: 0.048 * (3500*3.3 + 1000*1.66 + 500*4) = 730.08
Services: 0.008 * (3500 + 1000 + 500) = 40
Training: 0.002 * (3500*3.3 + 1000*1.66 + 500*4) = 30.42

Now I have to turn these numbers into cash. In the first turn of delenda, the econ stats for the Latum province are as follows:

Food 5655, price 1.48
Production 983, price 1.13
Services 716, price 0.99

I will assume that Training costs Services.

So my Legion, if I build it all this turn, will cost:

20*1.48 + 730.08*1.13 + 70.42* 0.99 = 919.57 gold

Since Warriors had an Upkeep number of 0.1, I will assume that my Legion will also cost about 92 gold per turn in upkeep, but that of course will change if the price of the various things changes. It is also important to note that Latium will not be able to make more than 1.3 legions per turn, no matter how much I spend.

That involved way too much effort on my part. The GUI should take care of this kind of thing for me. I would like to see something like this:

Production Data and Orders: SPQR
Production Data and Orders: Latium
Economic Data:	Cash (Taxes)	Food	Production	Services	Training
Per Turn:	X	5655	983	716	?
Price:		1.48	1.13	0.99	?
Infrastructure Production Orders
Military Production Orders
Legion:	920	Number:		Percent:
Siege Wepons:	Y	Number:		Percent:
Horde:	Z	Number:		Percent:
Production Data and Orders: Gaul
Production Data and Orders: Spain
Infrastructure Improvement Data
Military Unit Data
Unit:	Upkeep	Food	Production	Services	Training
Legion:	10%	20	730	40	30
Siege Weapons:	10%	A	B	C	D
Horde:	10%	A	B	C	D

This table automatically tells me how much money it will cost to build something in a certain province. By comparing the unit resource costs and province resource production per turn, I can see how many can be made in a turn at an absolute maximum. If I put in a percentage of the tax rate as the production order, I can quickly look at province taxes and the unit cost see how many will be made per turn, without the GUI having to tell me explicitly.

I know you are already working to make it look better than that, but the html table shows roughly what I want to be able to see and do. The Number: input box is the option to produce a certain amount of something and then stop allocating resources. This would be especially useful for things like walls where only a certain number are needed and extra resources put into that order are basically wasted.

[LFS]

few points

- If some one can come up with a gui design which everyone is fairly happy with then I'll happily go with that, I can spend more time coding than thinking (I don't like thinking ).

- (No offense) Your table scares me, to many numbers, rows and columns, it feels more like a book keepers screen than the current gui.

- though at the same time there should be some way of finding the cost of things (and your ability to work out the cost of a legion is way ahead of me. )

- I do like, and have said so before, entering absolute numbers, e.g build 2 only 2 and nothing but 2 legions.
Though not necessarily for everything, allocating % is fine for things like farm improvement/research etc.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi gents:

Richard, thanks for the effort that went into creating your post, but I'm with Lee in that I think it would scare off too many players. If we were ever to do such a thing for power players it should be very near the end of developing v1.0 IMO. In the code there's a Cost object that tells how many FPS (food, production, services) are needed to build a unit. So we can easily put that info up if anyone should want it.

I am largely with Lee on this except that I think his 'absolute numbers' prescription is insufficiently flexible. FE entering an order of "build 2 only 2 legions" is pretty worthless in wartime when legions may be chewed up very quickly.

How about this for low MM. At the civ level the player enters the configuration of the entire army. FE 13 Legions, 4 Light Horse, 6 Siege Engines. That high-level interface gives the build and maintenance cost for the entire force (assuming you were starting from scratch) and also the incremental from where you are now. You can also get info on if the build-up were to be performed in 1, 2, 3, whatever turns. The player then picks the target for number of turns.

From then on, the game works to maintain that army at that strength. When we know how to do unit reinforcements that would be the preferred way, with new units being created only when one gets whiped out, or leaves a pre-defined military theater. One could also do this at a Province level to have finer control of what's built where. You could also index army size to the civ tax base size or something so as the empire grows the standing army size could be automatically adjusted.

What do you think? Seems very flexible and low-MM to me.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Richard, thanks for the effort that went into creating your post, but I'm with Lee in that I think it would scare off too many players. If we were ever to do such a thing for power players it should be very near the end of developing v1.0 IMO.

I don't see what is so different about my GUI and what we have now and what is being proposed. We already show the province production and price, I simply put that on the same page as the orders window. The expandable tree structure was already agreed upon.

In the code there's a Cost object that tells how many FPS (food, production, services) are needed to build a unit. So we can easily put that info up if anyone should want it.

Yes, that is the main thing I would like to see. But knowing food, production, and services, while useful, is not enough, since I am paying cash for everything and I would like to know what I am getting for my money. Since each province has different FPS prices, there shoudl be something in the province data to indicate how much a thing costs in that province. I don't think that this is trivial information. Players will want to know things like this, and if the game doesn't tell them they will have to resort to manual calculations.

I am largely with Lee on this except that I think his 'absolute numbers' prescription is insufficiently flexible. FE entering an order of "build 2 only 2 legions" is pretty worthless in wartime when legions may be chewed up very quickly.

I really like the percentage allocation...for some things. If I am in a big war, it is great to start churning out military. But percentage allocation is pretty bad for things like walls. I have to resort to manual calculation to figure out exactly what percentage to allocate of I only want to build one wall. Otherwise I either don't build the walls fast enough or I get an excess of "Wall Building Funds" that sit around doing nothing except annoying me each turn in the popup.

Also, what if I want to build a single scout to explore the world? With the percentage allcoation, I have to go to teh GUI, allocate the funds, wait until the unit is produced, and then go back to the GUI and turn off allocation. THis means two trips to that screen, and there is always something leftover after the first scout appears and I shut off production. This is a waste of my time and my civilization's resources. With a number allocation, I only have to go to the GUI once, and there are no wasted leftover resources.

I think that number requests should be in the game, and that they should trump percentage requests. Percentage requests are great for long term policy, and are an excellent innovation. But for one-time purchases or short turn requests, they are not very good. I like being able to set policy, but I would also like to be able to say "We need a wall around Seville, and we need it fast. Put your economic plans on hold and make that wall ASAP. Then, after that wall is finished, go back to what you were doing before." This is IMO historically reasonable and actually reduces micromanagement, sonce a one-time order would only take one trip to the GUI instead of two.

The system you propose for the army looks like another good way of setting long-term policy, but it also wouldn't be very good for single requests like walls. IMO it would be a nice feature, but I wouldn't use it that much.