Woofy1250
01-12-2012, 04:59 AM
Some suggestions related to trading functionality:
The ability for the game to note market prices in towns the player visits. For example, if trying to sell lumber at town A, a tooltip would list comparative prices from towns B and C. I remember Freelancer doing this very neatly. Mousing over a commodity in your inventory would bring up a list of locations the player has visited and their offered buy/sell prices for that commodity.
Marketplace building improvements - I feel like it'd be more useful by taking an average trade price of nearby NPC trade towns, or something along those lines, and offering those. Having it offer hardcoded and extremely unfavourable prices for goods makes it an utter waste of resources and time to build, for me. Maybe it's handy in a siege? Further, I'd love to see the marketplace UI resemble npc town goods market UI instead of a standard radial menu that essentially transmutes gold back and forth into resources according to set rates.
Alternately... the marketplace could possibly work by setting up a remote link (trade route) to an npc trade town's market of the player's choice, and trading directly with it. Sort of like a Customs House in Colonization offers the player the convenience of not having to manually transport goods back to Europe. To be fair, it should charge a tariff for the service, possibly based on distance from the player's town?
Other:
Some transparency on exactly how gold decay works when traveling. Is it decreased by having troops along? (protect the treasure against thieves) Is it fair for it to still occur when in an npc town, assuming that's not a bug? Tutorial tooltips explaining these more obscure mechanics would be great.
Another one in the same vein is needing to bring stone in order to fire trebuchets. I had to abandon a quest siege and go back to my town to get stone because this was nowhere explained when I bought a trebuchet. Not a huge deal, but still an inconvenience for me as joe average player. Maybe have the game check if the army has more than 50 stone per trebuchet the first time the player acquires one, and give a little warning popup explaining it requires the stone resource to fire.
Crown costs of tech upgrades and construction could stand to be decreased a bit. Once the tutorial questing starts to slow down, I ended by being quite hard up for crowns, while at the same time being overloaded with all the other resources, and being unable to spend them on anything besides houses and military units. I respect that it nudges the player into questing a bit more, but I feel like there's an imbalance in crown income and natural resource income once the player reaches the end of the "noob zone." Maybe it eases up after? I don't know, but that's my impression of the farthest I was able to get with persistent CTDing.
More population cap information. I strongly suspect my population cap is somehow being bugged with dead units still counting toward the max, but I can't be sure. It would be great if there was a mouseover tooltip that showed a detailed breakdown of what is using how much housing cap in my home city. Perhaps it could be an entire UI element that also allows the player to disband units for the sake of freeing it up. More pop cap information and management functionality would be fantastic.
Thanks for reading. Tried to cut down on tl;dr fatigue when looking at these.
The ability for the game to note market prices in towns the player visits. For example, if trying to sell lumber at town A, a tooltip would list comparative prices from towns B and C. I remember Freelancer doing this very neatly. Mousing over a commodity in your inventory would bring up a list of locations the player has visited and their offered buy/sell prices for that commodity.
Marketplace building improvements - I feel like it'd be more useful by taking an average trade price of nearby NPC trade towns, or something along those lines, and offering those. Having it offer hardcoded and extremely unfavourable prices for goods makes it an utter waste of resources and time to build, for me. Maybe it's handy in a siege? Further, I'd love to see the marketplace UI resemble npc town goods market UI instead of a standard radial menu that essentially transmutes gold back and forth into resources according to set rates.
Alternately... the marketplace could possibly work by setting up a remote link (trade route) to an npc trade town's market of the player's choice, and trading directly with it. Sort of like a Customs House in Colonization offers the player the convenience of not having to manually transport goods back to Europe. To be fair, it should charge a tariff for the service, possibly based on distance from the player's town?
Other:
Some transparency on exactly how gold decay works when traveling. Is it decreased by having troops along? (protect the treasure against thieves) Is it fair for it to still occur when in an npc town, assuming that's not a bug? Tutorial tooltips explaining these more obscure mechanics would be great.
Another one in the same vein is needing to bring stone in order to fire trebuchets. I had to abandon a quest siege and go back to my town to get stone because this was nowhere explained when I bought a trebuchet. Not a huge deal, but still an inconvenience for me as joe average player. Maybe have the game check if the army has more than 50 stone per trebuchet the first time the player acquires one, and give a little warning popup explaining it requires the stone resource to fire.
Crown costs of tech upgrades and construction could stand to be decreased a bit. Once the tutorial questing starts to slow down, I ended by being quite hard up for crowns, while at the same time being overloaded with all the other resources, and being unable to spend them on anything besides houses and military units. I respect that it nudges the player into questing a bit more, but I feel like there's an imbalance in crown income and natural resource income once the player reaches the end of the "noob zone." Maybe it eases up after? I don't know, but that's my impression of the farthest I was able to get with persistent CTDing.
More population cap information. I strongly suspect my population cap is somehow being bugged with dead units still counting toward the max, but I can't be sure. It would be great if there was a mouseover tooltip that showed a detailed breakdown of what is using how much housing cap in my home city. Perhaps it could be an entire UI element that also allows the player to disband units for the sake of freeing it up. More pop cap information and management functionality would be fantastic.
Thanks for reading. Tried to cut down on tl;dr fatigue when looking at these.