My favorite AGEOD game is AACW, because it offers more options (the unit building and reinforcement screens, transportation etc.) and the hand drawn map just look SO much nicer than the rendered stuff.
So I was excited when the PoN demo was released - this game had been touted as 'the next big AGEOD thing' for years and years, so I was looking forward to finally playing it.
By now, I started the demo numerous times and played around, but my favorite AGEOD feature - the divisional stuff - has been ejected, and there is now a lot of economic stuff to manage that is ... opaque, to say the least.
I had to do quite a bit of stumbling around aimlessly to figure out a lot of the basic infos that should be right at hand.
The Trading stuff requires far too much switching-around to pull off without losing track, and the biggest sinner is probably the balance screen - that one is a bastardly combination of information overload and Where's Waldo.
And I STILL have basically no true idea what I'm doing, frequently run into a brick wall when trying to figure out some specific or another and can't get rid of the feeling that doing ANYTHING takes about ten times as many clicks as it should.
So, I don't want to stop at 'this all sucks, improve it!', because I know a little constructiveness is always helpful - so I put some thoughts into the F4 screen (cause it covers the part of the game where I feel it's by far the most opaque).
Here's the F4 screen as implemented:
Now, apart from the taxes stuff at the bottom, what does it really do?
It throws information at me at a pace that tops the firing rate of a submachine gun. I get tons and tons of icons and little numbers, that essentially give me the same information the balance sheet gives me.
There's a LITTLE more detail, but not quite so much that it's truly useful.
As a new player, I see little reason to enter the screen at all. There IS some stuff hidden therein, but it's not really obvious and falls way, WAY short of what should be there. You can see details about stuff, like the trade probabilities, in tooltips and you can enable or disable all production facilities of a good in the 2nd row. And you have a lot of infos available at a glance, which CAN be useful in some circumstances, I guess.
But for a new player and a lot of common situations in the game, the screen is borderline useless.
So I did a little thinking and moving around stuff etc., I rearranged UI elements that are already in the game and tried not to add anything substantial.
Here's what I came up with:
As you can see, my F4 screen no longer contains as many infos at a glance, but on the other hand, you can - without ever leaving this screen - do LOTS of stuff that requires you to open half a dozen screens or menus in he game as it is now.
Some points of interest:
For both income and expenses, it provides a scrollable list of the game-objects that affect it.
For Income, you can see you get 15 coal from a trade with the Northern Germany trading zone.
Another 1 coal is produced from your local craftsmen - or so I believe, I had a really, really hard time finding out about that one...
To the right, there's a trade button you can press, which should then open another screen which lists all trade zones in which you can do trade and that have the current good (coal in this example) on offer.
You can modify the details of the existing trade by just clicking the buttons on it. Easy!
For Expenses, you have a list of all the factories that consume coal - that's all already in the game, but you need to manually click through your provinces and browse smallprint on a ton of tooltips to gather it.
The only thing I added is the small red boxes which spell out how much of this particular good is consumed by that facility.
You could enable or disable any specific facility just by clicking it's power icon or you could toggle them all by using the power button at the right., You could double click on any of them to close the ledger, select it and move to the province where it's located. Easy!
Even a newbie could manage his economy MUCH easier if we had such a screen in the game. Why don't we?
If I find the time, maybe I'll take a look at some other screen(s), too.
Until then ... discuss!
Edit: I just realized I haven't upped the newest version. But the only thing I added is numbers in brackets after the Income and Expenses headers to sum up. So just imagine they were there, ok?
_____
rezaf
