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Already Suggested: Military Unit Building Association

DeletedUser111351

Proposal
Allow players to identify with which building a particular unit is associated.

Reason
Nothing is more annoying than going into battle, having exactly 4 units die, and upon returning to the city finding that all 4 units were from the same building. Or, a quest comes up that says delete multiple units and upon deleting them finding they were all from the same building. If a single type of unit was pooled from all buildings of its type, this would be fine. That isn't how it works. Each unit has a specific building association and must be rebuilt in that one building. So if one had 4 buildings of the same type, it might take 1 rebuild cycle to create all 4 lost units, but because they all are "associated" with the same building, it now takes 4 rebuild cycles.

Sometimes this is unavoidable. As much as I would like a troop pool, I do understand that that is a significant deviation from currently play. That said, there's no reason why a player shouldn't be able to see this implicit association between unit and building. Let the player decide which troops to bring into action/sacrifice/attack with.

Details
Currently there is an orange stripe that can be displayed over unattached units to indicate them being unattached. Expand on this display to have unique colored stripes for each building. A player can then see, oh, these 4 blue stripes are from 1 building. Ah, my red building is the one with 2 dead, I'll take my green units to war instead.

Balance/Abuse Prevention
This feature is mainly an information aid to the player to allow them to make informed decisions. The only potential issue I see is the difficulty in making it color-blind compatible. I don't view that as a reason not to implement features, but it is something to consider to possibly come up with other display choices for this same information.
 
Prinza the Hunter

Prinza the Hunter

Monarch
This sounds very much like an idea already proposed to do with barracks identification. I've seen it suggested on beta, too. It generally gets a lot of player support.
 

DeletedUser111351

Prinza the Hunter said:
This sounds very much like an idea already proposed to do with barracks identification. I've seen it suggested on beta, too. It generally gets a lot of player support.
Click to expand...
Don't know. Been a thought for awhile now and I didn't find anything in looking for similar ideas (but that's always a bit random as a wrong keyword or different classification/organization and suddenly it gets completely missed). Decided I would put it in print.

This whole idea system is a bit wonky anyway. Two ideas get submitted. One idea gets written off as similar to an existing one regardless of whether it is better or not. Adjustments to a proposed idea get lost in the thread. Then developers only see ideas that get eventually pushed onto them by some random count of people saying +1, regardless of how much merit/worth/value an idea might have. My hope is that in opposition to the supposed stated hierarchy, some devs (or whomever makes the implementation list call) actually peruse the board on a semi-regular basis and toss them around for possible implementation regardless thread status.

Most people don't know what they like until they can actually try it out anyway.
 
Prinza the Hunter

Prinza the Hunter

Monarch
One2Rule said:
This whole idea system is a bit wonky anyway. Two ideas get submitted. One idea gets written off as similar to an existing one regardless of whether it is better or not. Adjustments to a proposed idea get lost in the thread. Then developers only see ideas that get eventually pushed onto them by some random count of people saying +1, regardless of how much merit/worth/value an idea might have. My hope is that in opposition to the supposed stated hierarchy, some devs (or whomever makes the implementation list call) actually peruse the board on a semi-regular basis and toss them around for possible implementation regardless thread status.

Most people don't know what they like until they can actually try it out anyway.
Click to expand...
While I agree that there is a vagueness about the progression of a suggestion, I do recall reading that the. umber of "+1" was not the major criteria. As a software developer myself, I can imagine the process:
  1. One hour a week is given for the developers (all two of them?) to review the suggestions.
  2. They have the en forum, the beta forum, the german forum, the .. well, let's just say "lots" of places suggestions are coming in from.
  3. Anything not well laid-out, easy to understand, with clear reasoning and showing some thought to the wider impact on the game is rejected out of hand. The mods on the forums are probably told this and told if too much rubbish comes to them.
  4. The first pass on considering the merit of an idea is how well it fits in with both the medium-term development plan and the short-term coding plan. If it fits with the way the game is going, and covers an area of code that will be addressed soon, it will be scrutinised.
  5. Five to ten minutes at most is given to consider the idea. Developers are paid to develop, not to pour over reams of ideas from myriad sources. If it looks good, it will then be placed into a (very small) pile of considerations for the next development meeting, probably the next day. In the time to consider the idea, there would be a first-pass on costing (i.e. now many hours will be involved).
  6. At a development meeting, the idea - having survived to this point - is then considered in more depth, how it fits in the UI, what the ramifications for the middle tier would be and whether any database changes are required (if so, it stands even less chance of going anywhere). Naturally, the higher the cost, the more convincing must be the case for implementing any idea.
Now, that is all my imagination on the process but it won't be too many miles out. Notice that a great many suggestions in this forum (and, what's worse, even in the beta forum) are not even presented in an adequate manner likely to be considered at all. There just isn't the time for even one developer to spend trying to work out what and why something is being suggested, let alone in a meeting. If there is no thought shown to why and what impact from a player's viewpoint, it can be too much effort getting to the point where any estimate can be made of the impact from the programmers' viewpoint.

Somewhere along the route of consideration is "will this be popular for the customers?" If the general commentary is negative, obvioiusly they don't even want to hear about it from the mods. The more positive the comments, the easier it is to work out that it might be popular (still only 'might' because most people don't like change).
 

DeletedUser96901

I have a deja-vu

this idea is almost as old as the game
remembering discussing it in the year 2013
 

DeletedUser111351

Prinza the Hunter said:
While I agree that there is a vagueness about the progression of a suggestion, I do recall reading that the. umber of "+1" was not the major criteria. As a software developer myself, I can imagine the process:
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm fully aware that they all already have a job to do and reading through all the miasma is mostly a pointless timesink. I know why it's done like it is. I just know that it's still not a very good system.

As for popular versus non-popular ideas, I learned a long time ago that people are often wrong about their own opinions. Anyone who's ever watched a kid open a birthday present has seen it before. I want that, I want that, I want that. YES, I got it. It's the greatest thing ever! Three seconds into playing with it it is dropped and never touched again. Another present remains sealed in its original packaging for 6 months, totally uninteresting. One rainy day, bored out of his mind and driving his parents crazy, the package gets opened. For the next 5 years the kid is constantly found messing with it until it finally wears out from overuse.

I'm not saying all people are clueless all the time. Public opinion certainly has its value. It's really useful to determine what existing things are disliked or might need changing.
 

DeletedUser110195

One2Rule said:
Don't know. Been a thought for awhile now and I didn't find anything in looking for similar ideas (but that's always a bit random as a wrong keyword or different classification/organization and suddenly it gets completely missed). Decided I would put it in print.

This whole idea system is a bit wonky anyway. Two ideas get submitted. One idea gets written off as similar to an existing one regardless of whether it is better or not. Adjustments to a proposed idea get lost in the thread. Then developers only see ideas that get eventually pushed onto them by some random count of people saying +1, regardless of how much merit/worth/value an idea might have. My hope is that in opposition to the supposed stated hierarchy, some devs (or whomever makes the implementation list call) actually peruse the board on a semi-regular basis and toss them around for possible implementation regardless thread status.

Most people don't know what they like until they can actually try it out anyway.
Click to expand...
This is actually an old idea, same with seeing healing time and training time simultaneously, I personally posted the idea for dealing with which units in which barracks, though that was to be able to delete units from their barracks, rather than just see which one they belong to.
 
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