New Army Management Prototype

[Rosletyne]

As many here are no doubt aware, the cap of 2000 units imposed in the last update has become a heated topic in the feedback thread. I have been disappointed to see how some of our forum management appear to be taking the side of InnoGames in this. Now, I have always sympathized with the moderators for putting up with the flood of negative feedback while the developers are hiding, and I have noted how the recruitment campaigns for new moderators seem to have increased in frequency, but that sympathy wears thin at this lack of understanding for the many problems with army management that this change completely fails to address. To all the naysayers, who said that fixing these problems would be too difficult or too time consuming, not realistic or worth the effort, or just plain not possible, this is my response to you.

I HAVE CREATED A WORKING PROTOTYPE FOR AN IMPROVED ARMY MANAGEMENT FROM SCRATCH IN THREE DAYS IN MY SPARE TIME.

And most of that time was spent in PhotoShop and fine tuning the graphic layout, rather than coding!

Why did I do this, you may wonder? It has been a while since I coded anything, and I felt I could use an easy task like this to refresh my skills. But my primary motivation was that I wanted to shut up everyone who was saying this would not be viable. It can be done, it is not difficult, and it does not take a great deal of time or effort. There is simply no excuse why a team of professional developers would be unable to do this. Since they have been deaf to all other criticism, maybe a little public humiliation will shame them into doing some work. Or perhaps that is too much to hope for, and the developers have no problem with being outdone by me.

Some of the issues my design solves:

1) Speed. Whether you have ten units or ten thousand, my interface remains fast and responsive.

2) No more shuffling. You no longer need to search for healthy or attached units from a constantly changing list.

3) Organization. Everything is arranged into stacks by age, type, health and attachment status.

4) Usability. The unwieldy options to show all ages and unit types at once have been removed, like the now useless scroll bar. Instead champions and rogues have been moved to their own tabs.

5) Memory. The interface remembers which age and tab you had selected when you return to it.

6) Army order. The order of selected units is no longer shuffled either, which gives the player limited control over initial positions of units and their move order.

7) Counting. You can see exactly how many of each unit you have, in every state of health.

 

[DeletedUser97349]

I would be happy to forward on your design if you would like.

From the sound of the description however, it would not function with the way units are currently produced; stacking is not possible with unique unit IDs. Changing this would require more than changing simply the army management tool.

It should also be noted that no where and at no time has this change been put forward or described as a solution to any army management issues. No where has anybody said that the army management tool will not be looked at for further improvements. The cap is simply a solution to the issue of players no longer being able to log in. As I have said previously, effectively there was always a cap - the cap being the inability to access your game. This 2000 unit cap simply moves it forward so no one arrives at that point henceforth. Other issues with army management bore no part in this addition to the changelog.

 

[DeletedUser96867]

@ Starzaan

You have made it perfectly clear INNO has no interesting in improving it's product and cares not at all for feedback. Once we get through all the BS we can clearly read between the lines. The constant inaction month after month after year is crystal clear. It's sad that the customers have to take the time to do INNO's job and even then they can't be bothered to take note of the valuable resource they REFUSE to even have a MEANINGFUL conversation with.

All we get is the same meaningless garbage where you tell use they can't fix something unless they change what is broken. Your credibility is sinking with every post.

 

[DeletedUser7719]

Very nice Rosletyne! How do units from barracks work on there though?

 

[DeletedUser96901]

No where has anybody said that the army management tool will not be looked at for further improvements.

no where has anybody said that the cap is a temporary solution or it will be looked for another solution to remove it again

and you still don't say that

further improvements is nice
but that doesn't include even the try to remove the cap again

 

[ddevil]

Well I seriously have doubts the cap being done becoz of 2000+ units hurting the game performance ... I think its mainly done with future developments in the game and that which might need us to spend more diamonds (maybe to revive the units) to survive in the game ...having uncapped units does reduce the spending power of many players ;-) #Just my thoughts

Otherwise I m sure the game dev's would have atleast tried to do something about it by now or maybe even would have told us that the cap's only temporary and some work-around will happen sometime in future instead of blatantly refusing to do anything about it and just making one of their front-end staff to keep saying the same thing again and again that nothing can be done about it...

 

[DeletedUser98465]

I just wanted to add; well done Roseltyne, regardless of the 'what' it's viable and proven a 'home user' can do this in a matter of days and a team of [sarcasm]'highly professional, experienced, motivated, cognisant developers or management[end sarcarm] can't. This is exactly the point I've been trying to make over and over again. These things are down to willingness and experience. I'm growing weary of the half-truths, lack of motivation and half-baked implemented ideas that seem to appear day in day out. Maybe I should heed to advice i saw a few days back and stop caring.

Me personally I wouldn't give them the code at all, but dangle it like a carrot. As far as suggesting to pass over the 'design' and then to immediately say 'it won't work' without seeing it integrated and action, is a bit off. But then I forgot, us players know nothing.

 

[DeletedUser5180]

awesome work here, proving that imo the easy route has been taken ie 'lets just cap it, its a lot easier than looking for a solution even if it sorts other problems at the same time'

one main worry about the 2000 unit cap is what happens when more features are added (yes, i'm including useless unasked for features also) and the game struggles to load.............i know, says head of development, that Alcatraz GB thingy....lets cap that at 1500 troops which will do for 6 months and we can always drop it down to 1000 troops when needed

 

[DeletedUser14782]

I personally like the attached/unattached units bit.

 

[DeletedUser12778]

Great Work, it solves many of the problems players have with the army interface

But i would like to keep the option to show all unit types open it is useful when replacing defenses and placing sieges on gvg, also to work on you city defense

 

[Nilopertiso]

Fair play Rosletyne - I thought this would be yet another moan/whinge thread, but I really, REALLY like the idea you have put forward and the potential it has to be vastly improved over what there currently is. I can't fathom though if you have actually programmed this and showing the code output, or if it's purely a graphical mockup only?

I don't buy in to the followup comment about stacking not being possible.. if you can group the unique unit IDs into each stack then the system simply selects one of those stacked IDs at random, I assume from some sort of array.

More importantly, I really like how multiple issues have been addressed in one-go - as you mentioned, you could do away with the shuffling when selecting units, the random nature of ordering (unattached/attached and health status) and the inability to easily ascertain unit quantity are my main gripes, but i'd have never thought of grouping by unit health too in the manner you suggest.
The only disagreement I have is removing the all units/all ages selection. There is no reason to remove the ability to "show all" and I can think of ways to retain that ability whilst still incorporating it around your suggestion. I am neutral to the separate categorization of rogues/champions (as in I couldn't care less if they are separate or not) but I can see the logic behind it.

In my view, this suggestion is certainly one of the best "community driven" ones and you have done the work for them! As a side comment, I would in that proposal add the ability to filter for "full health only", particularly alongside the ability to show all units/all ages to cut down on what would then potentially be alot of wasted/blank space, but otherwise i'd certainly champion this approach!

 

[DeletedUser105486]

Great Work, it solves many of the problems players have with the army interface

But i would like to keep the option to show all unit types open it is useful when replacing defenses and placing sieges on gvg, also to work on you city defense

I agree - maybe a button to "expand army" could be in place

I think this idea is a great idea - much more compact way of displaying things. Good luck with this!

+1 here!

E

 

[DeletedUser6272]

this is awesome and imo a must

if a player can do this in 3h then im pretty sure foe can sort something out.

on dinegu i must have close to 2k troops but no chance of finding out.

the game slowly punishing bigger players with updates so we need some to make it easier for us.

this is 1 so a big plus 1 from me.

cheers rosletyne for time and effort.

 

[DeletedUser914]

This is exactly what I proposed a few months ago. Inno give Rosletyne a great reward for this prototype.

 

[DeletedUser9614]

+1

.

 

[mrbeef]

Yes, but it's the mechanics behind the GUI that's important.....3hrs to come up with the GUI is all fine and well but I can assure you it would take considerably more time than that to sort out the back-end stuff.

The Millennium Falcon looks great...... but could it fly in earth's atmosphere? I doubt it.

 

[Nilopertiso]

Yes, but it's the mechanics behind the GUI that's important.....3hrs to come up with the GUI is all fine and well but I can assure you it would take considerably more time than that to sort out the back-end stuff.

The link given by Rosletyne is in fact interactive, but whether the codebase is shared or not, I do not see a reason why such a valuable and hugely necessary addition would be considerably complex to incorporate. We are talking, on the most fundamental scale, simply grouping units together by health.. we aren't talking about anything on the scale that perhaps GvG took to program. Heck, I imagine these special events are more complicated to program than the suggestion under discussion here.

It would be nice if someone from FoE could comment on whether this is being seriously looked in to, or at the very least, acknowledge it as a consideration.

 

[DeletedUser5180]

It would be nice if someone from FoE could comment on whether this is being seriously looked in to, or at the very least, acknowledge it as a consideration.

I'm very surprised that after over 2 weeks someone from INNO has not put any input into this thread yet. They seem to bend over backwards to alienate themselves from their customers.

A simple ' we have seen this thread, and are looking at this possibility, thanks to the OP for their efforts' would have gone a long way to give us some faith that they actually look for feedback.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

I'm very surprised that after over 2 weeks someone from INNO has not put any input into this thread yet. They seem to bend over backwards to alienate themselves from their customers.

A simple ' we have seen this thread, and are looking at this possibility, thanks to the OP for their efforts' would have gone a long way to give us some faith that they actually look for feedback.

To be fair it is the holidays and Starzaan did respond at the start of the thread. I do agree it would be nice to have them acknowledge it but that isn't how they roll. They prefer to have six degrees of separation.

 

[DeletedUser5180]

To be fair it is the holidays and Starzaan did respond at the start of the thread. I do agree it would be nice to have them acknowledge it but that isn't how they roll. They prefer to have six degrees of separation.

I think Starzaan does a great job, i was meaning some direct input from INNO.....in the past Anwar popped up ocassionally but these days it seems there is some giant wall been erected between INNO and us. maybe its more like a two way mirror than a wall......they see and hear us and we see and hear nothing