need more detailed soldiers info on screens

[Shaak]

Hi there!

Its really a big problem for remember which loadout using each soldier. Can you add on screens when I need to send some soldiers on sub-missions the hover-event popup, which will show the hovered soldier loadout? Or just add loadout icons.

 

[Shaak]

And at soldiers menu. I need to know which soldier has role to understand which training to focus

[Blade]

Actually, it is known that UX needs a lot of polishing, but that must wait till the game itself rolls like it should. Then come all "decoration" stuff - UX, pictures, text, UFOPedia, and so on.

Think about it - every minute spent on making a feature tidy that doesn't make into the final game is wasted - that goes into something that actually makes a difference!

[Shaak]

1 hour ago, Blade said:

Actually, it is known that UX needs a lot of polishing, but that must wait till the game itself rolls like it should. Then come all "decoration" stuff - UX, pictures, text, UFOPedia, and so on.

Think about it - every minute spent on making a feature tidy that doesn't make into the final game is wasted - that goes into something that actually makes a difference!

So what this changes?

[wulf 21]

Well, if we are discussing User Interface here, I would like to throw a thing in I am missing much:

In Xenonauts 1 you were immediately seeing in the armory if a soldier was wounded (red name and percent in brackets behind name + big bar over soldier if wounded). Since you now first get to armory before launching any mission in X2, the overview with the "launch mission" button would be the perfect place to immediately hint the player that some soldier is wounded and you might want to exchange him/her before launching the mission.

Suggestion - Paint soldier Icons in Skyranger yellow for wounded and red for badly wounded. Additionally display the health bar directly under the small soldier portrait if soldier is not at full HP (like you see the helth bar in the assign soldier popup already)

[Blade]

2 hours ago, Shaak said:

So what this changes? 

OK, if I have to spell it out for you: you need to wait 6 months and then check again. But I guess Chris will be here soon explaining it in 6 sentences. Sorry, forget I said anything.

[Decius]

It's perfectly reasonable to make suggestions that get put into the list of features to implement. The next UI pass might not be for a while, though.

[Chris]

On 4/7/2019 at 10:17 AM, Shaak said:

Hi there!

Its really a big problem for remember which loadout using each soldier. Can you add on screens when I need to send some soldiers on sub-missions the hover-event popup, which will show the hovered soldier loadout? Or just add loadout icons.

 

On 4/7/2019 at 12:26 PM, Shaak said:

And at soldiers menu. I need to know which soldier has role to understand which training to focus

Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I can see that it would be useful to be able to tag a soldier as being say a Sniper and have that displayed on all the other screens like these. It's not a big task exactly, but it's not a small change either because the Role system works a little differently from in Xenonauts 1.

At the moment the loadout is actually on the dropship slot, not on the soldier. If you go to the dropship and right-click the soldier portrait to remove the soldier, the equipment and role stays in the slot and you can assign another soldier to take that equipment. It's designed to allow you to replace injured or dead soldiers without breaking the composition of your team, which I think is a useful feature.

We could also allow you to set a loadout on the soldier themselves, but then we need to think on how to combine these two systems together. I guess that by default soldiers could be "Generalists", but you could manually assign them to be a specific role like Sniper or Assault if you want.

However if a soldier has a specific Role set (i.e. not Generalist) and you assign them to a dropship slot that has a different Role, the game will ask you which you prefer. For example if you equip a Sniper to an Assault slot, you'll get the choice to either keep the existing Assault equipment or to reassign the slot to be a Sniper slot and automatically equip the soldier with the sniper equipment. That would probably give the best of both worlds.

[Shaak]

4 hours ago, Chris said:

At the moment the loadout is actually on the dropship slot, not on the soldier. If you go to the dropship and right-click the soldier portrait to remove the soldier, the equipment and role stays in the slot and you can assign another soldier to take that equipment. It's designed to allow you to replace injured or dead soldiers without breaking the composition of your team, which I think is a useful feature.

Yup, its useful, but stats of soldiers more important I gues. I will never change role of my soldier If I was train the soldier as sniper or heavy trooper.

 

4 hours ago, Chris said:

However if a soldier has a specific Role set (i.e. not Generalist) and you assign them to a dropship slot that has a different Role, the game will ask you which you prefer. For example if you equip a Sniper to an Assault slot, you'll get the choice to either keep the existing Assault equipment or to reassign the slot to be a Sniper slot and automatically equip the soldier with the sniper equipment. That would probably give the best of both worlds.

Its seems like a good solution. Another reason why we need personal asignment - its an medical rooms. If we send wounded soldier for treatment - this also grant a little challenge to remember which loadout on this soldier was. And minor reason - role asign give more personality and purposed to soldiers, since allows you to recognize them and remember their in-game history with the player.

[Dagar]

17 hours ago, Chris said:

At the moment the loadout is actually on the dropship slot, not on the soldier. If you go to the dropship and right-click the soldier portrait to remove the soldier, the equipment and role stays in the slot and you can assign another soldier to take that equipment. It's designed to allow you to replace injured or dead soldiers without breaking the composition of your team, which I think is a useful feature.

It definitely is useful if the soldiers are getting good at everything as they did in Xenonauts and if it warns you of overloading the replacement soldier due to lower strength. But I think it is bad because it is not intuitive. If you have played any game of that kind you expect the soldiers to have custom loadouts, mostly because it has always been that way and because similar games of the last years have much more focus on the individual characters than on the squad.

If you want to go that route, I think a good idea would be to make that system as clear as it gets. That might involve showing the loadout on the dropship assignment screen or having according role symbols fixed to the slots, though that does not really play well with how at least Xeno 1 had roles more as a suggestion than an actual rigid system. In fact, maybe the best thing would be to unify the soldier loadout and dropship spot assignment screens with some overview of at least the most relevant inventory items of each unit, such as armour and main weapon. It always bugs me to have to go to the hangar to select the order of units in the dropship, and also it is quite tedious to scroll through all soldiers to determine which pieces of equipment I have on the team and which I forgot. If you were to press that dropship slot centered loadout system onto Xeno 1, I would dislike that very much, even though it would be practical.

[wulf 21]

1 hour ago, Dagar said:

If you want to go that route, I think a good idea would be to make that system as clear as it gets. That might involve showing the loadout on the dropship assignment screen or having according role symbols fixed to the slots, though that does not really play well with how at least Xeno 1 had roles more as a suggestion than an actual rigid system. In fact, maybe the best thing would be to unify the soldier loadout and dropship spot assignment screens with some overview of at least the most relevant inventory items of each unit, such as armour and main weapon. It always bugs me to have to go to the hangar to select the order of units in the dropship, and also it is quite tedious to scroll through all soldiers to determine which pieces of equipment I have on the team and which I forgot.

Well, as I am testing the closed beta, I can say, that it really already is like that. And I find it pretty intuitive as it is. And yes, role names are still pretty much a suggestion, you can still modify loadouts after role assignment. The thing is that the whole loadout is even then still bound to the dropship slot. So if someone has, say, a laser rifle, you don't need to manually remove the rifle from a wounded soldier and give it to another one, you just assign another soldier to the slot and that's it.

You can for example find a screenshot how the overview looks in this bug report thread:

Additionally you always get to see the overview before launching the ground mission. Hence my suggestion to put the information if a soldier is wounded directly there, too.

The only thng I am wondering about is how this system should work in base defense when you can use all the soldiers, not just the one in dropship. The others need to spawn with some loadout, too, after all, and it is logically not possible just to give them the last loadout they had assigned, because it might contain limited items (such as laser weapons, armour).

Edited April 9, 2019 by wulf 21

[Dagar]

51 minutes ago, wulf 21 said:

 So if someone has, say, a laser rifle, you don't need to manually remove the rifle from a wounded soldier and give it to another one, you just assign another soldier to the slot and that's it.

 

Xeno 1 already solved that by stripping soldiers of all finite equipment, at least if they are too wounded to participate on a mission.

But it's good that the system is intuitive to you!

[Chris]

9 hours ago, Dagar said:

 

Xeno 1 already solved that by stripping soldiers of all finite equipment, at least if they are too wounded to participate on a mission.

But it's good that the system is intuitive to you!

Hmm, but in X1 even in the case where the soldier is wounded enough to removed from the slot you still have to assign a new soldier to that slot and then equip them with the items you want them to have. In X2 you just assign the soldier to the slot and they inherit the items from their predecessor.

It does make things easier; whether the current incarnation is better than the X1 system overall is still up for debate though. Out of interest, have you played the X2 beta?

10 hours ago, wulf 21 said:

Additionally you always get to see the overview before launching the ground mission. Hence my suggestion to put the information if a soldier is wounded directly there, too.

The only thng I am wondering about is how this system should work in base defense when you can use all the soldiers, not just the one in dropship. The others need to spawn with some loadout, too, after all, and it is logically not possible just to give them the last loadout they had assigned, because it might contain limited items (such as laser weapons, armour).

Yeah, I suspect putting health on those portraits is a good idea. In fact we recently had a new concept done on that screen so we had the ability to support larger dropships / more troops if we wanted to, and there is a health bar for each soldier on that concept.

For the Base Defence missions we're likely to use a variant of the the same screen that allows more soldiers. We may also remove the central part where you position the soldiers in the dropship (because you can position them at the start of the mission anyway) and use that space to hold some special "sentry gun" slots too, assuming you've built some.

[Dagar]

7 hours ago, Chris said:

It does make things easier; whether the current incarnation is better than the X1 system overall is still up for debate though. Out of interest, have you played the X2 beta?

Nope, haven't, and I can't say that my intuition about the intuitiveness of that system is right, especially after @wulf 21 already stated that it plays good.

[Max_Caine]

I think this thread has shown that thanks to many, many games rolling up job/class, equipment and individual into one package, many people are going to automatically assume the same is true of X2, that trooper X is a sniper, because trooper X is assigned the Sniper loadout, even though trooper X could be equipped with any other loadout and perform just as well in that category. It doesn't help that the closest competitors to X2 automatically do that, and it I think it's going to be worth bearing that in mind come the release of Early Access, as people are going to have to learn new rules (or re-learn old ones). 

[Decius]

14 hours ago, Max_Caine said:

I think this thread has shown that thanks to many, many games rolling up job/class, equipment and individual into one package, many people are going to automatically assume the same is true of X2, that trooper X is a sniper, because trooper X is assigned the Sniper loadout, even though trooper X could be equipped with any other loadout and perform just as well in that category. It doesn't help that the closest competitors to X2 automatically do that, and it I think it's going to be worth bearing that in mind come the release of Early Access, as people are going to have to learn new rules (or re-learn old ones). 

PP is doing exactly that as well, by allowing much more freedom in the equipment a soldier can carry but tying their abilities to their equipment.