Here’'s something I started putting work into today, as a longer term improvement to challenges. Not for a few weeks probably, at least. I release these patches too close together…
I’m going to have retaliation in there.
Right now player A issues a challenge.,
Player B beats it. maybe sends a message saying “nice game”
The End.
New system:
Player A issues a challenge
Player B beats it, and sends his fleet as a linekd retaliatory challenge to player A, with just a few mouse clicks.
Player B strokes his chin as he sees his fleet destroyed, then re-designs his fleet and retaliates.
Player A gets the new challenge and…
etc.
In theory, I’d have a ‘threaded’ UI for the challenges that would let you view the retaliations and the back and forth between players fighting against each others fleets.
I know that some people have been orgniasing systems like this manually and I’d like to make it easy. The bonus is that you can always retaliate the fleet just as a courtesy to the challenge issuer, so they get to see how you spanked their fleet
Any thoughts?
i get so annoyed having to go back and fi9nd the names of the poster in order to send back what fleet I destroyed theirs whit and hardly ever is there a reply !
Sounds like a good idea to me. Admittedly I don’t do a lot with challenges, but I keep up on the Challenges forum, and from what I read I suspect this Retaliation will get used a lot. A bloody awful lot.
You need a menu that opens a text file of all the people and the names of the missions you’ve challenged, that way people don’t have to remember - the game itself keeps track of it for you. It should be organized by day/week, I like how when I browse history in an internet browser I can explore by “folder” by time instead of specifically by date, a folder made for a period of time and whatever is done within that time period is stored there, it makes a lot of things easier to sort through by how recent it was.
Indeed, guessing someoens username sucks, whereas a drop down list of people you challenged before would be cool. I’m currently mulling over how to represent all this in the challenge browser, given this pesky minimum spec width of 1024 for the screen (grrr).
I’m also going to allow you to see the unique ID for each challenge on there, so that people can reference them out of the game more easily.
Right now my thinking is that I swap the ‘fight/download/delete’ button area for ‘details’ which opens a big window with details on the selected challenge. I haven’t coded that yet though (still mulling over the threading view)
Maybe put the extra information and the download/fight/delete buttons in a window on the bottom and have them apply to whichever challenge is selected?
I’m only new to this game, there are a couple of things i’d like in the challenges section.
An option to hide expansion challenges in the non expansion version.
At the end of a battle the ‘go to fleet hq’ button appears redundant since you don’t earn honour from these battles. It’s even more useless if you’ve already bought everything.
The game seems to periodically remember an old fleet layout from a previous challenge, this causes an issue if the new map is smaller and you spammed a fighter swarm in the bottom corner since this blows the cost/pilot limits on the new challenge but you can’t clear the battlefield. Is there a “reset fleet” button im missing that would solve this?
‘Memory’ in the challenges menu, i’m trying to go through them by rated difficulty, it’s a hassle that every time you have to re-sort the list and work out where i’m up to.
I’m having trouble reproducing this bug reliably, it might happen the first time I load up a challenge but then upon reloading it the ships have gone.
Example: yfrog.com/5m92789545j
-edit
The use of the “main menu” button, sometimes it takes you to the launch screen but sometimes it takes you back to the page you came from. Statistics menu after challenges - clicking main menu takes you back to challenges menu, just needs a more apt name, maybe the same as the missions ‘go back’ button. Ship design has ‘go back’ buttons, but race selection, from deployment & mission screen, also uses ‘main menu’ but goes back to the previous page.
Also, is there a way to link another player to a specific public Challenge? Maybe a UIN (presumably they already have one) that you can share with others so they can compete with you for a better solution, or so people can recommend on forums some good challenges that aren’t just plasma spam fleets :S
