With the change to conveyors and the map design you can now directly change the difficulty of the map by adjusting the design to have less efficient import / export zones to the outside area by making them only meet minimum requirements and also by making warehouses shorter and more compact that require cars on the production line to make more turns on the conveyors which slows down efficiency.
The game should pause when the research popup interrupts the player. I would also suggest either having research tabs with categories, or using the same ui design as the production line equipment for the research window so that going through a hierarchy of research is easier and doesn’t take me away from the game.
Allow the player to set a technology template for upgrades so that you can easily set all machines of the same type to “opt in” or “opt out” to have the same upgrades so that you don’t have to manually find each one and update it.
Also, eventually having a blueprint mode would be nice- and a way to save them.
regarding the UI imporvement:
At all you want the building menu to be oriented towards the top of the screen and expanding downwards and not as today towards the bottom screen and expanding upwards.
regarding the conveyor corner:
Yep, my expectation was that the vehicle will enter the corner tile, stop on the rotating platform, wait for rotation and leave the corner.
This would make the line design more challenging but it’s a game so have all things to work like in the real world? It’s still a game and I believe not everyone wants to handle such detailed simulation. But when talking about difficulty levels it would be a great idea to push the gameplay more to simulation than arcade gaming.
regarding the map design:
Don’t forget: You just see the production facility and not the whole building. When talking about a complete complex there should be goods receiving, warehouse etc. included. Atm the Resource Importers and Export doors are nothing else than (fire)gates between the production area and everything else around.
In my mind it makes no sense to have a penalty or bonus because of the slot location like you mentioned. If you would have the control over the complete building design it could be an aspect to talk about. But from my point of view Production Line should be related to designing and optimizing a production with just some basic mechanics for goods receiving, retailling and finance.
the most important point is that the thing you are clicking on does not move and neither does anything else above it. this makes it predictable and user friendly. Cliff kinda broke all the rules of explorer.exe
the importers are the goods receiving, directly off of the truck if you go on the idea I talked about. I mean sure you could have a sorting facility between shipping and the resource importers but we can skip that, its a game. the warehouses are the stockpiles. the only real things missing are staff requirements like a lounge, bathroom, and some offices, as well as other utilities besides power. its a very simplified version of reality, and I’m sure more things will be added in the future to make the game more interesting.
good point on the UI thing…i’m currently trying to improve route performance, and also improve the new car design system and the sales/economic model. I see those 3 things as pretty critical, and then afterwards I can think about stuff in the priority vote like marketing & more car models.
yeah it was actually the first thing I noticed when I started playing
once its fixed I would actually like the tech tree to work in a similar way as the build menu, because I personally dislike tech trees that take you away from the main game. so that would be my first mod request if its not vanilla. I wanna see my production line!
Also I never mentioned it but there is no ui number showing the progress of research per hour so every time the research pops up its rather jarring to the player. plus the fact that the research window does not remember where you were last scrolled to.
I just had to poke some fun, sorry Cliff ^.^ I know you got plans
