This might be helpful when it comes to the potential for the screen to get a tad crowded, making the game more accessible. Also makes solutions to problems that involve introducing new policies or sim values a little less of a losing proposition (although translation costs will always be an issue, I guess)
1 Like
The only problem I could see with this would be that it then makes the UI controls themselves quite cluttered and confusing, although I presume this could be implemented with hotkeys.
Something we originally considered was making non-highlighted icons actually disappear entirely (leaving lots of room) when you moused-over an icon. So for example, mousing-over income tax, would make every unrelated item totally vanish and the connected items would be resized appropriately.
That is something we never got around to actually trying, and its only a solution to the ‘let me see what X is connected to’ issue, not the finding of X in the first place.
I guess in general terms, continuing to work on design and balance so that all of the screen elements are seen as interesting and relevant and thus none of it is clutter, is the main objective.
Even if everything is interesting at some point, nothing is gonna be interesting all the time, so no matter how much you fiddle with it, having lots of policies is gonna be cluttery.
I often find myself late-game deliberately going through every single policy one by one to see if there’s anything left I’d like to change. And usually there are like one or two policies where I’d go “OH right, I never even touched that one”
So yeah, a way to temporarily filter stuff would be quite welcome. Is it a power user feature? Sure. But that’s alright. Absolute beginners don’t have to use it / they might learn how it’s useful dynamically.
1 Like
Figured you guys would’ve already considered that option, haha