[Suggestion/Ui] Improvin the Empire Tree

from Elemental Forums

The Current empire tree is not quite as usefull. This is for several reasons.

(a) All Herores are displayed, even those sitting in a town and those in the army of another hero. Typically these heroes are not accessed individually.

(b) Regular troops are not shown

(c) Important information is not accessible (army strength, relation (location) between cities and heroes, and heroes themselves)

(d) city functions should be accessible (as also noted by frogboy in one of the video comments)

(e) Not a bit configurable

 

The image below displays possible changes to the empire tree.

Armies

Instead of Heroes Armies are shown.

These armies could also have the shield icon to indicate their combat strength. Therefore regular troops wihtin an army, do not have to be represented individually. Heroes within an army, however, should be drawn next to it, to indicate their position on the map (Where did that hero go? - Oh it is in the souvereigns army!). Clicking on the shield icon should open the Units details (for comments on this see https://forums.elementalgame.com/387721).

Additionally displaying regular troops in the empire tree will make it easy to find that one explorer or frigate somewhere on the map. It will also help notice armies that have not moved this turn. Especially transports with heroes onboard are a must-have then.

For caster heroes also a quick button to access spells could be shown on mouseover (similar as described below for cities).

Cities

Cities should display the army strength as well as all heroes stationed within. Here also the shield icon can give access to stationed troops window. A build and recruit button could be shown on mouseover (dynamically move the other icons in the tree to create a clear area for this).

Furthermore each city should have an individual icon. These icons could either be user generated or automatically drawn upon founding of the city.

At a last point cities within the empire tree should be arranged in a definite Order. Preferable by the date when they entered your empire. Having the second oldest city somewhere in the middle of the empire tree is somewhat confusing.

Configuration

To reduce clutter during the later parts of the game the tree should be configurable. Like in Sins you should be able to completely hide armies and cities from the tree (e.g. by right click menues). Furthermore options to hide the champions within armies and army strength should be available.

You could even go further and allow grouping of cities and armies, so, e.g., by continent or user defined attributes. This would allow to hide all cities on one continent and show them again with one click.

 

Empire tree

1,122 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

You forgot the most important part: It needs names. When you have 20 cities, hovering over each one to find the one you need is not good.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I figured if they have individual images (which they lack now)  names would not be needed. You might however be right.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

could give them picture of what they mainly do since brad hates "city spam" shouldn't be so many..

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Actually if you look at brads beta 3b video he will have about 12 cities or more when he is done conquering. He himself built 3 or 4 cities, and each AI did the same. If he wants really few cities he should not build more than two cities himself.

So maybe founding cities with the souvereigns essence (or at least creating green land with essence - so that you can rebuild a razed city without additional essence cost) is not to bad, to limit city spamming. Of course founding your empire would be without cost for simplicity.

Consider that all land that was made green by your cities is already acessible to you (you can harvest its resources) so that a new city would be typically built outside of green territory. However that is not the topic of the thread, so maybe i should write about this somewhere else....

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Good suggestion.

I'll add a few ideas:

- Different city icons for different faction-cultured cities.

- A selection of similar icons within each faction.

- Designate units/armies as 'Garrison' and they no longer show unless you browse the city.

- Formation of units into armies using a system like Europa Universalis III or Call to Power - the civ4 way is confusing.