Starsector > Suggestions

Naval Market: Returning to the Era of the Obvious Ship Catalogue

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Piemanlives:
For a few versions now the ship and goods market have been rolled into the same planetary interaction option. This is, quite frankly, absolutely fine. Condensing similar menu options in order to make way for more diverse interactions isn't a bad idea. However with the recent influx of new players and users this has revealed an unintentional flaw in how it's handled.

A very noticeable number of new players don't actually realize there's a market for buying and selling ships.

For those of us who have played the game long enough we're familiar with and used to using the hotkeys for navigating the planetary menus while going about our business. New players do not have that familiarity with the UI and standard menu hotkeys. The ship market currently isn't advertised in any way, shape or form and that needs to change. Somehow. I'm no master of UI design so someone else can come up with that.

SCC:
There's the assortment of hotkeys shown next to the trading option, and one of them is for fleet, but, uh... I included this in my signature for a reason. Alex got too used to using hotkeys.
Another visibility-related thing I'd like to mention is that you can completely skip the combat tutorial in the main menu without any kind of warning or anything.

Alex:
In the dev version, the option reads "Trade goods or hire crew, buy or sell ships, or refit [I, F, R]". I *think* that's not what it is in 0.9.1a, right? So I'm hopeful that this will help with the issue.

Hmm, if I could also do something custom to distribute the hotkeys along the line... i.e. something like:
"Trade goods or hire crew [I], buy or sell ships [F], or refit [R]"

Would have to totally hardcode that, though. Let me make a note.

SCC:
It might help, but the only foolproof way to do this is to split two most important functions (trading items, trading ships) into 2 dialogue options again. Not everyone is inquisitive enough to try out hotkeys there, instead relying on numerical keys.

Zalpha:
Maybe a good way to solve the new players not know what to do or what they can do is to do a tutorial of navigating the menus, purchasing a ship and equipping and kitting it out.

It could maybe start off at the main station menu and then you hire a new captain, then move down to in the cargo shopping menu and make a purchase of a ship hull mod and learn it. Then head down to the shipyard and buy a ship with d-mod, and point it out the difference between ships with them and without them. Then it could move to the equip menu. It could make use of newb friendly features, like "Okay, now autofit it", keeping it simple and maybe letting them know things they can do like removing a d-mod (I had to search the net to find the answer to that problem). Then add the captain they just purchased and once they have the ship, run a simulation with it. All of this in hopes of teaching them and showing what they should know to help get deeper into the game.

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