Hi Alex, thanks for keeping an eye open for suggestions.
I was watching CohhCarnage's stream and was reminded on how unintuitive, unergonomic and pointlessly limiting the combat deployment screen is.
- Novices have no intuitive insight that it's possible to deploy ships in flanking positions in pursuit engagements.
- Due to the repetitiveness of the dialog it is often even overlooked by experienced players that the it's a pursuit engagement. (at least that's a mistake I make too often)
- Ship selection for deployment positions is very unintuitive and has poor ergonomics. Multi-mode selection click cycles are objectively bad.
- Command ship selection is cumbersomely segregated in the combat dialogue.
- Why shouldn't we be able to control the starting positions of ships precisely, so that a slow Mora doesn't block our fleet?
My suggestions to fix this:
- Ship deployment should happen directly on the combat command screen, without a toolbox hiding what's happening (e.a. seeing that enemy ships are running).
- The fleet should be listed as drag & drop item list at the bottom of the screen.
- The possible deployment positions should be highlighted as areas, with a simple AA grid for drag & drop ship positioning. A 6×2 grid should suffice I think. It can be made vertically (bottom) and horizontally (flanks) scrollable for extreme fleet sizes.
- An auto-deploy button (e.a. frigates to the flanks) could skip obvious and tedious selection, leaving the player the option for fine-tuning like positioning individual ship in the deployment positions and just removing ships depending on confidence. Less clicks all the time, because it's optional.
- Command ship selection should be toggled with a simple right click on the same deployment screen.
- As for everything, descriptive & instructive text for the state of the game / active menu should be displayed at an unobstructive position with a hide button, not just interrupting infoboxes which are dismissed too quickly out of haste/excitement/carelessness, let alone those random infoboxes.
I think that this would greatly improve the experience for new and experienced players alike while even adding a tiny bit of gameplay depth.
Thanks!