In general, I'm simplifying things here and there. The ship tooltip, for example, lost a couple of stats in the last update - iirc the CR loss/second value was standardized and so removed as a player-facing value. I've been thinking of culling a few other low bang-for-the-buck values like this as well. (shield/phase upkeep, perhaps? shield flux/damage could possibly be standardized as well, with notable differences expressed via built-in hullmods.)
While making stats more accessible is not a bad thing, there are actually some not displayed stats that i'd like to see:
- Ship acceleration and turn rate ( they were previously vaguely present as manoeuvrability).
For example it is possible to have about same speeds on slower frigates & Falcon with hullmods, but huge difference in these stats is not mentioned in tooltip and hard to measure in play.
- Ship system flux costs, durations, cooldowns, effect values (where applicable).
- Flux cost per shot for weapons (in addition to flux per second that is already present)
- Active vent rate (Not particulary important for vanilla, but many mods add hullmods that modify it)
Acceleration and turn rate are, imo, things that are too difficult to compare or get a real sense for from looking at the numbers. You get more from 3 seconds in the simulator, and besides, they're somewhat correlated with ship size and top speed. All in all, just not worth the UI space/complexity imo. Showing too much information is a bad thing too, it lowers the usefulness of all the information you're showing. And considering there are *four* numbers here (accel/decel/turn rate/turn accel...
Active vent rate: if a hullmod is there to call out the change, imo that's quite enough. The issue is when the value is important, changes, and not called out anywhere.
System flux stats: Hmm. I think that since you're not going to be comparing ships on the basis of this, or picking which system to add to a ship, that it's not actually all that important to show.
Flux per shot/other: Maybe, yeah. It's another tough call as to whether to add an easily-calculated piece of derived info, i.e. whether it's worth the extra screen space or not. I'd love to take another look at the weapon tooltip at some point, and, as mentioned elsewhere, making it easier to compare weapons there could be a very good thing.
All in all, I'm not necessarily a fan of showing information that can be figured out through playing, but that can be a delicate balance.
Remember a long time ago ship tooltips used to show a few basic stats (offense/defense/etc) on a 1-10 scale, using pips? There was a *lot* of feedback asking to see the actual numbers.
Maybe an option for the old dots system might work. Simple/complex stat display, so the experienced players are happy and newbies aren't intimidated.
Why not show both? In this case the pips are computed by comparing weapon/unit stats against the average weapon/unit stats in that category.
YES! The Wargame series is a perfect example. Extremely deep and complex game with a huge number of stats but the coloured bars go a long way to helping- I can see at a glance which unit is good at once, and how they compare to other units.
I think David pointed me to this a while back
It looks good, yeah! One of the issues is the vertical screen space; the ship stats panel would get about 2x taller with this approach. Another issue is picking the right scales for the bar. For example, for armor, would you show "armor within size class" or absolute? If you show "high armor (for frigates)", then it's useless for seeing how the armor of a frigate compares to a destroyer, and it's not always less. If you do absolute, then the nuances of frigate to frigate comparisons might get lost. Still, that's not that big a deal and the right way to approach that could probably get figured out. UI layout is the bigger issue.
