[...]I would also appreciate if the menus to produce items would be modelled more akin to the research menu, meaning that you can select how many workers you want to work on one queue the way it was in the old Ufo games. Because if i see it right at the moment you can only produce only one item at a time, even with multiple workshops, and i really do not want to have to choose between better weapons and armor.
Is that possible?
hmm.. so you would get both your weapons and armor later?
i am all for this system, though, i would want, say, 2 workers to produce PB ammo for grenade launcher and 2 workers to produce D-F cartridges and continue doing so for ever, so that i would never have to micromanage production of consumables again.
but actually it would be nice to have much more than that, and i am afraid it's going to be a longish post.
maybe you are going to like some ideas here, or whatever.
1) what i would really like to do with those PB ammo and cartridges is to set an amount of those items that i want to have in my base at all times.
and when there is less than, say, 30 PB ammo, workers would be assigned to try to maintain the preferred amount of ammo in storage.
this would, of course be a convenience aimed at a very specific (limited) micromanagement issue.
or maybe your base manager would come to you with a list which says:
- there is less than 20 PB ammo in storage <produce until 30>
- there is less than 4 interceptors in hangars <produce interceptors until 4>
a related system would be warehouse management in FreeCol where you can set minimum and maximum desired amounts of items in warehouse, and when the amount exceeds or drops below those amounts you get a message in your turn report.
the interceptors thing would be a problem, though, because usually i have a special base for interceptor production, and a "produce interceptor" button might sound quite stupid, instead it should say "transport interceptors from base X".
and also, the amount of ammo that i would like to have in my warehouse is really not just a number but the amount of ammo assigned to my soldiers, including the ammo in weapon, plus some extra.
2) if roleplay was a priority, why not adapt a standard internet shop gui for shopping? would make things even less comfortable, i guess, but would certainly be good for rp.
(and then you could hire a base manager npc that would do the shopping for you, based on some general guidelines of yours, and the result would be a gui something similar to what it is atm.)
but a preview of what you are purchasing, with a conformation button, would do no harm.
and maybe also a base building preview, both for the layout of base facilities and for the radar coverage on the geoscape.
3) sorry if i have not figured out yet why it would be efficient to research multiple items at the same time rather than one at a time to start getting benefit sooner.
maybe there could be various intermediate results from researching a particular alien artifact that would speed up research of another alien artifact.
by intermediate i mean that you would get those results half-way during the course of the research before the research is completed.
like if the trigger system of alien weapons was not mechanical but psionic (and you would need to replace the psionic part with a mechanical trigger system in your workshop to use them), then your level of understanding of "alien communication" would speed up alien weapons research.
or else part of the research could be modeled as individual scientists getting ideas about the alien artifact, and those ideas may be redundant (more than one scientist might get the same idea), so you would get diminishing returns for assigning more scientists.
i mean, the experiments take some constant time, but the thinking process efficiency would increase less than linearly.
in that case it would be more efficient to research multiple topics at the same time, and to prioritize the topics and assign different numbers of scientists correspondingly.
there's more to generating ideas, like collaboration of scientists that should actually increase efficiency if more scientists were involved.
but if we are just talking about the reasons why the gui should enable assigning scientists to multiple research topics at the same time in the same base, then diminishing returns could do the trick and also create some gameplay decisions.
i feel bit stupid if this has already been done, but it's alright.
why you cannot research the same topic in multiple bases at the same time while the research results are distributed instantly over all bases, remains a mystery.
4) lastly, about base management in general
, i would suggest to forget about the whole x-com style base management gui principle which has always amazed me with the extraordinarily tedious navigation.
i often think that there could be an editable tree (like the little mutable trees that i do sometimes myself in java), especially in the sense that you could create and name some additional folders.
the objects in the tree would, say, enable you to recruit a specific soldier or buy a specific weapon.
i mean, like in the "soldier candidates" folder you could create subfolders like
"unused soldiers from previous months"
"soldiers that i don't ever want to see in the candidates list again because they have speed 15"
and each month when you got new soldier candidates you could drag them in the appropriate folder and keep your lists clean of trash.
and also, there are those long lists when you want to buy, say, some gun or ammo, most of which you will never use because it doesn't suit your personal preferences (playing style).
there could be folders "approved weapons" and "weapon proposals", the latter would contain, in my case with the present item stats, the knives, pistols, rocket launchers, and some others. if you wanted to buy something you would go to "approved weapons" folder and do your purchases in the much shorter lists there.
and when you, say, wanted to stop using SMG because, say, particle beam rifle has become available, you could drag the SMG from "approved weapons" folder to "weapon proposals" folder.
and you can imagine rearranging soldiers between 2 dropships, maybe even if the dropships are in different bases. you open the appropriate base folders, aircraft subfolders, look at the soldier files and drag and drop them to arrange well rounded teams in the two dropsips.
if soldier is being reassigned to a dropship in a different base and if transport between bases should take time, then after confirmation the state of the soldier node should be something like "on the way to base X".
this is, of course, a very much half-baked vision, and i think it is appropriately so, considering how unlikely this kind gui change would be to happen.
i guess there should still be an employees view and an aircraft view, but maybe those could consist of trees (maybe with nice icons, objects would need little tree icons then) where you could arrange the functional objects (like a recruitable soldier) as nodes in a standard tree gui.
