Thanks for the vote of confidence. For what it's worth, I also lean towards the Panzer General/Panzer Corps way of doing things over the more complex (and confusing) machinations of OOB or similar, more complex strategy games. But that doesn't mean more advanced features and mechanics are bad. A lot of the time it comes down to proper translating of very cool and intriguing theoretical ideas into actually practical and functional gameplay components.adiekmann wrote: ↑Fri Jan 25, 2019 2:31 am Kerensky has written in several posts on this forum warning of this danger in discussions that have come up regarding a wide variety of suggestions. I have grown to appreciate his judgement concerning where to draw the line between what would make a good addition/change to the game and what goes too far and would likely become cumbersome and problematic.
I don't reject the idea of more complex ship mechanics, but I would like to make sure it is tempered properly and is conductive to the player's experience, rather than ending up being a very frustrating ordeal. Like in the preview image they shared, we get a nice view of a lot of ships (model sizes do need work as mentioned). But are any of them damaged with these special damage types? I honestly hope not, because it is impossible to tell from looking at the image. And when a ship like a carrier could be so crippled as to no longer properly function as an aircraft carrier... that's going to be really important information to communicate to a player because the massive effect something like that will have on a player's decision making processes.
To demonstrate, I would call this the 'minimum' communication/quality of life level required to properly support this planned feature of special ship damage.
When a ship suffers special damage, something that clearly cannot be displayed in, or communicated through, a raw Hit Point number, there needs to be a graphical UI element that demonstrates this to the player in no uncertain terms. As I stated above, I think this could be cool if it was more graphical rather than some kind of arbitrary UI-looking button/icon.
If I asked anyone to look at the above image, and tell me which two ships of all the ones present have special system damage, I would hope people would be able to easily point out the two ships with black smoke coming out of them. When I steal a glance at this image, it certainly pops out to me, but it also does so in what I would call an unobtrusive manner. I would define something intrusive as... surrounding each ship with multiple icons each tracking a certain system for the respective ship. Could you imagine what it would look like if every ship had an engine, main gun, aa gun, radar, and so on icon displayed around it? Calling that obtrusive is putting it nicely.
This graphic clearly demonstrates there is 'something' wrong with these 2 ships that have billowing smoke coming out of them. But because it's just a cool looking smoke graphic, it's also a very vague and doesn't actually say what is specifically wrong with the ship. For that, you will need to look at the ship more closely, such as a Panzer Corps style expanded unit information panel, which now shows exactly what is wrong with this specific ship in a very clear way through UI elements.
I think this level of information and communication the game is sending to the player makes potentially complex systems far less intimidating and worrisome.
As an extra, perhaps mousing over each of these systems displayed a tooltip that further explains the effect these systems have. Moving your cursor over 'AA guns' creates a tooltip that says: "Damaged AA turret – reduced air attack."