Wall of suggestions

[Bianary]

A variety of suggestions based on my playtime so far, some of these I'm sure are already in development, others are going to be completely unreasonable to implement or just are bad ideas for the game, but hopefully some will prove useful so here goes.

Unit Management

• When I select a unit that has a move or attack queued, show a target (Or other icon) at its destination tile.
• When I move a unit so that it reveals an an enemy unit from the fog of war, stop unit movement immediately and ping the newly revealed enemy unit on the minimap.
• Add a breakdown for upkeep costs from each unit so I can see exactly how much each is costing me. Make this information available on the build details as well. Could do a little fading popup of the resource cost from each unit at start/end of turn (Or whenever upkeep is charged)
• Ping units on the minimap when they are in combat. (Can be a different color ping from the enemy reveal ping)
• When a unit is selected, colour the available tiles it can move to (Green) and enemies it can reach to attack (Red) - This should help with accidentally sending units one tile further than they can move in one turn, which takes up their next turn immediately since it queues.
• Add a "Hold until healed" button that will leave the unit there until it is within a turn's amount of healing from full. So if it heals .2 per turn with max health of 1.0 and is at .3 health, it would not show up as idle until it had healed to .9 (It would leave the decision of whether to recover the last .1 to the player to do)
  • Clicking "Hold until healed" at .9 out of 1.0 in the previous example would assign the unit to wait just that one turn, dropping it out of the list of unassigned units.
• A little cost indicator should pop up when a unit triggers additional costs (Such as moving into water)
• Make mountains more difficult to move over by tanks and ATVs (Wheeled ground units) - diagonal movement onto them costs double (Tanks couldn't move diagonally onto a mountain at all since they only have 1 move) so they would want to go around. Provides a mobility benefit to troopers/mechs hiding in mountains. (This may be too unintuitive, but I'd like the added depth for city placement that it would provide since heavy armor moving against you would then be more limited, and it's a fairly simple rule)
• Watercraft shouldn't be constructable in a land locked city, or should be given ground based transport from there that moves them 1 tile per turn (Transportation would fade when they reached the ocean and would not come back after that).
• Add a way to bring a unit to a city and upgrade it with the newest tech for its type. Such as bringing troopers back and equipping them with newly researched body armor. (May already exist, but I didn't see it anywhere)
• Some benefit to multi-move units for attacking without using up all their moves, since attack ends their turn. I'm not sure what would fit well here but since it only takes 1 move to attack it seems uneven to consume their entire move pool for no benefit.

City Management

• Whenever a new unit becomes available add a stock version of it to the Production Options.
• Indicate how far along in production a city is (Relevant for switching to a faster building unit)
• Show a city's range of influence when the city is selected.
• Disable mouse scrolling at the edge of the screen if in city mode
• Escape exits city mode rather than space bar
• Add some form of protection to building with credits, I accidentally built a couple units by clicking their credit option when I didn't mean to. Possibly an "Undo last purchase" that would be available until I left the city screen, instead?
• Improve feedback on the city screen for when production slows due to mineral starvation.

Interface Management

• Improved notification when a tile has an army on it -- should be easily understood without having to click on that tile (Power is unreliable since damaged units could make it look like less are present)
• Mark the idle alert (Icon or different colour) when all remaining idle units have been viewed this turn.
• Verification that I want to end a turn when there's un-viewed units in the idle list (A notification that can be closed by hitting space a second time?)
• Allow clicking on the top bar to set research even when no research is currently set. Maybe have text there "No Research Set" to call attention to that area.
• Disable edge scrolling when Pandora's window doesn't have focus (I don't like moving my view when I'm not even watching the view). Related, option to disable audio when not in focus/minimized?
• Rename "Defend" for units to "Hold Position" since it doesn't give any kind of defense boost.
• Add a more clear icon for units in armies that have taken their turn vs ones that still have movement left.
• Add more information when considering a trade pact or research pact on what we believe our capabilities are vs theirs.
• Add ways to pay bribes to people to get them to leave you alone?
• Include the name of the research that just finished for all the reward screens notifying about it.
• Each turn wipe out any remaining notifications from the previous turn and scroll up the new batch, or a glow/shine on new ones. Something to call attention to them. (I've gotten so used to "Out of Minerals" that I actually forget I'm in that state and should do something about it because it's just an icon that's constantly there, for example)
• This one is a bit vague, but colour code numbers so that it's easily identifiable when units are damaged/incomplete/whatever and approximately how far along they are. Right now everything in the interface feels like it's just white or gray which leaves a lot of room for colours to make quick glances more informative.

[SephiRok]

Thanks, most of the suggestions echo with me. I'll let the updates speak for themselves. :-)

[Bianary]

More suggestions for more fun! (I hope other people make some suggestions, I shouldn't be the only one)

More city management

• Allow workers to be assigned to Morale. By default emphasis on Morale is "None" because it's basically slacking off -- workers assigned to Morale have no production or benefit to the city except to represent workers being given time off and thus boosting the city's morale.
• Allow high morale to automatically let the city defend itself from invaders. If the people are happy with their current leadership they'll actively resist change. Driving off an attack would heavily lower morale though (Nobody likes having to defend themselves when there's an army for that).

Making the world come alive!

• Upon landing: "Our colony ship placed us in the safest location it could find, away from major hazards. But we don't know exactly what's out there so be careful." -- all the alien structures proposed here should be X tiles minimum away from player start locations.
• New artifact items
  • Upon discovery, "We found an interesting alien artifact that we think could be used immediately for production.
  • Gives you a choice: You can either hand the item to researchers or use immediately to produce one unit.
  • The unit it would provide would be a research upgrade on a current unit you have, but from late in this era or the next era up -- so you could discover enhanced armor in this alien artifact that's just too advanced for you to decipher and reproduce, but you can make just enough sense of it that you can use the item itself to enhance a unit.
  • If given to researches, it could either provide immediate research progress or spend many turns researching it and unlock that one research point early for further production of it. (The research decision is up to how rigid you want to make the research system, and/or extra research from later in the era or possibly into the next era. Immediate research points obviously leave the research system more rigid.)
  • Ties all the eras and research together, later on as you advance there would be an "Oh!" moment when you realize you were seeing future tech that you now understand how to make.
• New alien base: Lair
  • New alien created by the lair: Queen.
  • A queen should be created every 10-20 turns and should move away from the lair a bit and then create a hive.
  • A new hive value should be added for even smaller hives that the Queen should initially be creating, to make it not worth a player's time to try to set up an alien harvest.
  • The queen should be escorted by a bug on its way, but should be fairly durable on its own.
  • The lair should also produce bugs at a standard rate, that doesn't interrupt queen production.
• New alien base: Corruptor
  • Rot from the corruptor spreads across the land: Each rotted tile rots one adjacent tile per turn (Nothing happens if all tiles around it are rotted already)
  • New unit type: Scavenger. Spawns from corrupters and moves only on rotted land.
  • Rotted land has 0 food 0 mineral available. To clear it a Destroy turn must be used (Same command as to blow up a farm or mine).
  • Destruction of the corrupter results in all rotted land connected to it stopping its spread but does not destroy the rot.
  • Interaction with other species: Bugs feed on the rot and so nearby hives or lairs keep the rot from spreading. When players (Or AIs) destroy the hives keeping the rot in check, then it starts to spread.
• New alien type: Gargantuan
  • Incredibly large and heavily armored.
  • So big it doesn't really care what's going on around it until other large vehicles move nearby, or it's assaulted.
  • Treated as machinery for biological targeted effects: the incinerator's -damage applies because its armor is just that heavy. It's still not actually a machine though.
  • Once enraged starts chasing and smashing the nearest targets, preferring to go after larger ones first.
  • Attacks (eats) bugs, queens, and scavengers if they come near. Tasty!

The goal of many of these alien types is to provide a threat that's big enough to get people to work together to fight them, but have them guaranteed far enough away that they won't be problems while people are just getting started (Unless someone goes out of their way to provoke one). As well, they just increase the diversity of alien life on the planet to try to make it seem more like a functioning ecosystem.

[Bianary]

Updated this post with some more ideas!

Unit Management

• When a Former is selected it should show resources for tiles the same as it does when a city is being viewed.
• "Move all in this army" would be a useful command. If used, all units moving should move so that the army stays assembled (Doesn't use all moves of faster units each turn as long as they're moving as part of the army)

Research Upgrades

• Guerrilla Warfare could grant a slow repair (Half normal field repair, or even less) even after fighting in mountains or forests.
• Advanced Aerial Tracking (I forget the exact name, the one that gets you flak) could also give a new building in your city: Anti-aircraft battery. Once per turn an invading airplane or drop pod gets destroyed, the second attempt that turn will succeed.
• Drop pods on their turn of landing should have 0/1 moves (Can't move right away) but +50% to 100% defenses as they use the remains of their pod for cover. However if they land on an enemy unit they should suffer -50% power instead because they're not given a chance to deploy to a good formation.