SpielByWeb

[frarobertooo]

Hi there!
First of all, I want to thank Mikael for this gaming site, very well done.
This is my first play with Tikal but I have found the interface unintuitive, or better, slow. Here are some suggestions:
* putting down an explorator only clicking in a camp
* grabbing treasure only clicking in the center of the exagon
* after selecting an explorator, move the pawn for several exagon continuously clicking step by step.
* after grabbing a treasure, asking if you want to look at it now or after. So you can redo the entire turn if not... useful for studing the possibilities tree.

Thank you,
frarobertooo

[HappyProle]

Hi there. I was one of the developers of Tikal here on SBW. We tried to strike a balance between the interface being easy to use and it being quick. We put the game through some significant beta testing to try to address user interface issues. Having said that, thanks for the suggestions and here are my responses:

[frarobertooo]

Thank you for the fast reply
I know, it's a kinda hard to made a simple implementation if you have so many choices during the game.

[Wernazuma]

[frarobertooo]

[quote="Wernazuma"]

[TheCat]

Funny, I came here to post nearly the same feature request.

1) Click on base camp default to placing a single regular explorer in the camp. If no workers are available, display a popup warning.

2) Click on treasure to dig the treasure. If a valid worker isn't present in the hex, display a popup warning.

3) Click on temple to dig new level. If a valid worker isn't present in the hex, display a popup warning.

4) Click on worker, display all legal destination hexes, click on destination hex. This is implemented in other systems, such as StreetSoccer on LittleGolem. I suspect someone would be willing to share their pathfinding code with you. Look to wargaming programmers if you need hex-map pathfinding examples.

5) During scoring rounds, indicate current score and anticipated score (if end-turn was clicked now, what would the score be?).

[HappyProle]

Every explorer is unique (we had to do this to respect the rules), but that's not the problem I was trying to illustrate. What I was trying to point out is that you would have to highlight each of the treasure tiles as being clickable (with a little icon or something) regardless of what the player was currently doing. It's really a question of having lots of little icons or buttons on each individual hex or having an action bar. The same goes for bringing leaders/workers to camp. At one point we were going to have almost everything board-clickable; but we went with the little action bar and player supply instead, since it seemed a little cleaner and simpler to show what actions were currently possible.

As for moving workers, we were intrigued by the problem of calculating the least-costly-path for moving workers multiple hexes in one action.. but ultimately we thought that these calculations shouldn't be made for a player. There's a philosophical question here of how much you alter a game to fit the medium, and how much "help" you provide the player. In this case we thought it was best to stick closer to the boardgame where it's up to the player to find the most efficient use of their APs.

[HappyProle]

[Wernazuma]

[quote="frarobertooo"]

[TheCat]