With that said, I started playing it again recently, and I've noticed some things that have bugged me. So here are some humble opinions on things that would improve the experience.
Transport via ships. And maybe for all forms of transportation but I really only bother with ship transport. I have a couple of gripes here. It seems like it is fairly cumbersome to get troops from one island to the next.
What I normally have to do is get all my troops in a line stretching from the port. Then I take a transport ship out of reserve, and immediately select a stack,(sometimes full, sometimes not depending on the weight and cargo capacity), giving it an advanced order click "load into" scroll down to find the transport ship, and then execute the order. I unpause an wait for it to load. I then move the ship away, pause, and move my whole line forward a hex, and do this again.
This is all VERY tedious. The first problem is that the option to load troops takes a ton of clicks to do... and usually I have my ground trooops, anti-air, artillery, tanks, supply.. etc... With any sort of massive invasion, this can take literally an hour of real game time just loading things onto boats. This seems unseemingly complicated. Ideally, I'd like to just select say all my infantry, click on a port, and tell them to load into any avaialable transport ships in reserve.
Now a couple of things to note about this. It wouldn't be *as* difficult, if the minute my transport ships came out of reserve they started accumulaating supplies. Often I will start my loading orders, and by the time they load up, the ship is full of supplies. So two possible tweaks would be either treat troop transport and supply shipd deifferently, IE.. troopships would have their own contingent of supplies, and by default would nver take any additional as cargo space. OR, have an option that you can set to tell teh ships not to pick up supplies. The second option is less elegant, as it would involve having people select every unit and going in manually to click it off. Having two seperate unit's would help.
I also know there is a command to do sea transport... But this fails in a couple of ways. Often it trys to load up troops on the incorrect ships(or the ones I have set for another purpose), or going back to my main point, it wil lpick ships that have a full cargo of supllies, and so my troops just sit there on the port, eating burgers and drinking beer.
But basically, my point is, intuitively, I should be able to just say you guys... all 100 units... go to the port and load up in the 7 ships I have waitng for you. And it shouldn't take me several hundred clicks to do so. And since there are only 7 units allowed there, it's hard to do sometimes.. which why it would be nice to have an option to have troops load into reserve ships.. and have them come oout of reserve as they get loaded...
Filters: I know there are a LOT of filters in the game. Supply filters, terrain filters, defense filters.. etc.. But I don't even know what half of them do, and didn't even know half of them existed until reading about some of them somewhere. And having to click Shift-F5 is just annoying. Maybe if you had a tab attached to the mail button somewhere, or, on the left panel that had a little button for ever filter. That way you could easily have a place to see all of them in one place. Additionally, it would probably get people to use them more.. often I forget about a filter because I just plain forget that it exsts. Having some mouse over text for each filter that gave a brief description of what it did would help also. What I'm thinking of is the old original sim city. You basically had a window with all these filters/overlays that you could select and it would apply the filter. It would just be more user friendly than having to memorize all the keys.
Unit commands: I made a post about this already in the 2010 forums. But for artillery, it would be nice if when you told it to attacka specific hex/unit, that it doesn't try to move adjacent to that hex/unit. I don't want my artillery to get into firing distance of another unit, I just want it to switch fire to the target of my choice. The fact that I cannot do this is somewhat baffling. If I wanted it to move to the hex first, I would have issued a move command. And this isn't a case of the unit not being in range... my artillery just wants to get "closer"
Ministers: While I understand the intent, I don't ever seem to see any effects of this. Maybe because the changes are lost in the scope of things, I don't know, but as far as switching out ministers, I never change the default ones. I don't know what all their attibutes affect. I mean I can *guess* as what I will need for what position, but theres no way for me to actually tell. I think this could be revamped a lot, by having your ministers have a larger affect on the game. Sorta like hearts of iron. Give them attributes such as 5% increase to GDP, or 10% increase in conscription rate, but 2% decrease in morale. That way you could pick and choose the qualities you wnat for your game style, but at the same time, each minister would have some downsides to them as well.
Maybe make it so that only certain ministers wil lbecome available if your economy is at such and such state. Or say that brilliant scientist only becomes available once you reach a certain tech level becuase he's only interested in nations that are commited to research. You get the idea.. I hope anwyay. I'd would be nice if these had a more overt effect on gameplay. I mean, again, maybe they do have a large effect, and I jsut don't see it and I've been hobbleing myself all this time by not switching them out.
Economy: I'm sure this has been brougth up before as well, but if not... I love the way you can get your hands into the economy. Could it use some tweaks sure.. but I just adore the micro level in which you can make changes.. At the same time, I'd also apprecaite an "oh shite" button. Sometimes, my economy just tailspins on me, and I just can't for the life of me figure it out. Like my inflation will just rise and rise and rise, and my minister priority will be set to fight inflation with no success. I know that I've done something wrong at this point... but I won't be able to figure it out. I'll raise taxes... I'll only produce to capactiy.. you name it. .but it will still rise. At some points my onoly option is to virtually restart the scenario because I can't find a save game that I am sure I hadn't already made the mistake.
To me this is highly frustrating. I mean, honestly it's not like I'm making drastic changes to the economy. And generally I jsut let it run itself. And to have to reload and replay some DAYS worth of gameplay is just disheartening. Sometimes I will just stop playing that scenario altogether because I get so frustrated. So like I said.. to the casual gamer side of me.. I wish there were just a way to say ok.. I want to get to 4% inflation.. tell me what I need to do to get there... and I start to do soemthing that's counter-productive to this goal.. .maybe have the game tell me so. I think this will help the game be more user-friendly to the people that don't really want to micro-manage to that level.
Anyway, these are just a few thoughts to maybe keep in mind. And if I've missed something.. like I've gavea suggestion that's already been taken care of, and I just don't know about it, pelase excuse me
Anyway, GREAT game, and I can't wait for this sequel.
![[_]B](./images/smilies/beta.gif "[_]B"){kind=small}
opens that you are on the list so you can provide more feedback. (it's not open yet in case anyone misreads this)