A bunch of small improvements and suggestions for .800

Here's just a bunch of small things which could improve the functionality and polish of the game.

-One should be able to open and close any screen at will by pressing the button. E.g. Press I for inventory button and it comes up. Press I again, and it goes away. Also, Press I to make the inventory come up. Press C to shut down the inventory screen and load the character screen. This just makes things more streamlined.

-Autoequip food. If you run out of food, and the autoequip toggle is ticked in the inventory screen, You automatically equip some food of the same type of that which you just run out of. e.g. If you finish eating dried meat, and you have dried meat and smoked fish in your inventory, it automatically equips the dried meat. If you only have smoked fish in your inventory, it just produces a prompt that you've run out of food.

-Ctrl click more funcional. You can ctrl+click to transfer things from your inventory to a shop. But what if this is expanded?
If you have an empty weapon slot, Ctrl+click on a weapon automatically puts it in that slot. Likewise for Armour, head, glove and boot, horse and food.
In character screen, ctrl+clicking puts all your stat points/ skill points/ proficiency points into the one thing that you click, providing you are able to do it. e.g. you have 12 str and 2 ironflesh and 3 skill points. Ctrl clicking on ironflesh will fill the skill up to 4, because it's the maximum it can go. 2 points are used and one is spared. Likewise, if you have 80 proficiency points to spend, you could put them all into throwing with just one ctrl+click, provided your weapon master is high enough to allow it.
In the party screen, Ctrl clicking on a type of troop will transfer all of that troop over between you and whoever you're dealing with. If you have 70 swadian sharpshooters in your castle, you can ctrl+click to transfer them all over to you. Also, If your troops need upgrading, you ctrl+click on the upgrade button, and all troops that are available for upgrade are upgraded.

-Tournament masters could do with a bit of originality and info. First, before a fight but after you accept a new fight, he tells you what type of fight it's going to be (2vs2, 3vs3vs3, etc), and which team you'll be on.
Also, if there is any individuality between what types of match different arenas hold, The Tournament master could tell you about them. (e.g. "Welcome to te Reyvadin arena, famous for its battles involving three teams")

-The training dummies could do with some pain and death sounds (just sounds of being hit and falling over)

-Riderless horse AI should be tweaked so they don't go galloping through your own troops, bowling them over. Instead, they try to avoid running into other soldiers. Trick is, how to do this and still let soldiers be able to capture and mount horses.

-When you are 'captured' by an enemy after getting defeated by them, instead of having the viewpoint stay at where your party was last, perhaps it could follow the party that defeated you. You escape either by waiting out the full time in captivity, or, if the party is attacked or defeated before that time is up, you then escape.

-A dedicated button for taking screenshots.

-The ground painting and ground raising/lowering tools in the editor could use a bit of improvement. For one, there should be a visual indication on the size of the brush you're using, and perhaps the vertices that are in range to be affected should be highlighted.

These are all subtle but very handy changes. They shouldn't take too much time, nevertheless I'd be content too if they'd be included in the next version.

Thanks.

A couple of additions, suggested by someone else, though i don't remember their name.

-Mousewheel functionality in menus, you should be able to use the mousewheel to scroll down your inventory.

-Pressing esc exits from any in-game menus that are up.

Some very good ideas Ingolifs, I particularly like the one about individual arenas -

"Also, if there is any individuality between what types of match different arenas hold, The Tournament master could tell you about them. (e.g. "Welcome to te Reyvadin arena, famous for its battles involving three teams")"

edit: made it easier to read

Thanks. Unlike the more grandiose ideas i tend to post, i feel these ones are quite simple, and also quite necessary.

My name is fisheye, I'm a rubbish poster, and the only thing I have to say in this post is, I like these suggestions!

Lol, you remember that?
heh, i still feel a bit guilty for calling you that. If i remember correctly, it was just one rubbish post on your behalf.

Mods, what are the rules on getting things sent to the King's court? I think these suggestions are quite important, and should be placed in a more visible area.

Another one courtesy of Eogan.

-When commanding different troops (y'know, by saying Archers! Hear me!), there should be a seperate button for horse archers.
Horse archers behave in a very different way to normal cavalry, so I think this makes sense.

I'd like to see more hints added: the community could certainly make several times more than the eight that exist now.  I particularly think hints like 'you can give orders during battle' need work.

"Don't take on an army of dark knights at level 2"

Ingolifs said:

Mods, what are the rules on getting things sent to the King's court?

Click to expand...

Our ever fluctuating and always correct opinions, and I agree with you

Sounds good, I particularly like the customized tournament masters.

An improvement could be different arena enemy difficulties depending on the city. For example, in Zendar you get to fight captured river pirates, in Khudan you fight fearsome Vaegir snow-warriors, in Tulga you fight vicious Khergit horse masters. Champions in each city could also be different, so Zendar could have Bob the Scurvy Pirate and in Rivacheg you could have Eric the Undefeated.

I have some additional suggestions:

1. A back button in the character generation screen.  Some mods have dozens of possible character "classes" and you can't browse through them all to see their stats without either doing the whole process and quit to main menu, or just pressing ALT+F4 and restarting the game.

2. A decrement button during creation so you do not have to press reset and start over if you make one simple mistake.

3. Option for triple buffering in the launcher menu.  I prefer to play with vsync on because of image tearing with vsync off, but without triple buffering you lose a lot of performance because of the framerate "cutoffs" so I am forced to turn off vsync and attempt to tolerate the distorted lines crawling up and down my screen due to lack of vsync.  I am also aware of DXTweaker for forcing triple buffering in D3D but it does not work with 0.800 for me.  Besides, it is better triple buffering be supported natively in the program since using an external program adds some overhead, and if it could be forced by a 3rd party program then surely it should be relatively trivial to implement it natively (I really don't know).  Consequently, an option for vsync in the launcher would be appropriate as well.

4. This one is more a bug report but on the subject of vsync, it breaks when you alt+tab out of the game and you must restart the game to get vsync back on.

5. An option to set the level of anisotropic filtering (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x) in the launcher, since right now the option is boolean (on or off).  It seems to default to 2x or something on the low-end since it looks much better when I force it in the drivers to 8x.

EDIT: #3 appears to have been implemented since .807.  #4 was just a one off thing that I don't get anymore.

1. A back button in the character generation screen.  Some mods have dozens of possible character "classes" and you can't browse through them all to see their stats without either doing the whole process and quit to main menu, or just pressing ALT+F4 and restarting the game.

Click to expand...

This is actually moddable (or was, in 0.751, and therefore presumably remains so).  Write a really smooth mini-mod which implements this in the character creation menus, don't add anything else, and I betcha it'll end up in version 1.0.  Basically all you need to do is to log the choices at each step instead of adjusting stats immediately, then at the end of character creation go over the logged choices and adjust all the stats then.  Then a 'back' menu option would be peanuts to add to each menu.  For all I know there are mods which do this now (though I haven't seen it).

It can still be done very easily, just put your desired character classes in your selection menu and a "jump_to_menu[(mno_char_whatever_description)]" for each option, and then in that menu, put your desired description text, a "return" option, with a "jump_to_menu[(mno_choose_char_class])" and a "choose this character type" which would select those character class stats and jump to the face generator screen. This feature will be in 1066 1.1.0 and Brother against Brother 0.80.

You can't go back an operation but you can reverse or undo fairly easily. It would be nice to see this in Native as well, especially since it's so easy to implement.

cross post with the Band of Warriors (Extra NPC) mod:

Hardcode:  I really love this mod!  I wish it were added in as a standard in all other mods AND native!  Having these NPC characters, including Marnid and Borcha, start out at low levels where you can add in their skills and equipment has really added to my enjoyment of the game.  Thanks, I really appreciate it. 

Here's the suggestion:  I just wish Armagan would add in a function where it was easier to switch between heroes at the character/inventory screen.  Like a few buttons at the top:  you press it and it moves to the next character or toggles character/inventory screens.  Looking through all of your characters to distribute equipment/level up/check stats can become really tedious, especially when you get a good armor and you look through them all to see that it doesn't suit them or they already have same/better. 

I'd like to see total menu access. In the towns you can't open your inventory unless you're buying or selling something. And some other restrictions I don't remember.

Here is another suggestion/request.  I'd like to see some higher levels available for the troop tree.  I don't think it would be that difficult.  As it is now it is fairly simple to get your units leveled up to maximum.  I'm struggling to reach level twelve yet the peasant I brought in two levels ago has gone from level 1 to a high level knight unit -- BOOM end of development.

I would like to see at least another three levels (five would be even better) of development for each unit.  For example:
Knight -> Veteran Knight -> Elite Knight -> Hero Knight
Just pick a level scheme and stick with it for all the different unit types:
Swadian Sharpshooter -> Veteran Swadian Sharpshooter -> Elite Swadian Sharpshooter -> Hero Swadian Sharpshooter

For five levels a suggested course might be:
Veteran -> Elite -> Commander -> Hero -> Legendary

Each of these would take a large amount of experience to move up to.  The final shift to Hero Knight (orLegendary)  would take a ton of experience and probably be quite rare.  As to what you get for each new grade, it wouldn't have to be a tremendous amount.  It could be just another level or two with some small tweaks to upgrade equipment.  The final switch over to the last possible grade might wind up with the unit with the very best possible equipment for his unit type perhaps even including things like a Spirited Charger, etc:  in other words like what you build up your PC to be.

Right now, once I get my units to their top level I take them and drop them off at the castle because there is no more room to grow and I feel like I'm throwing experience down the toilet.  One of the joys of RPGs is building up your character to be better and better.  By allowing your character to command armies, and especially since the armies are pretty small, they become a part of your character.

Making it too easy to get to the top level takes away some of the fun as you remove part of what there is to shoot for.  This is why you have armor that goes up just that little bit more and costs a ton of money so that a full set of equipment for a character costs of 100,000 gold.  If you have NPC's then the bill is just massive but it's great because you don't max out so quickly.

There should be wandering groups of Mercenaries (1 footman, 3 veterans, and 2 horsemen for example) who you could hire (as a group). They would also join other NPC groups.