Due to this becoming a stickied post I will change the intro. 

This is a place to collect ideas and issues with the current user interface and propose improvements.  A lot of the initial ideas were mine, but Ive since trolled the boards and collected and compiled ideas of others.  So if you see your idea here, please dont think Im stealing it - Im just compliing this to make it easier for Emi, and hopefully your idea will have a better chance to be implemented.

Sometimes the interface is ok, but it has to handle a lot of different things.  For example, items.  Each item behaves in a slightly different way, but are all operated from the same interface - this means that some items are very difficult to use effectively - especially mining and warp items.  So if you see someplace where the inteface is struggling due to complexity - post that also.

A great example of a very successful change to the interface was the Fleet Formation idea - where selected fleets now remain selected.

The list is basically organised as follows;

# Title or subject, Proposal, Current Issues.

Current list.

1. Bases.  An UNLOAD ALL button.  Typing in and refreshing for each ore and credits is painful.

2. Exclusive Check Boxes.  Remove exclusive check boxes where possible and replace with fields for "number of runs".  Theres a number of places where these are used and you really want to do multiple things at once.  Current list; Sell ship designs, delete ships, install modules on bases.  You have to do it one at a time, time consuming and messy.

3. Warp items.  Change the warp items to a number of turns of free travel.  One way to convert them would be to assume their current percentage was applied to a 50 turn jump - so a 10% item would give 10%x50turns = 5 turns free travel.  When you activate the items, the turns go into a "Warp Travel Fuel" pool of turns.  You can then travel for free while you still have "fuel".  For items less than 2% they would have to be rounded up to 2%, yielding one turn of free travel.  This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface.  This would eliminate a lot of the messing around with, and general uselessness of warp items.

4. Mining Time.  Make a similar change as with Warp Items.  Have a "Mining Turns" pool.  Activate your mining items to add to the pool, then mine away to your hearts content until your pool is empty.  Also - instead of putting in the target amount of ore to mine, put in the number of turns you want to spend, players then dont have to calculate it themselves.  This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface.  At the moment you have to recalculate how much you want to mine wih every item you activate - you have to keep track of whats activated, and iterate the mining process over and over.  Its a lot of database queries, where one would do, and a great deal of tedium.

5. Activating and selling items.  Extend the list to a lot more items, maybe 100.  Make sure the sort button still works when you change pages.  Also if you type in 5 runs, but only have 4 items then just activate or sell all those items instead of reporting an error.  Have an activate all button - that selects all items even ones on the next page, and then an option to sort them into ascending or descending order.  This interface is very average in all respects, its tedious, and difficult to use.

6. Secret Base.  Withdraw all and deposit all button.  Just a nice thing to have, makes it easy.

7. Pages with Lists.  List pages are invariably too short, extend them to 50 to 100 items on a page.  This includes resupply for ships, upgrades, designs, buying marines, view/edit ships and so on.  In some cases the options and controls could be moved to the top of the page to prevent uneccessary scrolling.  Its a lot easier and faster to scroll down then it is to click to the next page.    Sometimes you want to select several things at the same time - and they are on different pages, so you have to update or buy, then change pages and do it again. 

8. Filtering missions.  Allow players to type in an upper and lower limit for encrypt level.  Being able to filter by level and by distance woud be excellent, and being able to sort by level and also by distance would also be very useful.  The filter is extremely limited,  its capped at 150+ which makes it fairly useless after a short time playing, and you cant set it up the way you want - also you cant filter by distance.

9. Clicking on missions.  Please add mouse-over details on items.  To reduce clicking.

10. Alliance leader stickies, or separate board.  Allow alliance leader to sticky a post in their boards, or give them a separate posting area.  Sometimes people yabber too much and critical info is lost.

11. Outstanding Counters table.  Put a table on the attack signatures page showing who has an outstanding counter on the player, and the remaining time for that counter.  Its hard for some people to remember apparently ..

12. Add Upgrades when buying a Fleet.  It would be nice if you can just select all the upgrades you wish and build the ship from the buy screen.  At the moment when you buy a fleet your prompted to select a power core only.    THis is just a nice thing to have, its simpler this way.

13. Commander Abilities and Mothership modules displays.  Show the maximum bonus available for each modifier, for example if you have +5% attack, then show the cap or limit as well.  Eg +5% (80% cap).  Show commander XP needed for the next level.  At the moment you have to do a subtraction to figure how much XP you need for the next level.  Its nice to know the caps for things, and displayed XP required makes it easier.

14. Display Raw ship values.  Show the raw values for a ship in the view/edit page along with the adjusted values.  Its sometimes difficult to work out what your base ship design is, and is very useful if you want to modify it to know exactly what your raw scores are.  Also a displayed fleet power in the view/edit screen would be useful.  THis is nice to have.

Theres a lot of really clunky controls in all the interfaces - they really do detract from the game - having to iterate things when you know exactly what you want from the start is annoying - lots of places that happens.

Can people post any other things that they find annoying with the interfaces.

EDITED** Integrated some posts.  Updated the mining turns idea. Integrated Kens idea's.

Sounds good, hopefully produce some nice PvP battles- though might be a bit scary first run through - the combat sounds like it has the potential to be fairly nasty.

Also I dont know what you mean by Full System scan/Full Assault room .. is there something Ive been missing all this time, or does it not exist on SOWARS?

Sorry FTP - that one slipped by me.  I added it to the poll as option 3, I didnt reset the poll though.

As for small swarmers - well theres a couple of different types.  Kami swarmers, and conventional defensive swarmers.

As with all mathematical problems, theres an infinite number of ways to get the wong answer, and only one correct solution.

If your ships are large ships, then a swarm of 8,000 ships or more will net you the maximum swarm multiplyers for large ships.  Regardless of the size of your ships, you will get a swarm bonus.

With very large ships the maximum swarm multiplyers are; Attack and Defense x 2.429, Hit Points x 11.000, these apply if you have a fleet of 8,000 or more ships.

These style of swarmers are extremely cost effective from an operating point of view if they have high absorb values.  There are two problems with them though. 

One; attack power is very low compared to the small swarmers (small swarmers exploit the constant value in the weapon attack power equation). 

Two; the capital cost for the fleet is massive.  They are most cost efficient when they achieve 80% absorb - a properly optimised ship needs to be around 250 billion credits cost to achieve 80% absorb (with no CP or Module bonuses).

I like big swarmers - but I think it will be a long time before I can afford a fleet of them.

It just being discussed.  Then Emi can evaluate it.

I should have added - if you like the idea of a change but have an alternative idea, please post it.  I will endeavor to capture it in the poll.

However, if you want a change - please also vote for an option that most closely represents your idea.

Nebula is a critical mechanic, however in its current form it can be exploited to allow a player to be immune to attack by remaining permanently in nebula.  I dont feel this is in the spirit of SO WARS and would like to see a change implemented.

The first three options work like this;

If you get neb'd, then you get a debuff that lasts for the stated recovery time.  If you get neb'd before your recovery time has elapsed then your next nebula is shorter by the stated 6 hours.

The recovery time can be fixed, or accumulative.  Fixed is fairly self explainatory - but the accumulative means that your recovery time is 6hrs the first time yur neb'd and dont recover - but if you get neb'd again without recovering, then the recovery time is increased by 6 hours to 12 hrs and so on.

For the first 3 options there is also a question of whether you will allow neb times to be reduced to zero - I suggest a 6 hour minumum.

I think the "pool" of nebula hours is fairly self explainatory also - basically if you get neb'd for 24 hours, then your pool is down to 24 hrs, but during that time your pool will regenerate some hours - three different options.  With 18 hr regeneration you can effectively stay in neb for a maximum of 4 days straight before your pool gets lower than 24 hrs - then your neb's will be 18hrs maximum for the following days. 

For 12 hour regen you can stay in neb for 3 days straight at most, and if youve run out your pool then you can stay in neb a max of 12 hrs in 24.  For 6 hrs of regen you can stay in neb a max of 2 days straight, then your next neb is 12 hrs, then your down to 6hrs of neb per 24 hour period.

I suggest that if these pools are below 6 hours and the player is hit, that the neb time is still 6 hours.

This poll is mainly for SOWARS - if you play only SOMAIN and wish to vote you may of course, but please post a message with what you voted for and that you play only SO MAIN.

THis poll has developed from quite a lot of discussion between a few players, and while I did contribute, these ideas are not solely mine.  Tzarkoth, FTP, Jessie and others contributed to the development of these ideas.

I think these ideas are developed enough to poll them.

Maybe this can be for SOWARS only if self neb is really considered a reasonable "strategy" on SO MAIN.  Self neb is certainly against the spirit of the wars server.

Ill post a poll - let me know if theres an option I missed.

Tz - Im not sure what your talking about here, I think your just "spanking the monkey" and I personally will have none of it!

This thread sure doesnt belong here - youve already been WARNED once - are you a slow learner - will it take a firing squad for you to get the message!?

The principal looks good.

Id advocate a 12 hour recovery time, and a 6 hour penalty though. 

So if you get nebbed within 12 hours of previously being nebbed, then the next neb is 6 hrs shorter, so down to 18 hours after having a 24 hr neb.  My reasoning for the increase in recovery time is that players can stay logged in for 6 hours, and hitting a moving target is more or less impossible (unless you have a counter - and these guys arent giving out counters).  Its extremely unlikely anyone will stay logged in for 12 hours just to avoid being attacked.

To simplify the mechanics, and make it obvious, you could split the nebula buff into 2 parts.  The first part is the nebula buff itself which means you cant be attacked and normally persists for 24 hours.  Then add another debuff that only that player can see, call it something like "Vestigal Nebula Aura" or something, this debuff always persists for 12 hours.  If you have that debuff and get nebb'd then the nebula is 6 hours shorter than the last time you were neb'd.

This seems like a fairly clean solution.

Yeah - Im not sure you understood me there FTP, if your target is at a base then his base bonus should count of course.  Its just that the attackers shouldnt be able to get a base bonus when making a Long Range Attack.  I really think this is probably the best idea for reducing turns costs for INTEL attacks.

The Free Base Warp is still a good idea though - but I think maybe its something that needs to be introduced at the start of a new round, might be a bit of dispute trying to have it implemented onto the current server.

Yeah - I like the UNLOAD ALL BASES idea - but its kind of a bit too good

Id settle for an UNLOAD ALL at the current base location.

If you just made it the first mission you do cancels neb it wont really solve it - most attacks occur when the defending player is offline - so while they are online and active they are fairly safe, then they can log and neb again.

I think of all the solutions proposed so far that preventing people from doing missions during neb, and immediately after neb is probably the best.

Getting neb'd means youve been hit hard (or it should), so a slight additional penalty is within reason.  If you can just click a button to remove neb, then you can do missions a bit later or the next day - if they cant do missions they arent likely to be moving around, even if they stay logged in - so it opens the opportunity to attack.

The right amount of time is a consideration - I suggested 6hrs, I still think thats fine - much shorter and the window to attack is too small.

In another thread The Broken suggested an UNLOAD ALL BASES button.  Id like one of those please ..