From: pld@soda.berkeley.edu (Paul DuBois)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Letter to Changeling (long)
Date: 26 Dec 1992 05:37:08 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu

Here's an excerpt of the letter I'm sending to Changeling.  Hope it helps
some of you.  Comment to news and to Changeling@applelink.apple.com.


Fatal Bugs

After closing a game, "close" is still enabled. When starting a new
game (with the old one already closed), it asks:
Do you want to save "" before closing?

All the other menus are active also, but trying to select anything from
them causes a lovely system error.

Moving a ship to another fleet consisting of one ship (call it Fleet 2), a
"transfer fleet" was created which was called "Fleet 6" in the fleets
dialog. Things were moving slowly, so I did a merge of Fleet 2 onto Fleet
6. When they merged, the fleet sound played twice, the screen updated
twice, and Pax "unexpectedly quit".

Being able to rename fleets is great, and since it's an undocumented
feature I guess I should expect that it's not quite stable. Still, you
might like to know that when the field is being edited, selecting "New
fleet" from the pop-up and then hitting return (i.e. trying to name the new
fleet before it has ships) causes a bus error.

As an interface issue, I think that clicking outside the field should stop
the edit, and that the text shouldn't jump up a few pixels when you start
to edit it.


Cosmetic Bugs

Strange business with the Navigator pop-up; it doesn't reliably work when
trying to move to the bottom of the map. When viewing the bottom section of
the map,

When selecting zoom out, the Universe window resizes itself to that it is
larger (taller) than the screen; this is on a 13" monitor. Zooming (both
with command-+/- and with the zoom box) produces very strange results for
tiny maps -- on a two-star game I tried to zoom out to see the entire map,
but couldn't resize the window so it was large enough. In addition, the
scroll bars were taken away (because the game thought I was looking at the
whole map), so I was stuck with a 2-inch square box of empty space. Hitting
the zoom box brought back scroll bars, but still gave me a window about 1/4
the size of what was needed. The white area of the little message window
at the top was also stretched past the right edge of the Universe window.

The Global Summary in the Economic Report window doesn't tally 
correctly.  In fact, the planet summaries don't seem to add up either; I 
had a planet which was listed as having 300+ factories.

Economic Report:Summary -- When selecting a different planet (or global),
the report doesn't change until the information is updated (i.e. a tick
passes; never, if the game is paused) or the window gets an update event.
Actually, this happens in a lot of the different report windows.

Fleets are hard to click in galaxy view; had to select above and to the
right of where the dot was. This was after zooming out a few times, just
until the small set of icons was used. The problem seems to be the strange
mapping between locations in the different zoom levels. A ship sent right
to the center of a star icon in the zoomed-out view would be headed way off
to the left and above the star in full zoom.

When a new game is started, Game:Normal isn't checked; the check mark stays
where it was for the previous game. However, the actual speed setting does
go to normal.

The lines on the small graph in the Ship Design dialog don't seem to
correspond with the labeling; they don't start at the bottom, and there are
only 8 of them for a graph that displays 0 to 10.

In Galaxy view, the arrows don't un-highlight after clicking them.


Suggestions (generally least to most trivial)

When world-specific problems occur (such as overpopulation), the world name
should be included in the message. It's tedious to have to look through a
lot of worlds for a problem, especially when "overpopulated" is vaguely
defined in the manual. It says over 20K people in a region causes income to
decline, but I got the message when all my colonies and home worlds were
under 20K.  How about a "goto" button or option?

Make the window re-drawing "intelligent" -- it takes a while for the whole
thing to redraw, and a lot of the game is popping back and forth between
different windows.

I think the Minister of War should do more than just tell me that I've been
attacked, and that I should check for damage. S/he should at least tell me
where, and could even prepare a report saying what was destroyed, how many
were killed, etc. That's what Ministers are for, right?

The exploration advisor should keep lists of the information he has; a list
of planets/moons in explored systems and the resources available from them
would be valuable, and would save a lot of time searching for "the right
planet". Furthermore, a list of fleets and their current position,
contents, destination, ETA, etc. would be a lot more helpful than the
current bunch of dots-with-unreadable-overwritten-text in a square.

Tactical combat's really slow & sluggish -- if you're going to be doing 
any optimizing, start here!

In beginner level games, no mention is made when tech level increases and
more ships become available (just a ding which isn't explained).  How 
about popping up a message?

Give a warning when building a transport uses up all the people in a colony
or planet.  I'm pretty sure this is what happened to me; I built a large
transport and soon after noticed that the planet had 0 population.

Bring back the Navigator popping up from the Galaxy view.

The "select galactic sector" prompt and the % built in the Build ship 
dialog really flicker.  Can it update only when the mouse moves?

The Build At list can get long and cumbersome -- how about filtering out
the planets/moons which don't have shipyards?

Show where ships are being built in the Build List.

Clicking on a view button in the palette shouldn't cancel a Send; sometimes
it's the easiest way to bring up a window. There should be some standard
way to cancel a send, like escape and/or command-.

The interface for sending fleets should use the same semantics as the 
interface for selecting planets and moons; specifically, one should be 
able to click on planet letters or moon numbers to select a destination.

There should be a "send" command somewhere in the Fleet Control window, 
for those hard-to-select fleets (behind a planet, or "missing" from a 
window, etc).

Make the Review buttons in the Science Report window should act like the
Review button in the Tech Design window -- i.e., showing the tech level and
type of the design along with the name.

If the moon of a planet is colonized, can you put a crown under the 
planet in the Star window?


Manual

The manual doesn't explain which line line is Strength and which is
Accuracy (for those who start out playing at beginner level and hence
haven't yet tried designing weapons). This makes examining pre-set weapon
tech confusing.

The information on advisors is scattered throughout the manual; it took
some careful reading to find out that their ability actually affected
anything. It's still unclear whether the abilities affect all the advisors'
performances (in terms of the game, anyway). I think this information could
use some clarification and a section of its own.

The manual says nothing about winning or losing, or the lack of such
features. What are victory points? Is there any way to compare them, other
than knowing what place you come in? This could use clarification also.

What does colony spending do?  The manual says it speeds up progress 
towards becoming a homeworld, but a homeworld is just a colony with 
a port.

What do yellow boxes and red circles on the galaxy map mean?  
Something to do with ship detection, but the manual doesn't say 
anything about it.


Thanks for listening!

-- 
Paul DuBois				       Permanent: pld@soda.berkeley.edu
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