civplayer33
King
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2017
- Messages
- 965
As we move toward VP Gold the focus shifts more toward UI and UX (and rightly so). Promotions are, IMO one of the areas that are still too obscure, certainly for the newcomer, but perhaps even for the experienced player.
The tutorial system may help somewhat in this regard, but ultimately the player needs to be able to see what promotions there are and how they are unlocked (and in what order), so he can plan ahead accordingly. It is of little use to see that the newly promoted unit can choose between "Shock" and "Drill" if the player has no way to find out what comes after. Having this kind of ability tree is pretty standard for most games and while we can certainly blame Firaxis for not implementing a decent Promotion Tree in their game, VP has actually made this problem worse to some extent by making the promotions more numerous, the progression more complex and the abilities more varied (which is great, obviously).
There is, of course, the Promotion Tree mod, but unfortunately it has some bugs, at least when used with VP (Helicopters don't seem to work with it and some other late game units don't display their full promotion tree), and Enginseer has stated in the tutorial thread that mods will not be advertised with the tutorial system, which means new players may not find out about the Promotion Tree mod for a long time, if ever.
That leaves two ways for players (especially new players) to study the promotion trees: either by noting down the progression manually and thus effectively creating their own promotion trees on paper or in some file (since I think the system is too complicated to actually memorize it perfectly, if playing the game in a non-obsessive way, at least) or using the civilopedia.
The first possibility is low tech and just shows how there really should be a promotion tree in the game and the second has some issues; this is where I want to propose an improvement.
Feature Request: Add a new field to the civilopedia entries for each promotion that unlocks (an)other promotion(s) so the player can explore the promotion progression that way.
Currently only the required promotions are shown for each relevant entry, which means the player has to "work backwards" to explore the progression, which is really not a viable way to do that. By displaying an additional field to the "Required Promotions" field, called "Leads to" / "Unlocks" or something like that, the player has an easy way to explore the possibilities of each promotion line.
I believe that this addition would be significantly simpler to implement than fixing the Promotion Tree mod (though the latter would certainly be preferable, because that mod is awesome, but the author has been inactive for some time now, unfortunately).
The tutorial system may help somewhat in this regard, but ultimately the player needs to be able to see what promotions there are and how they are unlocked (and in what order), so he can plan ahead accordingly. It is of little use to see that the newly promoted unit can choose between "Shock" and "Drill" if the player has no way to find out what comes after. Having this kind of ability tree is pretty standard for most games and while we can certainly blame Firaxis for not implementing a decent Promotion Tree in their game, VP has actually made this problem worse to some extent by making the promotions more numerous, the progression more complex and the abilities more varied (which is great, obviously).
There is, of course, the Promotion Tree mod, but unfortunately it has some bugs, at least when used with VP (Helicopters don't seem to work with it and some other late game units don't display their full promotion tree), and Enginseer has stated in the tutorial thread that mods will not be advertised with the tutorial system, which means new players may not find out about the Promotion Tree mod for a long time, if ever.
That leaves two ways for players (especially new players) to study the promotion trees: either by noting down the progression manually and thus effectively creating their own promotion trees on paper or in some file (since I think the system is too complicated to actually memorize it perfectly, if playing the game in a non-obsessive way, at least) or using the civilopedia.
The first possibility is low tech and just shows how there really should be a promotion tree in the game and the second has some issues; this is where I want to propose an improvement.
Feature Request: Add a new field to the civilopedia entries for each promotion that unlocks (an)other promotion(s) so the player can explore the promotion progression that way.
Currently only the required promotions are shown for each relevant entry, which means the player has to "work backwards" to explore the progression, which is really not a viable way to do that. By displaying an additional field to the "Required Promotions" field, called "Leads to" / "Unlocks" or something like that, the player has an easy way to explore the possibilities of each promotion line.
I believe that this addition would be significantly simpler to implement than fixing the Promotion Tree mod (though the latter would certainly be preferable, because that mod is awesome, but the author has been inactive for some time now, unfortunately).
