Yogi Dave
Well-Known Member
I've heard several complaints about troop selection for battles and have jointed in with them.
Adding shortcut keys offers the best solution for what I think is the most significant complaint:
There are three dialogs used to setup and auto-fight a battle regardless of it being for a tournament, world province, or spire encounter. They are:
The game has shortcut keys in several places. You can select an encounter in a province with a number key. 1-4 for tournaments and 1-8 for world provinces. <Esc> is used in the first two dialogs to pop you back to selecting an encounter. So, what keys would be good here?
Here are ideas for shortcut keys on each of the 3 dialogs. The letter in the graphics are intended to show what they are associated with. They are not intended to be shown on the dialog.
Province Dialog:
Army Setup:
Battle Results:
Pros:
Adding shortcut keys offers the best solution for what I think is the most significant complaint:
The sheer number of mouse clicks and small movements required to score more than a few thousand points in a tournament can and often does create a repetitive strain injury, RSI.
There are three dialogs used to setup and auto-fight a battle regardless of it being for a tournament, world province, or spire encounter. They are:
- Province dialog - choose between negotiate/cater/convince or fight.
- Army Setup dialog - choose troops and decide to Auto or Manual Fight
- Battle Results - Heal troops and return to province
Of these the Army Setup gains the largest benefit, but all would benefit.
The game has shortcut keys in several places. You can select an encounter in a province with a number key. 1-4 for tournaments and 1-8 for world provinces. <Esc> is used in the first two dialogs to pop you back to selecting an encounter. So, what keys would be good here?
Here are ideas for shortcut keys on each of the 3 dialogs. The letter in the graphics are intended to show what they are associated with. They are not intended to be shown on the dialog.
Province Dialog:
- N Negotiate, Cater or Convince
- F Fight
Army Setup:
- B Barracks
- T Training Grounds
- M Mercenary Camp
- 1-5 Selects troop from left to right (Same as selection in military buildings)
- X Removes the last added troop from selection
- A Auto-Fight
- F Manual Fight
Battle Results:
- B Back to Province
- 1-5 Selects the troop to restore with diamonds. (Ignored if the troop isn't damaged.)
Pros:
- Improves playability.
- Reduces repetitive motions which can lead to RSI. This reason rises above all others since it's a common injury playing games that require a lot of small mouse movements and clicks.
- There is always the coding time. However, since there is precedent for the use of the number keys in the troop selection dialog in the training buildings, it seems like this may not be difficult. It all depends on common code organization.
- This could lead to even higher tournament scores which may or may not be desirable.
- Does this create too great an advantage for browser play versus mobile play?
- Use of keyboard macros would decrease the time to complete encounters.
Even with the considerations, I think the lessening of RSI overrides these.
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