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(2 edits)

I created the 200x38 map and populated a city with about 50 units I placed there. 

In the list of units, if you move a unit it swaps the unit. It should remove it from the list, and insert it in the list rather than swapping. This means anytime I drag and drop, my well ordered list gets all messed up. Moving a unit from near the bottom of the list to near the top of the list next to the units that I wanted to load onto it was tedious and time consuming in the extreme! Again, what it should do is when I reach the top of the list, the list should start scrolling until I get to where I want to drop it. I had to do 6 drag and drops to get it where it needed to be. 

Now if the load feature wouldn't always pick up my defensive units first (AA, Artillery) that might, repeat might be helpful. If I could, like EDEE select a "DEFAULT UNIT TO LOAD" or have a priority list for each unit that can host others that would be fantastic. (one priority list for each host unit). Drag and drop is extremely picky as far as positioning the item and there is no feed back like drag and drop in Windows that highlights the entry you are dropping onto before you release it. So a lot of my drag and drops just failed. What would be beneficial is if there was a Move Up or Move Down button (just one for the entire list) and pressing and keeping it pressed down would move my unit up or down in the list until I released the button. Better if I could select a group of units and move all of them as a group (like all of my infantry to my helicopters). What I would really like is a persistent Tree window like EDEE that allows interaction with the map. I could very rapidly organize (load/unload) and move out units. In most cases, for a city, I like to deal with all the  units in that city at one time.

You commented that a lot of people really liked the game. If you play a very simplistic game with very few units, yes, it is ok. Once you start accumulating units in one place, it becomes very tedious and onerous to deal with the unit lists. How to make this really  workable  - when I select a unit in the  list and I highlight  the load button, an additional list of all the units present in the City/Port/Airbase for my selected unit that I wish to fill  pops up and I get to select the units to add (multiples). That would really ease the tedium over the very the onerous multi Drag and Drop in these situations.   

Maybe a lot of the people who like this game just don't mind numbing, time wasting and extremely keyboard/mouse intensive tedium of doing what should be simple things with what I have found to be an extremely rudimentary interface. I am sincerely trying to be constructive. 

This game has absolutely tremendous potential for the concept but the interface needs a lot of turbocharging! It is sort of like an NFL game where every play gets flagged and every play has to be reviewed - it just ruins the flow of the game. By the time I get something done, I forget why I was doing it in the first place.. 

(1 edit)

Unfortunately, there is not a Default/Non-Default loading option as there was in EDEE. This is by design as it confused more people than it helped. The tree view is a simpler method which people understand when they want to do special loading  situations. 

The tree view itself is set up for swapping and loading/unloading, not for ordering. So if you desire to order a list of 50 units in a particular way, you will have more work to do. The tree view can be impacted by a machine that has difficulty rendering the scene.

Regarding various comments involving the mouse and the interface, first, all command and info buttons can be mapped to a key. The map itself can also be scrolled via keys. All of those commands and a few more can be set through key binding.

The dialogs and interface controls do have only rudimentary key controls, and they are not fully compliant with standard windows controls. Unity only provides very basic controls, which must be built upon. This involves a great deal of time, which is a short commodity for this project. So some of the basics are in it for now. Time will tell if more can be added.

EDEE, being a Windows OS dedicated program, was able to take advantage of the built in Windows API. Unfortunately, Unity does not do this, it has a homegrown kit which is very basic.  This is one of the few disadvantages of using Unity. So a lot of the expectations of windows standards compliance are not going to be there, at least for now.  Do not construe this as a defense for the things you don't like, it is just the reality.

I had not wanted to Sort the list or keep it sorted but it is a rather arcane way to drag and drop from my experiences in Windows and Linux - I have both.

It still remains that the unit list for the city is very difficult to use if you have an accumulation of units.

By not being able to specify a load sequence the LOAD ALWAYS picks up AA, Artillery FIRST. It would be more appropriate to have the load function load infantry, armor, engineers, Seabees first rather than AA, Artillery that I usually want to leave in a city for defense. From my perspective, if this is always going to be the way LOAD works, that button and keystroke are useless in my play. Perhaps some compromise could be reached?

Right now the compromise is the tree view. I always like the non-default concept, and I will look into what can be done with this on the request list.