One workflow problem I'm wondering about is ..
Near the beginning you usually only have a few units to worry about, but you could have a big pile of 'probe' units made up to explore nearby areas; later in the game you might be pumping out units for massive combats of thousands of ships.
I've been working towards a 'click to pick a unit and see his detail screen, then click Move order button, pick destination and confirm' type workflow; that wouln'd to well for large numbers of units.
An issue to worry about later is 'automation'; I'm not going to sweat it day one, but I figure once your empire has expanded to the point you've got dozens of worlds, probably in a blobby or circular expansion, your center-worlds and home-world are less a worry 'at any given instant', but your fronts are where the action is (ie: it takes awhile for someone to sneak into your middle unassaulted, so you'll likely be aware of it so can defend yourself.) So I might add a 'road' concept down the way -- mark a world as a 'production shipyard' and give it a destination, and all mustered units get sent on their way; likwise, an intermediate staging world could have a road to point any arriving units onto another destination without taking player input. Other games do it, so sounds good; but I odn't need to worry about it day one. Day one is 'does logging in work, and does it crash after 30s'
Anyway, for workflow, that I do need to address dya one .. your first order theres a good chance you'll 1) rename your homeworld, 2) design some ships, and 3) start building a pile of tiny mosquito sized ships that will be done by turn 2. As such, right off te top, you'll have a stack of units to move.
I'm thinking that..
When I show a planet (say), on the strategy overview map (just circles with strategic icons on it, think google maps), that I'll show a single icon per 'unit type', with some indicator on it to suggest how many in the stack; so if you have 20 of one ship type, and 5 of another, show 2 unit icons. (on the right, and if other players have units in same system, show them on the left, say.)
To move, you click on the stack-icon, and get a pic and stats of the ships, and order buttons such as Move (and Disband and so on.)
If you hit an Order (such as Move), then pop up a minimap with 'pick a destination' type purpose (rather than flip you back to the main map, since could be disorienting to do that.. but same features in the minimap, just smaller), and a count. Defalut the 'count' to be the size of the stack.
So pick the size 20 probe-stack, hit Move, and pick a destinatoin and it'll send all 20 there. But if you hit Move, and type a '1' into the dialog, you can split off 1 and leave 19 behind
Strikes me we can treat 'like unit' stacks as a single unit for ease of control, and letr you split off groups for firing them off to different destinations.
TRheres a related concept of maybe letting the player group random units into a 'fleet' and ordering the fleet around; but thats a separate thing.. like 'roads'; definately useful, but I can worry about it later; its a handy to have, but not 'essential' to have, day one thing.
What do you think?
jeff
