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RE: CEO v0.54 Unit Preview - [Gluttony]
hahaha, some of the gluttony actionsets look like graceless memes already (like queen with armor)
somewhat related, the CEO infopanel is pretty small in terms of possible description size. In our game there are already mouse-over-to-see-keywords, so if we were ever to add a passive stacking piece (very unlikely), a potential solution might look like:
Has the passive of Hostage, Behemoth, AirElemental.
and you could read all of them in the keywords, maybe with some ridiculous scrollbar setup to let you read all of them.
-main_gi
yea, the complexity cap is mostly guarded by this and my own lack of willpower to upgrade it or add scrolling, but the mouse-over thing seems like it will eventually be needed for certain effects to exist. Currently the number of things to justify it is small enough that they could just be rolled into some perceived 'learning curve' (ex: gemini twin), but after a certain point it will no longer be reasonable. (ex: if gemini twins had a scaling moveset) However, by having that limitation it kinda forces things to veer into the direction of being more intuitive, so something like 4 different gemini twins is never even done in the first place.
It's all some kind of pseudo-manipulation onto myself to gain some type of advantage out of a thing that would normally be a negative, but the downside comes when I make effort to fight against it by reducing descriptions down to the point of being vague. Sometimes I just can't let go of a particular effect and get into a battle with the limitations I've placed onto myself. It also causes some linguistic weirdness trying to get some particular phrase to fit onto a single line instead of 2, or some description to fit into 3 lines instead of 4. I spend an unreasonable amount of time fighting these imaginary problems, lol.
I think any CEO-like game that gets a similar amount of expansions as some MTG-like game (so like 5+ sets to total to thousands of units) will eventually need keywords too. But honestly I quite like condensing descriptions too and I also like trying to fix them. There are some effects that also feel awkward to state all their effects and can tempt an intuitive wording. Like Hostage and "caught between" - Ryan made a piece with that sort of effect and basically it can be worded like:
The second is more intuitively clear on the first read, the first is more mechanically clear. That's just an annoying tradeoff.
The sources of infopanel ambiguity I remember: referencing other units (including all promotes), some types of transforms causing death squares and some not (NO HIDDEN INFORMATION), semi-keyword effects (like Dove and Angel enchant not mentioning that it's lost on attack/can't target King, when DOVE IS RARE AND PLAYERS WOULD GET THAT PIECE FIRST), and fudged turn timers (ex. Butterfly actually being 20.5 turns and all enchants being +0.5 turns).
By the way I have to ask what you were thinking when you did these changes:
Enchant status reworded from "immune to melee attacks" to "immune to melee death". I thought this meant you could knock the armor off a HauntedArmor even if it was enchanted with this reword, but you didn't change anything.
Envy action being called
What the hell is an enemy unit type? Does it mean Envy can turn from a [Champion] [Basic] [Legendary] to a [Minion] [Clan] [Rare]? I mean all of that looks ridiculous so the only thing you can reasonably think is "oh it's a clone ability", but I don't know how "type" could possibly be read that way. It would really be more clear if you deleted the word "type" from it.
-main_gi
Yeah there are alot of descriptions that need a bit of clarity. Somtimes you just have to do a bit of testing, e.g. seeing how void interacts with magic, ranged and special. (teliport, move and teliport)
good points, especially regarding dove/promotes. Promotes are probably the best arguments in favor of CEO needing expanded info panel rollovers even in its current state.
I vaguely remember some weird interpretations derived from the way magic immunity works and how that would relate to melee immunity for unblockable swaps, but this may have also had something to do with other effects. I honestly don't remember why it was changed to this but it does make it sound like armor would be breakable while enchanted. At this point it wouldn't surprise me to find that I changed the wording just to reduce the character count by 2, lol, but enchantment in general probably needs an overhaul to simplify and balance it.
this I remember more clearly - it was to indicate that the cloning is done in regard to the unit type itself rather than whichever moveset it currently has, such as broken armor or a voided unit. If it were simply made to clone a unit, interpretations could go either way, so despite 'type' being a little erroneous I decided it would be more intuitive this way.
So, I think Envy is a big offender in vagueness because the infopanel is already very small. It also copies value too, which is a question I often heard with LifeStone (people wondering if they can revive a value-boosted Pride or a value-lost MoonFox). I think you'd need some sort of informal keyword for it, like
So you'd also have
I would suggest "base value" and "base version", but that is already an informal term for the +0 version of a unit, unfortunately.
-main_gi
you're probably right, I think it's common for a developer to become blind to this type of thing from having a skewed perspective of what initial interpretations might be. In terms of lifestone, there will probably be a lot of people that think reviving gluttony will act as a second life to continue the rampage with all new moves intact, but it doesn't work that way.
I also think over-explaining is a problem to avoid though, such as taurus rush or castling, I have not had good incentive to simplify these down to the level of 'leap-attack' but always feel like there is something fundamentally inelegant about having such a large description for a move type. Between taurus rush and leap-attack, I'm still not sure which form of description is less confusing, lol.