In-game Unit descriptions

[warscream22]

...Or lack there of. First, congrats on a decent 40k game. Second, My only real complaint is the lack of some sort of reference on unit usage (besides raw stats). Just a picture of the unit with a brief blurb would be nice. There is too much assumption of players being familiar with a particular army.

[Tolien]

I agree.. It is not obvious if the "Battle Cannon" is better than the "Plasma Destroyer" to take out enemy tanks or if it is better destroying infantry. A single right click on units and weapons to get a better description would be very helpfull.

[sdeix75]

High strength plus armour peircing is good for taking out heavy armour what you need to decide is the amount of shots it also takes so a high strength gun plus armour peircing that shoots twice per squad member is it better then a simmilar gun that shoots once but hus say bolters on it is the choice.

you get the shots per weapon times by how many in the unit taking in accuracy and morale the strength vs armour (minus ap %) is how much damage.

[FroBodine]

There is too much assumption of players being familiar with a particular army.

This is it in a nutshell. Many of us are not familiar with how WH40k combat works, and your game does absolutely nothing to teach us that. 300+ units, but I have no idea why one is better than the other.

Poor forethought to helping newbies to 40k understand anything.

[JimmyC]

I'm relatively familiar with W40k and am still struggling with the sheer variety of units and weapons! Definitely a steep learning curve, but on the positive side it adds a lot more depth to the game.

[warscream22]

By the way, has anybody run across the Shockk Attack Gun? I know how it works in the table top game ( I play the Orks), but I am curious what it does in this game. Is it an infantry, vehicle killer, or both?

[Aekar]

The lack of description tooltips in the game needs to be addressed.
There are some but there needs to be more.
Also having a unit flavour description would be great.

About combat and weapons, there is the "how does combat work" topic that has very nice explanations.
This needs to be replicated ingame.

[Rudankort]

We felt that creating meaningful unit descriptions when there are so many units in the game was very difficult. When there are like 30 units, it is fine, but 300+? We would have to repeat ourselves a lot, and in the end this would not add much value for the players. Another reason is, we may still tweak units in the future, and this could create differences between description and stats.

There are many games out there which have many units but no descriptions (like Heroes of Might and Magic series). This does not seem to create problems for people who play those games.

[warscream22]

Fair enough. Suggestion: How about sub-dividing the main categories in the purchase tree. i.e. Anti-armor inf, Anti-personal inf, and "balanced" inf. This can speed up the "shopping" process. Anyways it looks like you got your own Battle of Armageddon going on with all the "feedback". I still enjoy this game tho.
Cheers

[rezaf]

We felt that creating meaningful unit descriptions when there are so many units in the game was very difficult.

There's an obvious solution to this dilemma. Just provide a way to display such info somewhere in the game, and the modding community will handle the rest.
A suitable place would be in the unit info panel that ought to appear when you right click a unit.
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rezaf

[Rudankort]

Fair enough. Suggestion: How about sub-dividing the main categories in the purchase tree. i.e. Anti-armor inf, Anti-personal inf, and "balanced" inf. This can speed up the "shopping" process. Anyways it looks like you got your own Battle of Armageddon going on with all the "feedback". I still enjoy this game tho.
Cheers

The problem is, there are much more "subdivisions" than that, and it is hard pin exact role of each unit. Thus, in case of infantry there are also fire support units, assault units, scout units, indirect fire artillery-like units etc., and various combinations of these. I'm afraid that any classification will be misleading, compared to actual stats you can see in the UI. Stats don't lie.

Not sure I understood your last remark, I really appreciate all the feedback we are getting, and I can tell that many suggestions voiced on this and other forums will get into the game at some point. We are already hard at work on this.

[Rudankort]

There's an obvious solution to this dilemma. Just provide a way to display such info somewhere in the game, and the modding community will handle the rest.

Let's do it the other way around. When these descriptions are created, I will happily integrate them into the game.

[rezaf]

Let's do it the other way around. When these descriptions are created, I will happily integrate them into the game.

Serious question, why is this a better solution? I always wanted to do something like that for Panzer Corps, but there was no room to display it anywhere. I toyed around with a workaround by painting the text on an enlarged bigUI unit picture, and it kinda worked, but it was wonky ...
We're just talking about designating a boxed area left empty if you guys put nothing in there (which is really fine, I think your reasons of having to create and maintain that stuff are very much valid).
Say, IF you were indeed to make a right click unit info screen for friendly and enemy units (killcounts can also be in there...), just make a boxed area where you put the unit type description and leave some empty lines below that, and hook that space up to an otherwise empty column in unittypes.whdat. So if some modder(s) were indeed to go through the trouble of making unit descriptions for all the hundreds of units, those have a place to live.
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rezaf

[Rudankort]

OK, seriously now. Let me check if I understand you correctly. You suggest us to design the UI, so that there is some place for text descriptions, but since we will not use them and many people will naturally wonder why we have empty textboxes in the UI, we would also need to hide them in case no information is provided in unit file, and make sure the design remains nice. That sounds like quite some work for a feature which we won't use. At least at this time I cannot commit to this. Let us revisit this question after the dust settles down a bit.

[rezaf]

OK, seriously now. Let me check if I understand you correctly. You suggest us to design the UI, so that there is some place for text descriptions, but since we will not use them and many people will naturally wonder why we have empty textboxes in the UI, we would also need to hide them in case no information is provided in unit file, and make sure the design remains nice. That sounds like quite some work for a feature which we won't use. At least at this time I cannot commit to this. Let us revisit this question after the dust settles down a bit.

Fair enough, though no, you didn't understand me correctly. My suggestion was tailored to address specifically that very issue you describe. Here's a quick and (very) dirty mockup of what I had in mind:

This is the sidebar, naturally, and I'd have suggested to put this into a popup unit info window (like the one in Panzer Corps), but it should make my intention clearer (I hope).
The space below "Steel Legion Infantry" is where the unit description would go. Nobody should be too bothered by such a small empty area, and if a description is present, it can be put there without upsetting the UI. The size of the area is up for discussion, but I think what's depicted here should suffice if it must.
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rezaf

[Tolien]

Well, Panzer General and Fantasy General (old similar games) where easier to read info about units and their bonus skills. Right click and read info! It would be easy to put into Armageddon as well I guess.

[Micha63]

agree!

[sdeix75]

I agree.. It is not obvious if the "Battle Cannon" is better than the "Plasma Destroyer" to take out enemy tanks or if it is better destroying infantry. A single right click on units and weapons to get a better description would be very helpfull.

a way to start getting to know your guns especially tanks is the first gun is the main weapon and the next guns and secondary weapons to assist or can also be called defensive weapons although some like lascannons do assist the main gun. try using this when calculating what you wont the unit for

high ST and AP = hvy armour killer = 70 - 100 - 50 %
high ST and low AP = med and hvy armor killer 70 - 100 - 20%
high ST = all types of armor 70 - 100

Super high ST = killer of everything 120 + most likely will have AP

low ST = infantry killer and light vehicles 50 and below st and some AP

med ST with mid range AP = med armor killer but can kill infantry and hvy armor = 50 - 7- ST plus 20- 40% ap examples are lascannons and some missile launchers

the 1 thing when choosing your weapons is shots and range. the laser destroyer tank i just realised only has 1 shot but is 4 range with no accuracy fall off with 90% to hit but no other weapons.

the bombard i think is the best artillery gun though you would use with a basilisk. bombard hits hvy armor and basilisk hits lgt armor. the medusa is strong though short range none offer support i beleive

early game tank with a good mix is the lemon russ annilator. also lemon russ punisher for infantry and lght armour and there is a lemon russ upgrade tank with plasma guns side sponsons which is pretty handy

infantry wise best to take commanders

[Aekar]

It is a very nice suggestion but I don't think it needs to change the main UI myself, as there is already a procedure to display string values.

But we all agree to request to:

- Allow descriptions of weapons
- Allow descriptions of units


And that could easily get addressed by:

- Allowing a left click on weapon (in whatever panel where it is named) -> popup with the description string
- Allowing a left click on unit name -> popup with the description string


These things are mandatory and will multiply player satisfaction by 3.
With all the much harder things done already (cutscenes, briefings texts and voiceovers, nice maps ...) that nice description feature will allow much pleasure from the player!

Trust me, they will LOVE the game thanks to it!
(and, regarding mods, it will also be nicely used )


And I would say, with much less priority: (and a small voice...)
- Allow unit renaming (with right click ?)

[Maler]

Some small unit/weapon descriptions would be great. Not for every unit but something like this would work - Describe the Land raider then just list it's possible weapons. Don't do a different description for each Land raider variant. Just repeat that one. Weapons descriptions could be separate on the purchase screen on the right or something.