Feedback to the player for being under attack, and for pathfinding failure

Discussion of gameplay issues and experiences, game balance and suggestions for tweaks and modification of the existing systems.
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SurOrange
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:39 pm

Mon Nov 19, 2018 8:46 am

Most of the frustrating moments in this otherwise great game for me come from not being properly informed about something. Hopefully this is minor enough to count as a tweak and not a feature request.

First: When a player character is under attack there should be more of an indication than just the soft red glow that the character portrait currently has. I don't know if my colorblindness is playing a part, but I've totally missed that glow so many times and gotten someone in another part of the world killed as a result. Some kind of alert noise would be ideal (maybe toggleable?), and perhaps a quick "(person) is under attack" message, like how it informs you that a raid is advancing on your base. To go a step further it could be nice to differentiate between "this character is being targeted" and "this character actually just took damage" since those tend to require different responses from the player.

If you want to keep the red glow, then at least make it cover the whole character portrait; currently it's just in the background, so if a character is wearing a large hat, there's not much background visible, so the glow is harder to notice.

This also helps people without SSDs suffer less loading when trying to babysit multiple traveling squads to keep them out of danger. Ideally we'd be able to tell them to not run directly into hostile squads, but that's another undertaking altogether.

Second: Pathfinding tends to sometimes go the wrong way before correcting itself, or even fail altogether at times. I know fixing that isn't so simple, but I would at least ask that if pathfinding fails for a character, the game could display a symbol like a question mark over their head, and over their character portrait in the squad menu (for when giving move orders on the map), perhaps with a typical "error" noise as well. To go above and beyond, it would be great if a temporary (fading out) 3D arrow above their head could point in the direction they are about to move if pathfinding succeeds, so that the player isn't caught off-guard by the character moving in an unexpected direction.

There have been many times where I was in a precarious combat situation, and ordered someone to move away from the enemy, but upon unpausing my character either stood still and got hit, or ran directly at the enemy and got hit. Simply knowing whether the pathfinding succeeded at all would help a lot in that regard.

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