A quick and simple semi-fix to the empire tree

from Sins Forums

As most players know, the empire tree is supposed to make ship organization and giving commands easier. However, especially in larger battles, ships are either dying, leaving, or entering the battle so quickly that reliably selecting a ship and giving it a command from the empire tree can be very difficult, if not impossible, because the ships displayed jump around so much. Short of a serious redesign of the whole thing, I have an idea which might go a long way towards making the empire tree much more usable: enable an option to register ingame clicks on select, instead of on release. As it is now, clicks seem to always registered by the game only after the button is released, and then the game seems to often wait until the next tic or so (more if there's lag) to display the ship as being selected. If the empire tree has moved even a single ship during that time, there's a great chance that you'll have failed to select the ship you want... and your failure to select that ship could make a significant difference in battles, especially if it happens more than once, which is quite likely if fleets are of a halfway decent size.

However, if you know that if you press mouse1 over the particular ship you want, that the ship will certainly be selected when the next tic rolls around, using the empire tree would be significantly easier; it would be much more reliable. Even if it does jump around, if you can be satisfied that a particular ship selection will be successful after finishing a click, it would be much better.

A semi-related problem is that, on ICO, commands are only displayed to you after the server registers them, so it seems. If I tell a ship to attack another ship, there seems to always be a small delay, which is most likely due to lag, which is not present on single player games. Sometimes though, an attempted command doesn't go through to the server reliably despite pressing the correct buttons, meaning that I have to babysit my ships for a couple seconds every single time an order is given, just to make sure the order goes through. If Sins displayed orders to the player as having been given immediately, it would solve the problem: of course, nothing would actually happen in space until the server responds, but at least one wouldn't have to wait on ships to make sure they're know what their future orders are.

Fixing the Empire Tree is much more important I think, but any acknowledgement (or fix) of either of these issues would be great.

16,072 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Could help selecting maybe. :) However beware with the right click to give orders, I don't think you'd want it to be registered on press, or you won't be able to rotate the view anymore when you have a ship selected... (by the way SageWon if you read this I apoligize for having said you were wrong in the "long standing complaints" thread, ships phase jumping are the main problem and what I exposed doesn't happen all the time and is secondary...).

I also have an idea that could help with general gameplay and the empire tree, it would be the ability to cancel the last queued order. Depending on how you play, it might help a lot or a bit. Personnaly, I often find myself giving queued orders with and without the empire tree (be it telling a scout to run in circles or giving some of my ships an attack queue), and I find frustrating that if you make a mistake (due to simply yourself, the tree jumping or ico too slow to register) on one of the last orders, you have to redo it all over again.

I don't know if players generally use the tree to queue orders (tell us :) ) but if that is the case then I think it would really help a part of the problem. And would be a cool gameplay addition anyway for either a patch or Rebellion.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Sorry if this is a necro, but this still hasn't been addressed. While I don't get as mad as some (https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/412046) the Empire Tree can be very, very annoying.

Hate to think ow many times I've lost a closely contested fight and subsequently a fleet/grav well because the damn thing jumps up or down, sending my huge fleet of bombers away from an enemy cap ship/titan/star base into the space in the bottom left of my screen, or worse set my Ogrovs to follow a fighter squadron. I DO queue orders on the ET which can easily go wrong with a slight movement.

I don't pretend to be a massive ICO presence, or know the Devs' job, but surely this must be one of the more straightforward things to code for in such a complex game? I mean, one of the main causes of the Empire Tree jerking up and down is ships in transit between grav wells. Couldn't the section for transiting ships be placed BELOW the rest of the tree? I mean, a few tweaks of structure and it could be changed from an Achille's heel back into the immensely useful tool it's supposed to be.

If I've missed the finer points here apologies, but this seems to be one of the few perennial problems with this game that I otherwise love so much.

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