Suggestion - UI/Chat/Tutorial/Factions/Mail changes

[Locarius]

Attention: If you dont want to fully read the wall of text scroll down to the points witch are short and explain the suggestions in a better way.

So im just thinking that there could be more changes to the UI and one of these atm is the Forum linking..it should be its own tab and not under Help witch actually kinds of doesnt make that much of a sense and not really that ..many people still doesnt know whats the link for the forums..i think to improve the social aspect of the game we need to get that "Forums" link as its own tab and not under Help..as people tends to look things that are easy to see.

The in-game chat system should be more customizable, as well with better appearance and a integrated friend system,private chats,and private channels..to allow the players to get more of the communication aspect of the game witch at the moment is not that great.

As well the tutorial could be more effective, if we take in consideration the most asked question in chat and have in mind this questions are actually really basic and core of the game.Now i dont have any issue anwsering new players and all in chat (witch i do..and a lot)..but when you start seeing the same questions over and over..even like 5mins after you already anwsered to another person..its kind of lame and it also means the tutorial doesnt do a good work regarding some points.

To put it in just a few points:

UI Changes:
-Change the location of "Forums" link from "Help" tab and instead leave it as its own.
-Allow to copy/paste the names of players to make it easier in case you want to mail him or look the player in the leaderboards. (this due to many players using diff characters witch makes it harder for the player to search)
-Add a house forums.
-Add in game recruitment system (including the application system) you can find it here: http://forum.strongholdkingdoms.com/vie ... 16&t=19596
-Put the quests in order. (with this i mean actually placing lets say Crazy Construction entire chain together instead of when you did it)
-Add a small description of what those quests were so when someone ask you about certain quest you could anwser without having to ask whats that quest about.
-A "Confirm or cancel" window after clicking (mostly by mistake) on "Delete Constructing" button when building your castle.
-Top down view of the village and castle would facilitated placing or re-placing buildings.
-When a player gets a "The enemy arrives at your parish" report, it should also state the name of the parish in question.
-An Overview Screen/Status Screen that display the list of your villages and related info attached.
-More avatar and coat of arms customization options.
-A zoom out feature to see the whole castle.
-Search option for Parishes, counties, provinces and country capitals.
-There should be a warning dialog if gaining a subrank will cause you to outrank one of your Liege Lords.
-The game should give the player a warning notice when a player's vassal is inactive and is going to be deleted, "X" days in advance.
-Ability to private the villagers to eat a specific food type, so that the player can stock it faster. A check box on every food type should do it.

Chat:
-Allow it to be more customizable.
-Add ignore/report options. (this will help the mods/admins to do their functions way faster and easy)
-Add private messaging system.
-Allow the creation of private channels.
-Add a invite system (to join private channels and private conversations).
-Add a friendlist system so you can talk with friends in 1 on 1.
-Fix the linking in the chat and to avoid spam, limit the player from linking each 5 mins or so.
-Dont make the chat to auto-scroll down when someone type anything as it makes it harder for a player to find and copy paste something they want to look for or just take note. (it will also help the linking as players dont need to post the link again).
-Make notify system to be enabled/disabled per channel instead of global.

Factions & Houses:
-Add a proper alliance system that have a limit of 2-3 allies per house and 5 per faction.This system will include a 24hr waiting until both sides agreed to be allies and will have to wait 24hr again in order to break it.
-Add a proper enemy system where if a house is going to attack another house they will get a warning of somekind of "declaration of war by "x" house".
-Monk interdiction/absolve can only be send by your official allies and since its limited, it will ensure that no random multi-accounts or neutral or any other kind of "wing" faction will be allow to send ID or absolve.
-Monk Excommunication can only be send by your official enemies, just like the other suggestion above this one..it will ensure that the multi-accounters,"neutrals" or "wing" factions cant use excom to a house that theyre not at war.

Tutorial:
-Add a "how to donate to the parish" mission in the tutorial. (this to ensure players get it from start)
-Add a "how to recruit units" in form of a mission to defend your castle. (this could be to defend from the tutorial attack).
-Add a "trading" mission. (could involve selling/buying stuff from parish or just trading with a random player).
-Make sure the popularity/villagers system is explained properly.
-Link the players to the wiki of Stronghold Kingdoms in case they need help as well to the chat.

Mail:
-Ability to make friend groups. The player can have a number of them, name them, add/remove players from them.
-Allow reports to be attached to your ingame mail post.

That is all for now.

Edit: Added suggestions from countjmula.
Edit 2: Added Tutorial Section and Quest suggestions.
Edit 3: Added Gaius22 suggestions.
Edit 4: Added more suggestions from 4acer400,George_Bush,DasWood,Blankwindow provided by Gaius22.
Edit 5: Added new suggestion and category..and also added the suggestion that Gaius22 posted.
Edit 6: Added "Mail" category and 3 suggestions that were posted by Gaius22 and DavidSpy but belong to MechJosh0, Fatal and ph_mcr.
Edit 7: Removed some suggestions that were added lately on the game.

[countjimula]

I think that the most important thing that will get more people to use SHK chat is to make the notify feature selectable per room, and not just universal. If just this one thing was changed I think almost every player will start using the in game chat, as well as skype, or teamspeak. As it is now few players look at the chat at all to see who might be talking, and few players go to chat to talk to other players.


A house forum, like we have for factions would also be very beneficial.


I do not think that all players should have all communication functions, but they should open up when a player gets leadership positions (just like the mail to faction option).

[Locarius]

Just giving an update to the thread i added tutorial changes/suggesstion.

Any more suggestions are welcome as well.

[Gaius22]

First I want to say that I'm sad that this thread didnt receive more attention because the main talk nowadays is all about the quest system (I dont mean it as a bad thing), and I think that the changes here referred would be a great addition. They little and so subtle but I think they would add something to the experience as they would "cut" some annoyances.

So I totally agree with every suggestion here posted, I mean some are a no-brainer.

And I have some of my own:

1) Organized reports. Some already talk about it and I already talk about this in other threads. The use of filters is welcome but the player kinda "lose" information temporarily as he/she uses it. My suggestion is to use tabs, like "All", "trading", "politics", "army", "quest/achievements" and such. Of course the names dont have to be these ones, but using this system the player would be at a distance of simple click on a tab if he wanted to browse some reports. They still be listed chronologically.

I think this would facilitate the search of an attack report, to forward it, for example.

2) A "Confirm or cancel" window after clicking (mostly by mistake) on "Delete Constructing" button when building your castle.

3) Highlight with green or blue or any other colour the castle building or "piece" that is in construction at the moment. This would influence player decisions on want to delete if they know what is in mid-construction

4) Top down view of the village and castle would facilitated placing or re-placing buildings. Another thing that would be great is if they did this like concept art . When seeing from the top down view the player would see their village/castle like painting art and without any villagers/soldiers. I think this would be amazing. I havent seen anyone talking about FF art work/drawings, which in my opinion are great and give "colour" to the game, they should be praised for that.

Here, I have some examples from Brothers in Arms: HH. Where when the player wanted to consult the map to see objectives and such, this is what it looked like:

http://guides.gamepressure.com/brothers ... 748765.jpg
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l ... ctical.jpg
http://www.msxbox-world.com/assets/guid ... on2map.jpg
http://www.msxbox-world.com/assets/guid ... on1map.jpg

5) Ability to type in the exact number of resources that the player want to trade, instead of clicking a million times, when dealing with great amounts of resources, until you reach the amount you want.

6) When a player gets a "The enemy arrives at your parish" report, it should also state the name of the parish in question. This would be useful for players with a lot of villages.

[Gaius22]

An Overview Screen/Status Screen! to display the list of your villages and related info attached.

A thread recently started by But_ton-TheSaurus noted this overview screen and I think it falls better inside this thread because, after all, its UI.
http://forum.strongholdkingdoms.com/vie ... 16&t=19852

He noted that the micro-management increases drastically as the number of villages increases (which is completely true, and in my opinion exponentially ). I already thought that this type of menu/window was needed but after the Crown Prince update and the ability to have 25 villages ( ) its seems to me obvious. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

This is what the Overview Screen should include:

- List of all the player's villages (left side);
- Ability enter in each village by selecting them;
- It should have 4 small tabs, dividing Resources, Army, Monks, Travels menus:

Resources:
1) Resources should be displayed horizontally on the right side of each village, separated by type;
2) As there is a lot of resources to be displayed at the same time, there should exist a button equal or similar to the one in the pillage window that gives the player the ability to choose which resources to pillage. In here this button would allow the rotation between the resources displayed. In reality what it does is rotate between different warehouses (Stockpile, Granary, Inn, Village Hall and Armoury);
4) The daily production of the resource should be displayed when the player hover the mouse over it;
5) Number of merchants available should be displayed here;
6) Shortcut to the Trade/Village Trade menu/tab;

Army:
1) Troops should be displayed horizontally on the right side of each village, separated by type;
2) The amount of troops place in barracks and in castle should be displayed when the player hover the mouse over the village;
3) Shorcut to the View Attacks menu/tab;

Monks:
1) Monks should be displayed in the same way, taking into account how many are available;
2) Interdiction button on the side, to apply it to the village in question;
3) Display Faith point cost and how many monks the player wants to use, applying Interdiction;

Travels:
1) Similar to the View Attacks menu;
2) Display every Monk and Merchant travel;
3) Where from and to;
4) Time until arrives destination;
5) What resources merchant have;
6) What ability the Monks are applying;

Other suggestions:

- Ability to type in the village or parish name, when choosing destination in the Trades menu, for both village trading and stock exchange;

- Along with the ability to type in the amount of resources that the player wants to sent, have preset amounts like 1000, 2500, 5000, 10000, etc, displayed.

[Locarius]

Well even when there are just a few people posting in this thread i do see a lot of good suggestions if not most..i have updated the main post with some of them.

[Locarius]

Well just bumping the thread as i dont really want it to see going wayyy down to the other lists..Also i want to remind anyone that suggestions are welcome and depending on what kind of suggestions and if theyre really good then i will update the main thread with them also state the name of the person.

[Gaius22]

- More avatar customizations options are always welcome
- As well as coat of arms options
- A zoom out feature to see the whole castle
- An anvil symbol or something like that, on the right side of the name of the village (on the top of the screen), only showed if that village has a building already under construction. Useful when rotation through the villages (specially if you have 25!).
- Ability to select individual tracks from SHK music list (I mean, why not?)

So many good suggestion were already given, that I dont have anymore , at least on this topic.

FF should come in here and read some of this stuff.

But keep them coming!!!

[Gaius22]

From 4acer400:

- Search option for Parishes, counties, provinces and country capitals

From George_Bush:

- Show the name of the parish building on popup UI when selected , instead of having to click on the "question mark"

From DasWood:

- "There should be a warning dialog if gaining a subrank will cause you to outrank one of your Liege Lords."

From Blankwindow:

- The game should give the player a warning notice when a player's vassal is inactive and is going to be deleted, X days in advance

All good suggestions. I'm just trying to keep them all in one place.

[Locarius]

Bumping the thread as i updated it with more suggestions from other players.

As well sorry that i didnt update it fast enough ive been busy