Re: Weird fuel behavior

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:

> Better documentation/help is always good, but there's also the
> question of the user interface showing the user what happened.  Right
> now, you kind of need to know the rules of xconq (and your particular
> game) to understand it, and of course it would be better if xconq
> helped you learn said rules by showing them in action as clearly as
> possible.

I think that there a number of instances where notifications should be 
issued, but are not.

> It's not an easy problem.  Having a huge number of messages somewhere
> of the sort ("unit xxx starved" etc) won't work (unless perhaps for
> rare events, which starving might be).  Maybe being able to click on a
> unit and issue a command saying "what's going on with this unit?"
> (e.g. "tried to attack last turn, but didn't have ammo").  

That would be kind of like the battle summary in Strategic Conquest (c. 
1984), except for individual units instead of all of them.
I still remember that Macintalk-synthesized voice narrative:
  "Bat-tle sum-mar-ee. Click to con-tin-ue."
  "Your dee-stroy-er, strength 1, ree-pelled an at-tack-ing dee-stroy-er."
  "Dee-stroy-er dee-stroyed your dee-stroy-er."
Nostalgia...

> Or I guess
> it would be a cell in the case of a now-vanished unit...

Maybe an unit graveyard window would be useful for displaying pastunits 
and their associated event logs. Have the most recently deceased units 
displayed near the top of a list in the window. This would probably be 
more useful than trying to hunt down the cell where an unit died. (Of 
course, Hans will probably say that the Mac interface already has this 
feature, since it seems to have everything else.)

Eric