Bulk Upgrade Improvement Suggestions

Neptune's Pride Feature Requests
1

The bulk upgrade feature has been very useful, especially when the intention is to give a maximum boost to one type of infrastructure and/or there are many stars within an empire. However, there are two conditions that I find it is not designed to accommodate. Perhaps with a little tweaking it could be even more useful.

Condition #1: building the most infrastructure of either type

Sometimes I simply want to keep buying whatever is cheapest to build, to get the most for my credits. I propose adding more options to the drop-down menu of infrastructures that can be upgraded on the Bulk Infrastructure Upgrade controls. The cases wherein science would be among them are so rare that it can be excluded to maintain ease and simplicity of design. Given that there are often upgrade options of equal cost among economy and industry, these two would need to be prioritized.

That said, I would love to see “Economy, Industry” and “Industry, Economy” added to the menu. Performing a bulk upgrade with these options would purchase in sequence whatever is cheapest among the two of them, with the first type listed being the one that will be purchased when there are options of equal cost for both.

Condition #2: not building infrastructure on stars at risk of being captured

No one wants to build infrastructure on stars only to have them fall into enemy hands, so when one is under attack the bulk upgrade feature cannot be used without worry of wasting credits and helping the attacker. To circumvent this limitation of the feature players could be able to deselect stars from being included in any bulk upgrade. Here’s how I envision that working:

On the Galaxy controls, the colored shapes in the first column could be switches that a player can click to turn on or off. The state of each switch could be indicated by changing the shape from solid to hollow, like they appear around stars or to the left of players’ names on the leaderboard, with the inside of the hollow shapes being black. Controls could be added to the right of Show All Stars, below the bulk upgrade button, to select or deselect all stars for bulk upgrades.

On the individual controls for each star, another switch could be added somewhere in the Infrastructure section.

On the map, deselected stars could have a black dot in the center as an indicator.

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2

Condition 1 I like. I was thinking of a bulk upgrade form where you choose to have economy or no economy. In another drop down menu it would be industry or no industry. The same with Science. You can choose more than 1 if you wish and it will always apply the cheapest upgrades first. At the bottom you simply click on apply upgrades.

For condition 2 I think it would be too hard for a player to set up before each turn. If you attack your enemy or your enemy attacks you then you would have to redo a lot of the stars you would consider safe. It would be much easier to manually go through the galaxy menu and choose what is cheaper to build than have to come up with stars that are at risk of being captured.

I personally would rather use the galaxy menu instead of the bulk upgrade because it gives me more control if I need leftover money. Just sort for the cheapest of whatever infrastructure you want to build and click on the eye to see where the star is located.

3

I considered something similar to what you said for #1, but I favored the suggestion I mentioned because it would be easier to implement, would keep the GUI simple, and I do not see much application for including science in a multi-infrastructure bulk upgrade. Having three drop-down menus would allow for total control over bulk upgrading, but they would need to be prioritized in a list from most to least favored, to decide which will be purchased when different types of infrastructure have options of equal cost.

The tedium of stepping through the list on the Galaxy controls and clicking each eye to see which stars are at risk is exactly what I am trying to avoid. I see it being much easier if stars can be blacklisted from bulk upgrades within the game controls. (Sometimes I will do it manually and refer to a written list, but when the list is too long that is no more efficient than using the eye to center on each star.) Yes, players might need to revise their (de)selection of stars each time they are preparing to upgrade, but I think it would be easier because only the stars near enemies would need to be checked and then the upgrades could be done in bulk, rather than checking each one as you work your way down a list, upgrading individually.

There is a way to make it even easier than what I already suggested. There could be a selection tool, similar to the Quick Upgrade tool, in the main menu. Click on the button for the tool and you are in selection/deselection mode. In that mode, clicking on any star will toggle its bulk upgrade selection status. That way you can simply view the areas of the map where you are in conflict, decide which stars you think are at risk, and just click on the ones that are not set accordingly to change them. That seems pretty easy to me. This tool could also show/hide the selection status of each star, so that it need not always be visible on the map.

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4

In #2 it would require a lot of work for them to implement. There would basically be a black list and a white list that can change during any turn if a star is taken over.

A drop down menu would be the easiest to implement even though it will still apply upgrades to stars that are being contested over. If the drop down menu for infrastructure is implemented then a blacklist and whitelist of stars would be a possibility and it would be more useful.

One other possibility is an option that says hide from bulk upgrade when you open up the galaxy controls. It can be a green and red checkmark. The default option would be for the star to be whitelisted when it is captured. This can change in the options menu if someone wants. Another tab would be a possibility to implement this. I would rather see both of these options implemented because using the bulk upgrade now is too risky for me. Unless both are implemented, I probably won’t be using an option like this and will rely more on selecting the galaxy controls upgrades manually.

5

Why not a Black/White list? Simply allow you to check a box on each star you want included, and have those as part of a saved state. Prior to the Bulk Upgrade, I would use the galaxy screen and click the Eye to locate the star while sorted by cheapest. If it was close to a boarder, I would skip it and move on. If there was a checkbox to indicate the star was safe, then I could select to upgrade only stars included in that list.

6

I think either of those possibilities would work. Maybe a blacklisted star by default would be better. and you have to manually select it. Or if a player wants they can make all stars white listed by ignoring any blacklisted stars if they prefer the bulk upgrade like it is now or if they want to do a quick bulk upgrade on all their stars while keeping their blacklisted stars saved.

7

I did suggest am option to exclude stars from the bulk list when it was discussed / implemented but the feedback was the bulk list is only for use when you are so big that individual stars are of little consequence. I would still like to see it as I could use it a lot more.

8

I will improve it one day!

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9

Hey guys, I have made a selection tool almost a year ago, similar to what you ask. Hope this helps :smile: