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The "Ready" Checkbox has arrived Friday, April 15, 2011 When you open your turns today you will find that you have two new elements in your user interface. A small checkbox next to the X on each of your planet, ship and starbase screens and also a button in the navigation which toggles between "all" and "idle". This is the new Mark Ready functionality. The purpose of this functionality is to give you another tool to help organize your empire and turn play and reduce the time spent going through ships, planets and starbases that you've already managed. So how does it work? Basically as you play your turn you can optionally check off the planets, ships and starbases you have completed giving orders to. As you check them off they will not be included in your idle list. So, if you have 50 planets then normally your navigation bar says Planet x of 50. But if you show only idle planets and you have marked 3 of your planets as ready then the navigation bar will show Planet x of 47. Clicking Back or Next will only move you through the planets which have not been marked as ready. When there are no more planets you will not be able to load the idle list. The checkbox has three modes:
The following events will wake up planets:
The following events will wake up ships:
The following events will wake up starbases:
Lastly you can toggle the ready checkbox using the hotkey: "r" UPDATE: The former tax rates hotkey "r" has been moved to "a" If you think we missed anything important in this list please let us know. As always we're open to more suggestions on how to make this even better. Have fun! CommentsThere are 40 comments - add your comment stenweb - Friday, April 15, 2011 11:24 PM Excellent! I noticed these earlier and was trying to figure them out, but this is an excellent addition and takes a lot of the macro-management out of the equation. Many thanks mihai2303 - Friday, April 15, 2011 11:47 PM excellent! halion - Saturday, April 16, 2011 2:19 AM Excellent thank you. especially the always ready function! I'd originally thought we would need to do it every turn. always ready will significantly help those with large fleets that don't move (hiss, lady royal or filler ships etc.)
might be able to squeeze another game in now ;) Thanks alot. Halion. rudel - Saturday, April 16, 2011 8:11 AM Thanks very much :) ratingen - Saturday, April 16, 2011 9:41 AM Nice feature. Could you either lock the ship or include a lock option. Its all too easy to give orders to a ship, click on a planet or other ship and forget that the ships destination will change. Don't know how many times I have had ships wander off... matsudo - Saturday, April 16, 2011 10:58 AM WOOOOOOOOOOOH!!! Thanks A LOT! Keep up the good work, guys. solkar - Saturday, April 16, 2011 11:27 AM Great,... just one question. Which is the hotkey for planet taxes now ? ^_^ mihai2303 - Saturday, April 16, 2011 12:06 PM @ratinger - if you press "X" after you are finished for the moment with one ship, or just want to check another planet/ship, there will be no need for "lock", and it's much simpler. I do that now even without thinking :) and I had no such problems. ratingen - Saturday, April 16, 2011 1:10 PM @ mihai2303 thanks for the information about the x key. please forget I wanted a lock option, that's much easier. matsudo - Saturday, April 16, 2011 3:06 PM solkar is right, 'r' hotkey doesn't open the taxation dialogue anymore, and that hotkey was useful joshua - Saturday, April 16, 2011 5:32 PM UPDATE: The former tax rates hotkey "r" has been moved to "a" james t. plagerism - Sunday, April 17, 2011 2:47 AM Excellent news, thanks for the addition. The "always ready" feature is a marvelous idea. james t. plagerism - Sunday, April 17, 2011 1:36 PM Can we also have a link to "first idle" on the ship, planet and starbase screens of the dashboard? And/or perhaps have the idle ship/planet/starbase at 50% opacity or similar differentiator? suntzu - Monday, April 18, 2011 4:47 PM This is great. Thank you! figak - Monday, April 18, 2011 6:56 PM I'm lovin it ;) james t. plagerism - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 5:07 AM Can you please make a ship "wake up" if it's a terraforming ship and the planet has now reached its target temperature? joshua - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 5:46 PM @James: that has now been added. dennis - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 10:02 PM Will a ship marked "always ready" also wake up when the waypoint is set to the warp well of a planet? I'm asking because the ship will be sucked to orbit (which is desired) and thus never reach its waypoint. james t. plagerism - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 11:44 PM How about waking up planets that now have enough money+minerals to build a starbase (but didn't before)? dennis - Thursday, April 21, 2011 12:46 AM Apparently, ships set to "always ready" do NOT wake up when they reach the destination planet, if the waypoint was set to the warp well. That is not good, because navigating into warp wells instead of planets can save lots of fuel, but the "always ready" feature does not support it. I suggest the following change: IF (ship.status == alwaysReady) AND (ship.location IS planet) AND (ship.waypointDistance > 0) AND (ship.waypointDistance <= 3) AND (ship.warp > 1) THEN ship.wakeUp() james t. plagerism - Thursday, April 21, 2011 12:51 AM I absolutely second Dennis' comments and suggested fix. I frequently navigate to warpwells and not waking up when it gets to the planet isn't useful. Suntzu - Thursday, April 21, 2011 6:51 AM Personally, I don't think that the always ready wakeup feature is so important. So don't make it too complicated. It is great now - let Joshua spend his time on more useful stuff. james t. plagerism - Thursday, April 21, 2011 7:03 AM Agreed, it is very useful. But not waking up when it hits a warpwell really should be considered a bug of an extant feature, not something new to be added. My idea of waking up for starbase building can certainly wait for the distant future. dennis - Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:38 AM The description says that ships wake up when they reach their waypoint (which is pretty smart and a great idea!) But it does not work as expected. I cannot use "always ready" unless this is fixed. And worse: other people who don't know this might forget about sleeping ships and regret that later, so I agree with James that it should be considered a bug. joshua - Thursday, April 21, 2011 2:56 PM The "warpwell scenario" has now been fixed. sakawa - Monday, April 25, 2011 11:07 AM Nice one. Thanks. ¿Could the ship go shadowed/coloured once you click the ready check box? If you are doing all the ships in one planet and you have a few of them it will be easier to know what has been done and still to do. james t. plagerism - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 7:31 PM Can ships also wake up when they run out of fuel, please? dungeonmaster - Saturday, April 30, 2011 8:07 PM As a borg player this is easily the best feature yet. Hands down. sirius113 - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 10:32 PM i hate features which support borg players -.- but nevertheless, a feature which should have been in original VPL aswell ^^ sirius113 - Friday, May 20, 2011 1:01 AM Just thought about it. It would be really nice, if a planet could wake up, if happiness change from below 100 to 100 dennis - Friday, May 20, 2011 10:28 AM It would also be nice if a planet would NOT wake up when it is overpopulated but 0 clans died. I have several bovinoid planets with more population than the temperature can support, but they eat supplies and nobody dies. It's just annoying to have these planets wake up every turn. mihai2303 - Friday, May 20, 2011 11:34 AM it's a game, not an ERP, you should also THINK when and how to use the AutoReady feature, check that mark only when you're sure you won't have to revisit that planet again. Less is more. I think we're sending in the wrong direction the developing team, with so many wake up cases and features. they made a great product, at least for now - not commercial, and i think it's overkill to request them to code so many cases. suntzu - Friday, May 20, 2011 12:04 PM I agree with mihai2303. It is not useful to program all these little tiny things. There are other much more important things to spend time on (such as ship movement history line or the possibility to get a sorted ship list of all your ships in a given sort order. Those things are where to effort should go. I love the ready checkbox, but the wake up is not of major importance to me. figak - Friday, May 20, 2011 1:43 PM Just use the ready box and once a week go through all your planets to see if any of the "ticked for ever" needs to change. That's usually enough for me. sirius113 - Friday, May 20, 2011 2:47 PM It shouldn't be so much work Other things should take much more time (those things u mentioned) And believe me, that from below 100 to 100 hapiness wake up is much more worth then ur requested features. Any player who played some games would love it. If you know what ure doing and u have like 50+ planets, you get rly frustrated without an addon for ur planets. But the good thing is, that little change on wake up would be enough dennis - Friday, May 20, 2011 4:47 PM I agree with Sirius. I have 140 planets and each one I don't have to look at every turn would save me time. The wake-up-on-100-happiness-reached is 3 lines of code plus 10 minutes testing. The don't-wake-up-on-no-clans-died is just another condition in an if-clause (half a line of code). I also agree that a sortable ship list would be very valuable. "non-commercial" is not a good argument. It costs a lot of effort (and thus money) to develop such a product and maintain its operation. They must be planning to monetize it at some point (which is fine). suntzu - Friday, May 20, 2011 4:51 PM Well, let me put it this way: In the long run, I would love to have RANDGEN/RANDMAX like planet automation back. E.g. you can specify either growth tax or safe tax and the taxes are set automatically. This would be great. Nevertheless, adding another wakeup option every week will not get us there faster - it wastes time. Therefore I recommend using the time to eventually have a safe tax and growth tax option, possibly customizable. I just feel that with the wake up there will always be yet another feature that one could add -- a never ending story. dennis - Friday, May 20, 2011 5:26 PM That would be even better (it would also replace the autobuild feature). I'd prefer this as well. But I doubt it's going to be implemented, because it's admittedly somewhat geeky and not mass-compatible. figak - Friday, May 20, 2011 5:29 PM It doesn't really matter what you think or don't think, it's not up to you if the effort to do any tweaks is worth it or not. I did some googling and this is the tread were we discussed "ad nauseam" what to do and saw this feature as a high return, low effort step. http://vgaplanets.nu/discussion/win-conditions-250-planets-winnin g-is-boring dennis - Friday, May 20, 2011 6:00 PM With a flamer, I'm sure this thread too will reach "ad nauseam" soon :)
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