Criticisms on New Interface

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1

Well old map should be supported, if u ask around, most players use old one anyways.
Old map got new update when mass sending fleet in same system u dont need to enter those numbers again all the time, with new map that feature is gone for some reason…kills players time for too much.

All the problems started to come with new interface if u havent noticed, that round when i noticed nuking bug, also new interface, now morale problem - new interface

If u go to Defense Station page and lets say u move DS from 1 system to another system, if u click that system where its going, it also says - There is only empty space here, again problem with new interface.

Now lets go back to battle reports, when those problems started to occur? - new interface

Back to morale problem, its only new interface/new map problem, only morale penalty SHOWN is wrong, its not like players who used old map all the time, could take more planets, than players who used new one.

If u send fleet to same planet from old map, u dont “win” by morale than sending from new map. So no morale problems, only new map shows things wrong…

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Last round we lost DS by bug aswell, we did hold 66% of the planets but DS got destroyed - what happend there? imo - must be problems with new interface again, we had no such problems back then with old interface.

3

This sounds a lot like my mom after she switched from IE5 to Chrome.

1 Like
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:joy::joy::joy:

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we have been suffering from this problem since SOR, u should suffer too :stuck_out_tongue:

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That’s an expected and understood part of developing. The solution isn’t to hide behind old code that had larger problems. Bugs will happen, and fixes will come.

2 Likes
7

Booo

Haha ive been back since before pie purchased ic.

Ill addmit first few rounds back when he didnt own it ic galaxys were still a bit larger and more agressive! You could clearly tell ic was about to die tho.

Pie purchased ic and made a lot of drastic changes. I still believe his 2nd interface and map features made ic a heck of a lot better then it is now.
Hes changed the game constantly but always done major work on the site to keep it running.
Ic needs drastic work and changes hes done well so far. Hes human and can make mistakes so some of his changes may or may not have been for the better but its our job to sit it out and wait and see.

My main suggestion to pie would be to get ic2 up and running and just like runescape did haha of all games haha run the classic ic as well but not untill ic2 is in order up and running and player count is back up

8

Perfection has never came over night…well besides for 5 months ago when i had my baby.

Give him time guys. Cant get better if we dont stick around and help pie instead of bashing his every move.
To many anti pie posts these days and i am partly to blame for some. We need to over come this grow up and help the man instead of fighting him to keep it the original dying ic

1 Like
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I want to show my support for the original post in this thread. IC as i saw it was not flawless but built as a text based game and it worked well without any fancy graphics etc. The map was one of the things that made it great. you could sneak into areas etc, which gave the game another strategic element. Development is somtimes good, but they tried that wit monopoly also, didnt work, didnt sell.

i wana qoute Genesis: Ill come back to play once they return the old map.

The development done by Pie is amazing, “tips hat” but overall it seems we are making the game more modern and easier to play. like fam counsil, option to show fams in map etc. All these things of making it easier also makes it worse. they remove the need for comunication and cooperation.

Thet game of IC was GREAT, i guess why so many of us are still around, but with all these new features that makes it easier and ways to cut corners etc Does not make it better only easier to stop playing.

Dont take away the complexity of IC, rather go back and implement more of the things that has been removed to make it more into the orignal way it was created. Couse that was a great game :smiley:

/Me goes to play FOrtnite :stuck_out_tongue:

10

I’ll meet you guys half way: let’s build a map that is a modern equivalent of the old map.

I agree with you to an extent about the tradeoff between convenience vs communication. Yes, things like the family council remove the need to communicate but it also lessens the burden on casual players.

If you remember waaaaaay back in the day, the original original game didn’t even list family coordinates. Nobody knew where anybody else was, and every round started with a race to click and click and click each and every system in order to find out where different families were.

On the one hand, it was great in that it reflected a very literal sense of exploration that doesn’t exist any more. It also rewarded communication and teamwork.

On the other hand, it was incredibly tedious and actually rewarded activity more than skill. If nobody in your family wanted to do the legwork, otherwise competent casual players were SoL and discouraged from playing.

On the other end of this are things like mass-exploration, which only became a feature within the last year. Is it really better to have to send individual exploration ships? Or take family council, as you mentioned. Is it really valuable that fo years we were having to ask our family members to copy/paste their council screens into chat? Is that really the height of how we define teamwork and communication? Imo having something like family council removes the need for mindless work and lets people focus on more meaningful strategic planning.

Do we want to reward mindless tasks disguised as “activity” or do we want to reward actual skill?

The problem with this is that people strongly disagree about what the “original” game meant. If we take this at face value you’re asking for a game that doesn’t run on mobile, is even more inefficient, and lacks several quality of life improvements that came over the years.

The reality in my opinion is that we are all effected by nostalgia and feel like the game itself used to be better because we used to have more people. I think it’s really the opposite; we have less people because the game got stale over time.

We don’t want/need the “original” IC, we need a modernized IC that captures the spirit of the original IC without all of its bad UX and tedium. IC has for most of its history been a great strategy game with a horrendous visual design. We just didn’t know it at the time because the web as a whole looked just as shitty back then.

You’re not wrong in wanting IC to feel as fun as it used to, but I think the solution is in moving forward, not backward.

3 Likes
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Pie just nailed the head on the tip, as they say.

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i agree with u on most there pie, but:

@I_like_pie Imo having something like family council removes the need for mindless work and lets people focus on more meaningful strategic planning.

This is what i dissagree with at its core. Its the package that made it great. the more shortcuts we get the lighter and easier the game gets, we lose the “depth” of the game its all these elements that make the game great, once we remove them and implements shortcuts its still called Imperical conflict, but without the compexity its realy not. atleast for us who have seen it and know how good it can be.

I agree we need to make IC more modern. But why does modern have to change the way the game is “played”. couse that is being done with changes, like op limit, one click yama lists, fam counsil. etc the list goes on. its the the depth that is being taken away.

I agree we should be able to play from phones etc today, but what do 1 click yama have to do with being able to play from a phone ? thats a complete game changing effect and nothing to make it more modern.

That change alone changed the whole game, and removed imo one of its best features, being able to sneak and explore and set up, hell expo phase had a complete diffrent level of excitement to it. And others had to use wizzies to find my plist. this is what i think gene is meaning when saying bring the old map back, not the old map itself, but how the map works…

atm the game isnt only being made more modern which in most parts are good changes, but also changing slowly into a very diffrent game and maybe thats needed in 2018 :stuck_out_tongue: but as a old strat game fan from, Star craft, to CIV etc. the depth IC had is slowly getting removed. It should be able to make it more modern without killing the complexity no?

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Fwiw the ops limit was a casuality of the morale redesign that most people ended up hating. It was supposed to come back but the code freeze will mean that gets pushed to the alpha instead. I agree that the op limit being changed to use morale has shifted the game for the worse.

But that’s a different topic; the op behavior in either form doesn’t really touch on the convenience issue.

The yama thing is a good point though, but again there’s always been a move towards streamlining the gameplay. Mal’s map generator is a great example of this; when it originally came out there were some people making the same argument you’re making now that it was ruining the game because it removed the need for families to manually compose and trade maps. That said, many old school IC players would consider Mal’s map generator a critical part of the game’s experience at its height.

The reality is simply that different people want different things. You say:

This is a matter of opinion. There are older players who don’t see this “complexity” as a good thing. Who defines what Imperial Conflict is after all? Your vision might describe the game as it was in 2006, but somebody else who played just as long as you might prefer the game as it was in 2009. Somebody else may yet consider “true” IC to have ended after 2003.

We have to be careful about stating opinions as if they are objective truths. They aren’t. You have a valid opinion that something like fam council removes depth to the game, but I also have a valid opinion that it adds depth. You are placing value on the process of trading council reports, where I am saying that this specific type of communication is unnecessarily tedious and takes time away from more high level strategy.

Neither one of us is wrong. We just value different things in the game experience. You and I probably also liked different things about IC in its prime. The point is:

Just because the game changes, doesn’t mean that its complexity is being killed. It doesn’t have to be so black and white, and it isn’t. Two different games can be complex in different ways.

I believe what you are actually making a case for is a specific set of IC features that you prefer, and that’s totally fine. But that doesn’t make your vision better, more complex, or truer to the original IC. It just makes it what you prefer.

All of us have preferences, and it’s helpful when we share and talk about them and make cases for our viewpoints. On that note, I very much appreciate your feedback. Again though, chasing “the true IC” is an impossible task because it means different things to different people. It’s much more practical to discuss the features on a case-by-case basis.

On that note, what’s the single most important change you’d like to see, and why? Feel free to respond in a new thread and we can continue with a more focused discussion. :slight_smile:

14

This sounds a lot like what happened to the music industry…

First it was the casette tape that would kill the music industry, since everybody would just home record from radio, and nobody would buy albums anymore, no artist would ever make any money ever again…
Then the CD happened, people would just buy one and then copy it for all their friends and nobody would buy it anymore…no artist would ever make any money ever again…
Then downloading happened, now that would definitely be the end of the music industry, no artist would ever make any money ever again…

Innovation happens. Yes some things get easier, but some thing don’t… It’s a shift of focus and skill. Having to click a billion buttons is not a great thing, does not require skill and is not a necessity to make the game fun.

Op limit, how did the op limit make sense? So I have 1 planet and you have 300, I can do a billion attacks but only 7 ops? Morale for ops makes so much more sense.

Fam council? Come on man, all it does it prevent us from having to copy paste screens into chat. This is hardly impacting the gameplay, and actually increases teamplay.

Complexity this and that, the only argument against the yama is really that is beats down the usefulness of the ‘Find target players planets’ op. I agree with that, but Pie already said to change that in the new version.
And to top that off. The source code extraction and putting it into MapGen was even worse. What you all seem to be forgetting is that that was a VIP feature, which is basically ‘Pay-to-Win’.
In the end the yama is literally no change to what it was before, every fam had a VIP (you needed it for drafting anyways), who would just create daily plists of every fam in the galaxy. Now we can all do it, whats the big deal?

One of the best things Pie has done so far is get rid of ‘Pay-to-Win’, cause that is complete and utter bullshit.

15

To be fair, the op thing is badly designed either way imo. Relying on morale is more realistic but due to morale in general being kind of borked it causes other balance issues. I prefer it the old way with the hard cap; even if it doesn’t make the most sense as a concept, a hard limit put more constraints on portal dropping, which is more interesting to me than what we have now. It’s not a great design either, but is the lesser of the 2 evils to me.

The best solution to me is to do something like the Fleet Efficiency feature we talked about awhile back, and maybe even split impact by unit type. In your example, a player with 1 planet could in theory op a much larger empire so long as they could fund it, but they’d likely fail most of the time even though their success rate would increase as their bonus increases.

So you can do a bunch of attacks and a bunch of ops with literally no limit in attempts, but with diminishing returns on effectiveness if you can’t replenish your units. That sounds both more realistic and more strategically interesting.

The op limit sucks as a concept, but our morale sucks even worse. We can/should get rid of both, and I intend to do so! :slight_smile:

16

Was yama not given to replace pay to win? Vip features inculded yama map and wasnt fair to the rest.
Map gen was usless eventually anyways once that galaxys got smaller. You could either just take a very fast glance at map like you can easily do now even without features on or use ftp. The yama map always was available for what the last 10 years? if you payed i see no issue with it. Yes allows attackers to attack much easier and makes ftp a bit useless at times unless targeting that single player but times change and so does the game. I enjoy everyone having the vip features .

We need to add a lot of out of game features tho like for an example… All of silenz.org feautures and make them all work again.
Maybe even the old pax raiding tool for mass sending.

17

well i think we agree on most points Pie, but

@I_like_pie:
The yama thing is a good point though, but again there’s always been a move towards streamlining the gameplay.

the map change with auto yama’s for one, It changes the gameplay in sutch a radical way, dont you think the game was better without it? :stuck_out_tongue:

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In some ways yes, in other ways no. It’s a net positive imo.

I place more value on strategizing with easily accessible info than I do on the process of getting the info itself. I never found it particularly fun to have to curate/manage/organize planet lists.

I’d rather just look at a map and make decisions. Imo the game was worse without it.

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@I_like_pie agreed but, why than dont make it easy to transfere a p-list recived from a succsefull OP into MAP, instead of the free yama we have today that kills that particular strategizing element…? :smiley:

in what succsefull strategy game expect boardgames like risk, is map info freely avalible like it is now in IC…

imo, placement of attackers, cores, expansion etc is one of the biggest strategic elements in a conflict game like this… and its completly taken away with the free yama list.

I bascily played only attacker in my IC years, and now its just a matter of travel time to reach your opponent after they expoed spread. I struggle to see how you can see that as positiv vs what it can be :smiley:

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Who said anything about what it can be? So far we’ve only been discussing it compared to not having it all.

I agree, what it is now is nowhere near as useful/intuitive as it can and should be. That’s why we’re rewriting the game, after all. :slight_smile: