Well, than they are good enough to have a vote then....
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Yes, when looking at the information for the country of France, there will be the three icons to indicate that it is a <Tier X> <land-based> <monacrhy>, each of those will be hoverable and provide an explanation. The name France on that page will not have a tooltip to indicate that it is a 'country name'.
I an fully on board with having a tooltip that explains the HRE. I don't think that the HRE is an IO needs to be part of it. I don't think that IO then also needs a tooltip ('An IO is one or more countries together that have bespoke mechanics' doesn't need to be stated).
I am fully on board with having a tooltip that explains the Patriarchates. I still don't think that we need to mention that they are IO.
When the common thing between the group we call IO are that each is discretely made for each individual case then is it really a group? The group is the 'Miscellanea' or 'Miscellany'.
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"Miscellaneous Political Entity" would be another awful name replacement.
An IO is a grouping of countries of some kind. Many of which are of common types like PUs or alliances, while others are sui generis like the HRE or Ilkhanate. Stating somewhere that what I'm looking at right now is a grouping seems to be useful enough.
Anyway, I doubt that we'll get any further. It's not a big deal either way.
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No, not until a cynic throws a dead feastherless chicken into the discussion in order to make a point.
Also some came pretty close - admittedly
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It's the same thing, you're just wording it in ways that are backend focused. "Can be freely scripted to have a wide variety of unique mechanics" is the same thing as "typically has bespoke mechanics."
I think it can be. Frankly I think the claims that IOs are somehow a purely backend thing that will make no sense to group from the player perspective are ridiculous. Their uniqueness is their commonality; they are buckets for unique mechanics and interactions I think that can be useful to explain to the player.
And you won't be told that "Holy Roman Empire" is an "International Organization Name." The game explains what objects and entities and mechanics are, it doesn't explain what words are.
Exactly. When we look at a country we see that it's a country and can read what countries are. And when we look at an IO we can see that it's an IO and read what IOs are. Sounds consistent and informative and clear.
I think that explaining that IOs are international and involve bespoke mechanics can be useful. It's not about explaining something better than the specific IO but teaching players what IOs are like so they know what to expect when they see them.
But I'm going to flip this on you - can you provide a reason for breaking their UI design standards in this one case that is based on an argument about UI design or game design and not just a personal dislike of this specific name?
I know I'm also arguing that it can be useful information, but I think people are approaching this backwards because of dislike for the name, which isn't a good argument for UI design. Fundamentally, everything in Project Caesar is identified as the concept or mechanic it belongs to, and every such identification contains a tooltip. This even applies to things that are obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense, like "building type" and "unit type" and "event option." The developers are not sitting their analyzing every concept and mechanic and trying to predict which might be useful to explain and which ones are less useful, they are simply giving everything an explanation. If you are arguing to change those I think you need to come in with more relevant arguments than "this name doesn't fit well" and "this concept isn't that useful to describe generically."
That's the beauty of nested tooltips - us experienced players just have one extra word or phrase we can not really look at, which isn't problematic at all, and newcomers can read basic information about whatever they want whenever they want. Are there tooltips that few will ever read and even fewer will find useful? Probably. But that's fine, and designing the UI in this way means that no one has to try and predict what mechanics people will find confusing and what tooltips people will find useful, because everything is explained by default. Would someone ever be confused about what the HRE is and then have to look it up on the wiki and then be annoyed it wasn't mentioned in game? I don't know, none of us know, we're all guessing. But actually we don't have to guess, because it's named by default, because everything is.
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Just wait till Aviarna Influenca hits your poultry-based society.... preferably delivered via trebuchet into your well-fed obscenely rich metropolis.... Then you will get what it means to get a cold turkey in a pointed discussion.No, not until a cynic throws a dead feastherless chicken into the discussion in order to make a point.
Also some came pretty close - admittedly
Besides my suggestions, which other did you like?
Maybe for some more contemporary to the PC timeframe terms we should,.... again.... look at the Italians (Machiavelli, Venetian/Genovese bankers...) or to the Habsburgs (people on a Charles V payroll.... although I fear they operated in 'mine', 'my brothers' and 'my cousins' terms.....
)No, just Miscellany."Miscellaneous Political Entity" would be another awful name replacement.
Or 'Grab bag'
or 'bespoke mechanic'
depending on what you are meaning by common and unique.
I would say all are unique in setup. Some are unique in existence (can be only one) while others can have many instances (common?)
(Alliance isn't an IO)
A PU is unique from the HRE. They are both unique.
Only one HRE can exist while there can be many PUs.
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So the tooltip would be "This International Organization contains multiple countries & has unique mechanics." I don't see how that's useful information; you can quite clearly see the list of multiple countries below, and you are in the UI that shows what specific mechanics the IO has.
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So it is useful to tell the player that this is one of the various things in the game that are the same only by being different? This is the point where we disagree.
Is that useful? Would it not be better if that subtitle referred back to the HRE?
I see telling the player "this is an IO but it is not like the other IO that you learned about it is different" is not useful. It would be better to not name it as an IO.
Sweet, can you provide their UI design standards? I would love to see them. I have been asking for a UI TT for a long time now.
(I am assuming that you are talking about subtitles and I am sure that if we go back through all the TT and posted items not all of the have a 'subtitle'.)
I am stating that they are also now identifying things that are neither a concept or a mechanic. The HRE or PUs are a concept / mechanic, how they decided to implement them is neither. Treat bespoke mechanics and UI as bespoke no matter the implementation.
I also would argue that some of the ones that do do not provide useful information. Lets take 'event option'. The only way to see an event option is when looking at the event and hovering over one of the options. Is it really useful to tell me that this option that I am hovering over while looking at an event is actually an 'event option' and then taking it a step further to give me a definition of "event option". Event Option: Lists the effects that would occur be selecting an option of an event. Hmm... might need to define the concept of option now.
A UI needs to be wary of blindly following patterns and adding too much to the screen just because it can. This makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Blindly following the pattern gives us "International Organization Variable" (see above). A UI needs to make sure that the the data it is presenting is useful.
While I do believe that nested tooltips have there uses but they also become a crutch. It makes things hard to read as every other word is a different color. It gets us useless tooltips like the following where what the first tooltip tells is too limited and relies on nesting for the real information we want.
- So the tooltip takes the number on the banner that I am hovering an uses it in a sentence. This tooltip could be improved by telling us how we get to the number and/or explaining what 'dynastic power' is instead of making us go to a new tooltip.
- This tooltip could easily provide us what the modifier entailed in this tooltip instead of making us go to the nested tooltip.
- (Look, it is the tooltip without a subtitle.)
- Again why is this two layers?
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Those tell absolutely nothing about what you are dealing with.
PUs are common, as are ad hoc alliances like Jihads or liberation coalitions. They follow from somewhat generic rules and events. And there can be multiples of them in the world.
The HRE, Ilkhanate, Tatar Yoke or Catholic Church are unique IOs (sui generis type). There will not be multiples of these in the world and they have special rules attached to them.
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This thread has convinced me that calling them IOs in game makes no sense. The tool tip for the HRE should explain the HRE, the Shogunate the Shogunate, etc.
"The HRE is a political structure with electors and Imperial Authority and XYZ"; not: "The HRE is an International Organization with Special IO Statuses and IO Variables"
No need to make things feel more generic.
"The HRE is a political structure with electors and Imperial Authority and XYZ"; not: "The HRE is an International Organization with Special IO Statuses and IO Variables"
No need to make things feel more generic.
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Exactly. This is the kind of concept that wikis exist to explain largely for the benefit of modders, but in game it just doesn't matter.
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Let's say that a player, brand new to PGSGs, enters their first game of PC. They have not followed these dev diaries and through them learned about the game's entire framework. They are presented with a large quantity of gameplay concepts that will be more or less relevant their gameplay. Learning all of these things will be a possibly lengthy process no matter how well-crafted the UI is; what will help speed that process, or prevent them from feeling overwhelmed?
To put it short, I believe that player insight into the backend could absolutely increase comprehension, and I agree with Ekyman about the term itself:
In my opinion, using umbrella terms like International Organization will help even new players create a cognitive grouping of concepts. Presenting players with a dozen unique components like the HRE, Ilkhanate, PUs, etc. that appear completely disconnected from one another will make the player feel responsible for learning them all individually (that this will happen anyway, from a gameplay standpoint, is not the point). Instead, naming them as IOs in the game's top-level conceptual basis will help the player intuitively group UI components together, like the IO buttons that will appear at the bottom of the screen, and create avenues for future recognition by identifying individual IOs as part of a larger system of mechanics.
I definitely don't think "International Organization X" should be a thing within the scope of each IO's mechanics and tooltips, since that kinda muddies things. But, broad recognition of these disparate gameplay components as part of a cohesive backend, at the top level, may prevent players from feeling overwhelmed and create a much more effective cognitive bridge than if everything was kept conceptually distinct.
To put it short, I believe that player insight into the backend could absolutely increase comprehension, and I agree with Ekyman about the term itself:
In my opinion, using umbrella terms like International Organization will help even new players create a cognitive grouping of concepts. Presenting players with a dozen unique components like the HRE, Ilkhanate, PUs, etc. that appear completely disconnected from one another will make the player feel responsible for learning them all individually (that this will happen anyway, from a gameplay standpoint, is not the point). Instead, naming them as IOs in the game's top-level conceptual basis will help the player intuitively group UI components together, like the IO buttons that will appear at the bottom of the screen, and create avenues for future recognition by identifying individual IOs as part of a larger system of mechanics.
I definitely don't think "International Organization X" should be a thing within the scope of each IO's mechanics and tooltips, since that kinda muddies things. But, broad recognition of these disparate gameplay components as part of a cohesive backend, at the top level, may prevent players from feeling overwhelmed and create a much more effective cognitive bridge than if everything was kept conceptually distinct.
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This is such a no brainer and natural development of the UX in current Parqdox games that I can't possibly understand how people think this is controversial
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Hard disagree. They ARE completely disconnected from each other, and you WILL have to learn them separately. The Yoke is not like the HRE, which is not like the Papacy, which differs from the Ilkhanate, which isn't the Shogunate which is distinct from the Celestial Empire, all of which have no relations to Unions and Coalitions. I'd argue that the game presenting them as if they do helps to confuse and overwhelm our theoretical new player.
I'd rather the IOs have nested tooltips about themselves like @Oglesby suggested above. That way, everything in the UI of the HRE is related to the HRE and helps the new player learn about the region they're playing in, rather than distracting the brain's very good pattern-seeking behavior by making you look for similarities between it and the Hindu branch of Shiva or whatever.
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It's a matter of how someone approaches the learning cognitively. Using International Organizations as an umbrella term is a way to assert some kind of order over that learning process. This is why complicated lesson plans are broken down in hierarchal ways, rather than presented as a long list of big topics because the latter appears more daunting to many people. Like we all agree, each individual IO will need to be learned individually, but in providing them all with a common identity at the top level of understanding you already put someone, who may already be struggling, partway into the door. It's a helping hand mechanic, from a cognitive standpoint.
Like I said before, I agree with this. There should be no mention of IOs in the mechanics or tooltips within the scope of each individual IO because that muddies things. Broad identification at the top level is my concern, and where I think we can all find some kind of compromise.
At the end of the day, different humans learn in different ways. With PC's complexity, there isn't going to be one method that maximizes understanding for everyone. However the game turns out in the end, Tinto has approached development in certain ways to ensure that their understanding of the game remains intact and intuitive, and one of those ways is thinking about these various individual groupings of flavor and mechanics as part of a larger system of International Organizations. It has worked for Tinto, and for at least some of the players following the development, so there is already practical precedent for presenting International Organizations as an umbrella term to create a cognitive grouping for people learning how to play. That hierarchal, broad-to-specific learning progression, is where I'm coming from.
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I think this is the bit we disagree on. To go with the lesson plans, for me, branding them "IO" isn't a helpful umbrella. To go with the education analogy, I see it more like grouping up Biology and Aerospace Engineering because both are STEM fields, rather than grouping up the misc. components of either one of those fields. Knowing that Biology is STEM isn't helpful when you're trying to learn about the aerodynamics of building a plane. Likewise, knowing that the Pope collecting a Tithe is technically in the same sphere isn't helpful when learning about how Coalitions work. Grouping it all into International Organizations in tooltips makes it a big, unwieldy lesson plan, and from what we've seen of the nested tooltips might actually make relevant information harder to learn by generalizing.
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Okay you're not wrong about learning in general, but this is such a basic thing that I don't think it applies. Other than explaining that the unit you play as in game is the country, this is not a complex concept that your unit can be inside a group.
We didn't need in EU4 there to be a generalized scheme for explaining the HRE, Native Federations, Coalitions, and Celestial China System, to make it clear they were different groupings.
This is furthered by the fact that each is IO is supposed to be super unique, and the fact that the idea for all should be intuitive from understanding real life, such as being a member of a coalition.
This homogenizing of way different entities on the front end seems counter-productive to making them seem different and weighty and flavor.
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Man, i find it so... limited... when people go on abouh how you cant compare apples and organes...
Ofc you can, they are both edable fruots grown on trees, one cost 3€ per kilo and is imported the other is locally prodiced and costs half a.euro per kilo.
Both need bees and other isects to produce.
One have this and that chemical composition the other a bit of that and some of that...
If you find it hard to put international organization (sure, the name sounds anahronostic and not the most immmersive) ... but the term does a very well job of summing up the common feature berwwen those organizations
Ofc you can, they are both edable fruots grown on trees, one cost 3€ per kilo and is imported the other is locally prodiced and costs half a.euro per kilo.
Both need bees and other isects to produce.
One have this and that chemical composition the other a bit of that and some of that...
If you find it hard to put international organization (sure, the name sounds anahronostic and not the most immmersive) ... but the term does a very well job of summing up the common feature berwwen those organizations
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Of course you can compare them. But in this case there's not really a good reason to do so front-end and a few reasons not to.
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