Wish lists for this coming year of polish and quality of life improvements

[Helmut von Dandy]

The "What's Next" dev diary describes the next several updates like this:

As is always and forever the case I’m not able to make specific promises about when all these improvements will come out, but I can say that the next three updates (1.10, 1.11 and 1.12) which are all coming out later this year will be smaller in scale than 1.9 and will be more focused on bug fixing, quality of life and general game polish.

For this reason I wanted to draw attention to the UX improvements I'd like to see in future updates, and encourage others to share theirs. So absolutely no system rework requests, no flavour requests, no bug reports, and no complaints about historical accuracy. Just improvements to how we interact with systems as they are currently designed, and improvements to how existing information is communicated.

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Here's mine:

Construction

• Shift+Alt+Click and Ctrl+Alt+Click adds multiple constructions to the top of the queue.
• The list view of the state-level Buildings tab is just the same view as the country Buildings panel, with the ability to set production methods.
• Temporary National Revenue and Temporary National Expenses are persistent in the Money tooltip.
  • This addresses an issue where a sudden budget deficit will seem inexplicable because there's no more graph to reflect the change to temporary revenue when the investment pool runs dry.

Trade

• A good's trade potential is shown when viewing it in a state.
• States with high trade potential are shown when viewing a good in a market.
• The Trade tab of the Market panel shows goods with high trade potential. Clicking them goes to, or expands, the relevant trade centre.
• The flags on trade routes in the Market panel, trade centres, and the Bought by list etc. are sorted by volume, with the largest market on top when they're stacked.
• A chart of trading partners by volume is available in the Trade tab.

Military

• An army's source of supplies is clearly indicated in the army's panel and tooltip, not hidden inside the Supply tooltip.
• When an army is selected its supply lines are much more clearly indicated using a path styled similarly to the movement path, even on land.
• An alert appears when an army's supply lines are being raided, indicating the affected army and sea nodes.
• A predicted convoy cost is shown when launching a naval invasion or moving an army overseas.
• When upgrading units, upgrade progress and the expected time to upgrade are shown somewhere.

Diplomacy

• Clicking one of the leaders when drafting a treaty opens the country's panel, not the character's.
• Economic dependency metrics, especially unfilled buy and sell orders, are not buried several tooltips deep into the liberty desire bar.
• The target of a draft treaty can be changed, so that the same treaty can be offered to another country without re-drafting.
• Treaty articles are available as Diplomatic Actions in the Diplomacy lens. Countries are listed with their acceptance of that article and selecting a country starts a treaty draft with that country including that article.

Politics

• To avoid the double negative conveyed by the cross icon, effects like Disable Nationalization or Forbid Monopolies are changed to either be indicated with a check mark, reworded to just Nationalization and Monopolies with the cross icon, or listed without an icon at all.

Companies

• Allow potential and attainable companies to be pinned.

Platforms

• Inertial scrolling support on macOS for trackpads and the Magic Mouse.
• Correct text entry controls for macOS. Option+Click should move the cursor between words, rather than Ctrl+Click, for example.
• The macOS icon is a platform-correct squircle.

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What about you? Remember, no system rework requests, no flavour requests, no bug reports, and no complaints about historical accuracy.

 

[ac566]

Some ideas:

• When looking at local prices for a good, need a filter for states within your country rather than within your market
• A filter for incorporated/unincorporated states in the buildings list and the building menu
• Alert for when you can form a country
• Mapmode for countries you have a treaty with
• Option to skip binding period for certain types of treaty
• Option for lump sum payment in treaty
• Alert for when a subject will go bankrupt/default or some way to prevent that
• A clearer indication for when a wargoal will go to you vs a subject (oftentimes I will end up transfering a subject to one of my subjects)
• A way to split an army/navy based on HQ
• More information on the building army panel, showing the exact breakdown of units in a state without having to hover over it
• Align the consript menu with the army building menu
• Clearer categories for potential companies (I often see dozens that I could never make since they show up if you have interests in a region)
• Denser Companie screen
• Wider and more information dense building menu (i.e. show more info you can find from the "full" version on the condensed version)
• Split up income/expenses from trade deals by country and apart from "diplomatic expenses"
• Always show import/export tariffs if any amount of the good is traded, even if it's only exports/imports
• Save outliner settings between playthroughs

 

[bbad89]

I’d love to see lobbies tied in even more with state/company diplomacy and have more granular interactions with them to support meddling in other countries’ affairs. They recently changed this in a hotfix to work with treaties more but I have yet to play around with it.

 

[Zhetone]

Make it easier to combat naval invasions by garrisoning a region rather than treating it like assigning a unit to any standard front; as it currently works, once a naval invasion is defeated, your units automatically assign to another active front, potentially taking them halfway around the world when the enemy will probably launch another invasion imminently, creating an annoying micromanagement headache

 

[Voidian]

I wish we could see all of the impacts of "transfer goods" treaties.

If I'm going to send 2k steel to austria, what does it mean?

How much am I expected to earn? How much are they expected to earn from this treaty? How does it impact our markets, specifically? Would be nice to see subventions and tariffs applied to that good from both sides when you're selecting them, without having to cancel the whole treaty, go into your market, look for that one good, see if there are tariffs and subventions, close, go to their market, do the exact same thing, pray you remember all the goods when you get back to the treaty tab.

 

[SpiritRiven]

Being able to press "G" when hovering over a production building in the goods tab to take you to those production buildings in the building registry, filtered.

Currently it just exits your window and its soooo mucj clicking i have to do to find those buildings

 

[Serensius]

Great thread! Some other ideas:

- A panel to show who your major trade partners are and a breakdown of the goods you trade with them
- A separate category for unique companies in states you own
- An alert for when your investment pool is about to be empty
- If I gain an obligation from a random country through an event or something, let me know why!

 

[z3rO_]

My small gripes:

- I dislike how wildly Prestige fluctuates between having an army, mobilising an army, and mobilising your conscripts. It could make sense - since the true strength of the army can only be seen in battle, but I think the huge fluctuations aren't representative of that.
- I think that the cap on barraks and consripts being static 100\100 instead scaling from your state pop is kind of wierd and benefits blobbing too much. I think we can move from that.
- It is wierd how subjects and their actions aren't part of treaties. I would like to become protectorate for money, and buy myself Techology Spread.

 

[Pendables]

I would like subjects in diplomatic plays to be improved. You should be able to start a war with a wargoal for your subject, and you should be able to put wargoals on opposing subjects without having to awkwardly pull them into the play with a liberate subject wargoal first.

 

[exi123]

- more tight auto advance rules for some development buildings (powerplants like railways also checking local base prize, government administration only advancing in incorporated states, always only expand on 100% employment)
- an option to disband all military units in a state at hostile takeover
- a clear, understandable and visible indicator in the tech screen when innovation is below the current cap
- clear, visible and understandable tooltips to see where radicals are coming from
- do not show agitators supporting a law when I am not able to invite them

 

[InvalidToken]

Companies:
- Changes to coop/command economy company dividends split (so it's not just mostly bureaucrats in command economy), which were discussed as coming in 1.9 at some point, but I think they're probably pushed back post-summer period (Which is fair, the team already seems to be working on all fronts).

We're planning to change how company dividends work under Command Economy & Co-ops to address this issue (they should go to the government & mostly back to the workers, respectively). Hopefully should be able to get this done in one of the upcoming hotfixes.

Construction:
- Some method of being able to encourage/discourage AI to expand existing factories instead of building 1 level of everything everywhere (especially companies), when they could just build the 31st-50th level of the building in one place with sufficient workforce and infrastructure to make use of larger economies of scale.

 

[Froonk]

I am not sure if this would be within the scope of a quality of life change, but I'd really like for infrastructure to be a state-based transport cost rather than a separate value that clashes with transport goods price. Since trade is removed as the main fiddly micromanagement sink, it seems necessary infrastructure should be taken a look at as well since it is an extremely fiddly juggling that often leads to railroads growing more unprofitable the more infrastructure cost a state has which feels very counter-productive.

 

[Zhetone]

I would like subjects in diplomatic plays to be improved. You should be able to start a war with a wargoal for your subject, and you should be able to put wargoals on opposing subjects without having to awkwardly pull them into the play with a liberate subject wargoal first.

This is something I really want too, for example as Russia I wanted to press return state war goals for Afghanistan and I couldn't, and because they were my subject they weren't going to press them themselves. I don't know why you can't do it in this game because you can in other paradox games

 

[Alchemistscoil]

Integrate the GDP Ownership Display mod.

Shows how much of your economy is foreign owned and how much of foreign economies are owned by you and your investors.

 

[Ilya Belkin]

Notifications
- Only alert about agitators that can be invited (do not alert about the rest).
- Combined alert: countries joined a diplomatic play in one message.
- Do not alert about the treaty declined to the side that declined it.

 

[amixForever]

Let me turn off alerts for specific decisions. For example, I never want to take the exploration ones as I don't find those event chains enjoyable, but by ignoring them I might not notice that I can take other decisions I do care about. This is actually the only Paradox game I've played that doesn't have this feature and it's really annoying, I was using this back in Vicky 2!

A slider in the settings that lets me adjust the sizes of the cities and other objects on the map, there are some mods for this but I'd like it to be a default feature and have some control over it, so that I can have the sizes that look good and proper to me. Right now cities are really noticeable on the map and after a little industrialization everything looks like a 10 million inhabitants megalopolis, I want to feel a starker contrast between agricultural life and modernity.

A wargoal to return a country one of its claimed states. I can carve out Bulgaria with 5 states out of the Ottomans but I can't give Greece a single state unless they are my subject. The awkward way to go about this is to conquer the state for myself and then give it away.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

One more thing I completely forgot:

• Add Diplomatic Offers and Diplomatic Requests categories to the Diplomacy Lens. Each lists treaty articles as options. Selecting an article lists countries with base acceptance for that article (i.e. without the gift bonus). Selecting a country starts a draft treaty with that country including the selected article as a starting point. Offers include the article in the draft treaty with the player as the source, while Requests include the article with the player as the target.

 

[cyberrb25]

There are so many tooltips that need to be improved on the Military tab that I feel I would stay a long time with it.

• Military units list the good consumption, but neither have any pathway that leads to the goods that are consumed nor show the current prices for those goods.*
• Mobilisation options also list the good consumption, but don't link to the good and also don't list the change in consumption from changing options.
• When looking at armies in the map, the composition of the armies is in the 4th chained tooltip, and could more easily be much higher.

Those are the first ones that come to mind. I'm relatively sure I'd be able to get others if I check more extensively.

*PS.: It's not the only place where I remember the "X grain consumed" > "This means that they consume X grain" > "This means that they consume X grain" kind of recursive (in a bad way) tooltips.

 

[Desseabar]

I'd say some with map modes.

First, a 'turmoil map mode' would be useful to see, and would probably be more useful than the absolute number of radicals.
Second, I'd like a nesting of map modes. There's so many now that you have to scroll through them; I'd like some folder/nesting structure for economic, political, demographic ones.

 

[Sledjer]

• Create a function to facilitate repeated sequences of construction with different buildings, without the need to manually move them each time, e.g. iron mine, iron mine, coal mine, steel, tooling workshop
• Show all relevant state bonus icons on the construction map mode, such as showing the coal mine bonuses on the map while building coal mines, or showing mountain construction efficiency maluses for all construction
• Add an obvious, easy to see view of ideology chance percentages for characters, as well as IG chances for monarchy heirs
• Add an easier to understand pop-focused view on why peasants and unemployed pops are not taking available jobs in the state, rather than limiting it to looking at individual buildings which provide individual last attempt explanations of why they failed to hire
• Make new states automatically swap PMs to the most used PMs, except for PMs that use local goods
• Save the last location interests were in if you lose an interest slot, so an interest is immediately declared there again once you regain the slot