More interactive Market UI



  • So here's the thing. I've been enjoying Screeps a lot lately, but I've only been around for like three months, and my AI is rather rudimentary still. So a lot of planning and building is done manually, but it is also something I rather enjoy, being the all-mighty entity that directs a bunch of worker creeps to do their bidding... Ahem, but I digress.

    I've been participating on the market for a while now, but mostly in a manual fashion -- setting up and managing my orders via console commands. And I've found this way of managing the market to be woefully inadequate, with no other way to make it more user friendly.

    So my "feature request" would be thus: could we have a better market UI, that would allow for creation, management, and fulfillment of market orders directly via the UI, instead of having to copy-paste stuff between market, notepad, and console in order to get things done.

    I know many of the veteran players have it all automated and wouldn't really bother with it, but I think even they could still benefit from it, and it would definitely bring in more players into the market as well, which would be beneficial to the whole economy.

    So please, give your considerations and thoughts onto this proposal. Thank you!

    👆


  • Hi Orlet,

    automate all the things! I understand your point of view, but I have to disagree. Is marketing a PITA to do manually? Yes! But this is the motivation to automate, which is the "goal" of the game. IMHO 🙂

    ☝


  • @utiuti but it is not mutually exclusive. Good UI would only provide a lower point of entry for new players, who could not automate their code properly yet. Automated code would still hold an advantage.

    With that reasoning you could also argue that manual building should be taken away as well, "because the goal is to automate everything".



  • @orlet I think the difference is that placing structures is a feature that is encountered within the first hour of playing the game, so having an (initial) manual way to do this manually is important for new players. In contrast, market code is a more advanced feature that is usually attempted only once a player has a better understanding of the game and has a fair amount of automation in place already.

    Of course, I'm all for improving UIs in general, but given the limited resources of the dev team, I don't think that making nicer interfaces for doing things manually should be a high priority.

    👍


  • @muon maybe it's just me, enjoying playing the game in a more interactive way, other than just watching my ant farm. And I still firmly believe that it would be of benefit to all players.

    And yes, I am aware that it may not be the highest priority, but more of the real of "nice to have" things.