About the format of attacks ( damage-strikes )

[turin]

A small change is indeed possible and the easiest to make, but changing things solely for the sake of changing them is also never a good idea.

A space would help if you made it 7 x3, but given that the game currently explains 7-3, which it would still do with 7x3 or 7 x3 or 7 x 3, is the change worth it? I was with Livor when really it did not seem that terribly confusing at all, and this damage indication has been used for a while. That does not make it right per say, but how many players who do not read the forums and just update their games will wonder what the sudden change from 7-3 to 7x3 means?

I agree w.r.t. it not being confusing for me personally; I basically understood it the first time I saw a unit attack - "he's attacking four times, each strike seems to do five damage, I guess that's what this 5-4 means"...

But it does seem like a decent number of people are confused by it. The topic of whether to change it comes up fairly often, after all. So I wouldn't be averse to changing it. Yes, the game does "currently explain 7-3", with the tool-tip and comment in the tutorial... but not everyone plays the tutorial and you shouldn't need to to learn the basic mechanics, and people don't always mouse over tool-tips either. Yes, maybe they should, but they don't...

[drwilly]

I only recently found out about the tooltips at all.
And that was after i played through every mainline campaign and played some multiplayer matches aswell.

[Gauteamus]

[...]you shouldn't need to to learn the basic mechanics[...]

How else are you going to know the rules? Intuition? Am I sensing a Leibnizian ontology here? *Insert silly joke about different infinitesimal notations*

More seriously, I have never had any trouble with the notation 5-4, and I cannot really see how it is possible to enjoy playing the game and not understanding this mechanic, and vice versa, but on the other hand I do not see any harm in changing it to e.g 5 x4 if that is more clear.

[Lord Ork]

I think the order is counter-intuitive. It doesn't take a long time to become accustomed, but when playing with another player, I always say it wrong (ie. 14-2 as "It does 14 of 2").

[Turuk]

Lord Ork, a good point. Though it really comes to how a player would interpret it into a sentence. I always took it as "I will hit for 14 damage 2 times."

[jb]

It is beyond me how anyone could be confused about how to interpret the damage code after playing a single game. You see what your units are doing when they attack and defend, how could one not connect the dots? At first glance you might not get it, but that is true of many elements in complex games like Wesnoth. The confusion should end within moments.

And if you are somehow still not understanding what those crazy numbers in side bar mean, there is a simple solution. Learn what they mean.

This notion that somehow people shouldn't be required to learn how to play is ridiculous.

[ancestral]

For what it's worth noting, it's opposite of many tabletop roleplaying games, where 2d10 would be roll d10 twice.

[Max]

It is beyond me how anyone could be confused about how to interpret the damage code after playing a single game.

you're right - but i don't think that's the point.

here's what i thought when i first played wesnoth:
i wasn't assuming that a unit had a fixed number of strikes but that you could spend your MP either for moving or attacking and that e.g. 8-3 means 8 damage and a strike costs 3MP (that's how it's done in games like Battle Island IV - Incubation that i've played before).

since wesnoth is free there are a lot of people that give it a try and for those that hadn't played similar games before wesnoth looks complex initially. if there's something that can be done to make it more suitable for beginners i think it's worth considering it.

[Simons Mith]

It is beyond me how anyone could be confused about how to interpret the damage code after playing a single game.

you're right - but i don't think that's the point.

Yes, I was going to use the phrase 'beside the point' myself. Good user interface design says, whenever a trivial change makes things clearer, you should probably make that change. After all, you can learn any interface, no matter how baroque - so presumably that means there's never any need to change anything - but good UI design is about finding and tidying up even the little things. That's why it's hard to do; because these tiny niggles are so easy to overlook, especially if you're closely associated with the UI in question.

[Thanatos]

For what it's worth:

Personally, I think 3x7 is much more intuitive in describing how the attacks work than 7-3.
Just show these notations to anyone you like out of context and let them speak it out loudly: "Three times seven." and "7 minus three". Which term describes the way it works best?

[Turuk]

At which point is it a minus sign? - is just as much a hyphen as it is a minus.

Tidying up the interface is all well and good as well, but as pointed out above, players have to learn how to play the game at some point, and not everything Wesnoth does has to be exactly how it is done in some other game so that players are familiar with it. That is making the assumption that the players have played similar games and so it would be more intuitive for them, when it is quite possible that they would have as much to learn even with changing it to 7 x3. They would still have to learn that it is not 21 damage, but 7 damage each strike with a possible total of 3 strikes, and as jb pointed out, they will learn it at some point by playing the tutorial (which walks them through how the damage system works) or just by playing a game and watching what happens.

[chaoticwanderer]

I personally (nor anyone I know) have no problem with the "x-y" system.

Using 7x3 would give the you were going to do 21 damage, and is less aesthetic than 7-3.

The only other way I could see it represented is 7(3) as someone previously mentioned.

[Thanatos]

At which point is it a minus sign? - is just as much a hyphen as it is a minus.

True.

But as I said above: Read out of context, that is: standing alone, everyone I know would read "Seven minus three". And that's my vision of intuitive usage: Being able to use/understand a thing without having to know about special contexts. Basic maths is a much more general context than the game-specific notation.

However, I understand perfectly well, that changing the interface would mean (a) a specific amount of work for the people directly involved, that's the devs, and (b) a change in usage for the hard group of old-school players, which mostly will be the devs again. So I would understand perfectly well, if everything stays exactly as it is at the time being.

/me goes out and enjoys early summer a bit more.

[Turuk]

However, I understand perfectly well, that changing the interface would mean (a) a specific amount of work for the people directly involved, that's the devs, and (b) a change in usage for the hard group of old-school players, which mostly will be the devs again. So I would understand perfectly well, if everything stays exactly as it is at the time being.

I'm not entirely sure why you seem to put this as it won't change solely because the developers are the hurdle in the way. Particularly for your (b), there is a large number of old-school players on this forum and on the server that vastly outnumber the developer community and would be affected by the change in usage as well.

[Matthias1217]

Another way of putting it could be 7(3x). Which would be translated, "Seven, three times." That would be the clearest of the choices for me to understand.

And I also had a small amount of trouble understanding the notation 7-3 when I first started. Even though I played the tutorial and read all the messages it still seemed counter-intuitive to put it as 7-3 than 3-7.