New Feature Suggestion: Threat Highlighting

[Melkor's Therapist]

The proposal: When the player has selected one of their own units, all visible enemy units that could attack the selected unit on the next turn would be highlighted (perhaps by a red glow or outline). As the player moves the mouse to select a path, the threat highlights would update along with the path display to show which enemy units could attack the unit on the next turn if it made the currently shown move.

Why do it: The purpose of this feature is to automate a tedious and time consuming part of playing a game of Wesnoth now - moving the mouse over all enemy units in view to check whether or not their range includes any hexes next to the one you are thinking of moving a unit to. This feature wouldn't give the player any information that they don't already have, it would just make it available to them faster.

I think this sort of thing fits in Wesnoth, since Wesnoth already has a number of "nice" interface features that aren't common to similar games, such as the likely battle outcomes display, or the ability to set up multi-turn moves.

Why not do it:
1. It requires a UI change with some new graphics.
2. It might require changes to the tutorial to explain it.
3. It would place extra work on the CPU while updating the path display, which might make the game run badly on older machines, or in large battles. Because of this it should be possible to turn it off in the game options somewhere.
4. This space left blank for the reasons not to do it that I haven't thought of.

[Velensk]

IMO it seems unessisary but not a bad idea. I've never had a problem figuring out threats (though it is annoying when I miss one.)

[Cuyo Quiz]

The veteran players know how to determine this with more efficiency, so you could say it would even out the battle in some ways.

It could also mean that turns could take less, as threat information would be displayed for the user in a direct way. That is unless the user starts checking alll the hexes and try to decide between those that have less threats.

[Glowing Fish]

There would certainly be a few times when this would come in very useful.

I am sure I am not the only person here who has moved a very wounded unit back to a village, seemingly safe, and then realized the next turn that an enemy Elvish scout could indeed reach it. (Elvish Scouts are worse than most skirmishers!)

But, I also think this is one of the things that you learn through game play. I don't think it is unfair to expect people to look out for this themselves.

Don't go to Glowing Fish for advice, he will say both yes and no.

[Darth Fool]

I think that this is a good idea because as a general rule of thumb for UIs:
Any information that a human could discover themselves through tedious attention to detail but that the computer can generate easily ought to be made available to the player in as intuitive a way as possible.

Of course, one does not want to clutter up the interface with all possible information, so a balance needs to be made to keep the most important information up front. I could see this being handled either by adding another hotkey to "show threats to the current hex," and maybe one for "show friendly support at current hex", or mayb just a "show all units that can reach current hex within 1 turn". The computer can calculate these very easily.

[Eleazar]

Any information that a human could discover themselves through tedious attention to detail but that the computer can generate easily ought to be made available to the player in as intuitive a way as possible.

Of course, one does not want to clutter up the interface with all possible information, so a balance needs to be made to keep the most important information up front.

Well said!

It shouldn't be too hard to make an appropriate "dangerous enemy" hex highlighter.

[Dave]

I think this is a very good idea....I'm in favor of it.

[Sapient]

A clever idea but the challenge will be to keep it from looking ugly, I think. Eleazar's new ellipses might come in handy for that.

We'd have to judge the processor consumption after it was implemented. Probably shouldn't be too bad.

[Eleazar]

I'm thinking something that would replace the "darken.png" when used in a can't-go-to hex, and a different but similar graphic for accessible hexes.
Does that sound feasable?

[SkeletonCrew]

I also like the idea Unfortunately my todo list is quite long atm, but I'll put it on it and if nobody beats me to implanting it I'll have a look at it.