Beginner game mode

[tomreyn]

While I was thinking about which long-standing bugs and properties which make the game difficult to play for beginners MegaGlest has, I realised that while some things are really difficult for newbies, they are known and completely normal to regulars. Often newbies would want more hints on how stuff works, but regulars would feel their GUI is overcrowded. So I was wondering whether a beginner mode, an option toggleable in the Options menu, would work for this.

Beginner mode:

* Food / hunger notification should be more obvious, and provide warnings before food runs out, possibly providing a hint on what exactly to do for this very faction (or at least a general hint) to prevent / overcome the famine

* Notify player when the number of workers s/he has considerably exceeds the number of troops (>75%?)

* Track idle workers and notify player when any workers are idle for more than X frames. Explain how to identify ('i') and focus on ('g') idle players.

Since this mode might also be considered to provide an advantage in network games, it could be worth discussing whether its use should be limited to single player games. Personally I think that the additional notifications it provides are just annoying to regulars and they will thus refrain from abusing this feature for network games anyways, so it should be no problem to allow for it.

[aqeeliz]

Heh, that food thing was interesting. I found out about it while playing one day, I forgot to add farms (and didn't realize they are important enough to be built in the beginning), and when I was fighting the on-coming attack from CPU and building more troops, I heard some new noises that I had never heard before. My troops died, CPU had just a couple of them left, I tried building more soldiers and noticed there is no gold, looked for workers mining gold and saw that they were all dead. Those two enemy soldiers destroyed my whole base then, and I sat there watching it...

Hmm.. didn't know about 'i' and 'g', they work in curren version? I should try that next time I play.

[ultifd]

Food and hunger notification shouldn't just be for newbies...

75%...of what? Why would newbies need to know that?

[tomreyn]

Hmm.. didn't know about 'i' and 'g', they work in curren version? I should try that next time I play.

Take a look at the README.txt file (interesting filename, isn't it) - it's worth it.

75%...of what? Why would newbies need to know that?

75% of all of the total of both workers and troops. My experience is that in most cases, at least for beginners, something is wrong is you have (except for the first 5 minutes of the game, maybe), a considerably larger number of workers than you have troops. Put differently, newbies often focus only on developments but not enough on building an army to be at least able to defend themselves (and their team mates). This is meant to notify them that they are too focussed on developments and not enough on troops.