Suggestion: Resource Cap Warning

[Patagia]

Hey there! Loving the implementation (thanks for all the hard work!) so far. After having multiple players get burned by this in our games, I had a few suggestions around the resource cap.

Core issue: The UI does not communicate the resource cap (30c, 15o, 15k) until you commit to an action that would put you over it (which causes you to lose those resources with no option to undo).


Suggestion #1 - Add in a warning when an action would explicitly generate resources over the cap.

Example: I have 14 ore and the 4p > 2o action is open. If I click the 4p > 2o action, I should get warning that these resources would be lost before committing to the action.

Suggestion #2 - Add in a warning when passing would cause you to gain resources over the cap.

Example: I have 28 credits, and an income of +11c. When I go to select my booster tile, I should get a warning (factoring in the income from the booster) that my action will cause some portion of my income to be lost.

Suggestion #3 - Add an element into the UI that communicates the existence/values of the resource cap.

In the physical copy, this is loosely displayed on the player boards and can quickly be explained during setup. While I've done my fair share of coding, I'm not a UI guy in the slightest so my opinion here doesn't mean much haha, but it would be good if those values were visible somehow.

[Mogri]

1. This is not simple; the UI does not know what the action will do before it happens.

2. This is somewhat simpler (though still not trivial; there are several faction considerations here), but it's also fairly rare in my experience for a player to pass with a pile of resources.

3. See https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=53642 for extended discussion on this subject. This is also sort of a high-level review of my thoughts on this issue overall: it's relatively high-effort for a problem that's really easy for most players to avoid.

[Andarel]

An idea that may minimize clutter - change the resource text color to red (which is used a lot in transition animations and has decent contrast) when exactly at resource limit (ignoring actions, just when the number is equal to resource limit), or show a small exclamation point above/behind the resource symbol? It's probably prohibitively difficult to flag all actions that might go over the limit but it's also easy for people to not notice that they've lost 1 coin without a UI reminder of some sort - especially when the resource limit reminder text may get scrolled down in the game action log by actions after production, in the first cycle of the round.

It does like resource cap notifications appear after production is complete, but players are much less likely to look at action logs than their own resources.

[Patagia]

Got it. I didn't want to make any assumptions about the BGA engine and what limitations you all are working with from an engineering perspective.

I would consider myself an experienced (but definitely not expert) player. The resource cap becomes an issue infrequently enough that it's easy to forget about, but also shows up often enough that it's relevant in games where folks are racing for certain actions at the start of the round or the occasional scenario where it is more beneficial to pool resources between rounds to take advantage of next round bonuses.

If the engine restrictions make this a pain to implement then I can see the argument that it's not worth the time investment. Putting the rule in the How to Play is an ok compromise, but ultimately that means it's going to be something a good number of folks run into once, get sharply stung (can't undo), and then hopefully not repeat it.

That being said, if the codebase is publicly available somewhere I wouldn't mind taking a look at it. Not doubting you, but I'm curious about the restrictions that would make suggestion #1 hard to implement.

[ljazz7]

Wouldn’t a simple solution to just have resources displayed as x/15 or y/30, to indicate a max?

[Andarel]

It would be simple but it'd take quite a bit of space, especially given that the cap doesn't come up that often - it's just a big hit when it does.

[ljazz7]

I dont really think this would take up all that much space. The text for the /15 could be much smaller than the rest of it.

[Mogri]

Wouldn’t a simple solution to just have resources displayed as x/15 or y/30, to indicate a max?

It would be simple if that space weren't occupied by the income.