The old stuff is changed into some monster where it's takes too much screens. And clicking switches.
The 'old stuff' looked like this:
It wasn't even a UI, just a series of menus. I found it excessively infuriating to navigate after trying it again sometime last year.
You can now have
a lot more stuff in your lair and perform many new actions. This can't be done without 'too much screens. And clicking switches'. A management game has to have a management UI, not a 'CYOA' UI.
...instead of cell map...
The cell map was before my time, but I can tell you it was
insanity. It would have made all actions even more cumbersome, because you now have to hunt down the right cell, too.
For anything else, it was just a pointless extra overlay that maybe looked nice.
Which is only convenient to use in this form...
Not for me. And that can and has been changed by anyone who dislikes it by altering the default value of 'lair_list_rooms_display_active'.
And there is no way to sort the buildings.
Known issue and the reason for the building filter being the way it is, displaying inactive rooms instead of
all of them, as you seem to want. Sorting is added in the WIP version:
Clicking on the girl name will do nothing.
What
should it do? It's an information display, also used in various places of the game. I'm not keen on complicating it without a compelling reason.
Which doesn't even have some important info, hidden under Inspect button...
What is important enough that you need it so frequently that clicking once more is an excessive chore? There is not a lot of vertical space left. The only thing I can think of that's missing is maybe 'power', but I've never felt the need to see that during interacting. I
have added a reminder for virginity:
...which will open submenu which is bugged when pressed Close, bringing player to Captives where you can't see anyone already in cages.
Both fixed since and languishing in dev hell.
Then there is Assign screen with poor choice of the background image...
...weird alligment making stats hard to see.
I happen to like that image.
It's there so that you know you've got unassigned captives. Plus some lair backgrounds fuck stat numbers up even worse, which is why the image is aligned to cover all the numbers.
You don't like it, nothing blocks you from replacing it with something else. An all-black or -white image, if you wish.
I want my lair to be a bit immersive.
You don't happen to be colorblind? Such complaints about hard to see colored parts of a UI are surprisingly frequently related to that.
The fact that it's also called "assign" instead of "Cages"...
The reason is that there are other rooms besides 'cages' in there. Farms, pits, guard towers, non-torture cells now, too.
...so for quite a while brain defaults to use Info screen instead of Assign screen...
That's a problem with your brain.
If you don't feel the need to manage a long list of assignments via a proto-spreadsheet, it tells me only that you're not a strategy/management gamer, not that the UI is bad or useless.
The Info sceen can be much better if you get rid of all buiding managments here...
What for? Filling e.g. a single empty cage or hatchery is easier and quicker via 'Buildings (I)' than anything else. Especially once reordering buildings is a thing.
...leaving only hatcheries (and even then not by separate entity but by types...
Why? If it's about ease of filling hatcheries, there's now a semi-intelligent 'fill all hatcheries' button.
...giving general info of number of minions by type...
How would you interact with or inspect your minions, then? And why is that information even useful in-game? I never felt a great need to know
exactly how many goblins I had.
...cages total, empty cages ... 3 closest births...
These can all be seen (maybe with a little scrolling) from the 'Assign' screen. And you can take action (fill cages, reassign imminent birthers, remove torturers from dying captives, etc) immediately from there.
...captives without cages...
That's what the header of the captives list counts now:
What status? They don't break, now do they? There's a trap counter now, that's the '(6)' in the above screen.
Then it will perfectly serve "judge by glance" purpose, which is should be the goal of, basically "end turn screen".
But the lair screen is not an 'at a glance' screen. It's the management hub of everything going on in the lair. Maybe it'd be worth it to add a 'summary' screen...
Actually I found that disregarding minions altogether and hunting in the forest and farms is the best option to go until you reach the of the grown man.
How?
How do you even fight a pig herd with a small dragon? It's a tossup at best. Forests have surprise rangers who are unbeatable by almost any solo small dragon, and the only animals you can play with at the start are foxes and bunnies, who are not very filling. Deer run away and boars hurt/kill you.
I don't really see how you can get enough food to evolve without tanking your seals game, unless you play on easy or savescum like a maniac for sheep and foxes. That is, it might be
possible, but I can't see how it's 'the best option'. Four goblins will make the rangers and swineherds beatable, no matter your dragon.
Goblins don't seems to be able to help you by holding woman...
That feature and anything else minion-related (hunting parties, mines, farms, villages ruled by puppets, etc) is not included because I don't want to give minions more agency. Doing that properly would mean something like doubling the size of the mod, and consequently me abandoning the thing altogether.
...almost worthless in the battles.
Goblins make it possible to even fight
anything as a tiny dragon. They are also disposable, cheap, and at least save you healing if nothing else. One reviewer
quit because he didn't manage to figure out goblins were a thing, so I don't think your assessment is even remotely true. They are also a cheap way to boost party power so running away as a small dragon takes less HP.
Furthermore, you get better minions later on. In most non-endgame saves I've seen, the dragon is not the main source of combat power.
And it's against my draconial moral eithic to eat perfectly breedable woman or sacrifice them to rise power of some goblin. Dragon kinda cares. So no eating girls when you can refrain from doing this.
Then you're playing a self-imposed challenge game.
Goblins don't need training, anyway, they're too frail. Cockatrices and basilisks are your first 'trainees'. Or 'drainees'.
But there is stuff like too much clicking and too much micromanagment.
I don't disagree. But my (and consequently DDM's) threshold for micro is pretty high. I used to play and
enjoy microing 150+ colonies in the original MOO2.
Some things are getting automation to reduce the clicking: auto-combat, auto-sacrifice, auto-mate
, auto-fill hatcheries, more food options at the tribes and elsewhere. Sky hunting is already there to allow you to skip straight to the interesting encounters, and will be overhauled further. Auto-crafting has even been released in beta form.
If you have further suggestions that don't involve gutting current features, I'm listening.
There is actually much more issues with lair UI than this, but this is the part that turning me off...
So to sum it up, you want to
- pollute your building list with both active and inactive rooms by default;
- click on girl names (to rename them?);
- save a click on the interaction screen to look at some yet unidentified statistic;
- hate the 'free captives' background, despite it doing exactly what you want from an 'at a glance' screen;
- have a hangup with how 'assign' is not 'cages', despite being able to assign maidens and minions to non-cage buildings;
- want a summary screen instead of rather than in addition to detailed management.
1., 4. and 5. you can easily change yourself, and seem to be personal preference. 2. and 3. might be of use, if you elaborate further. 6. as a
separate screen would be a new feature, one with a significant dev time overhead and no guarantee that the result would satisfy anyone. Unless you provide at least a mockup and I get feedback from others as well, I don't see this happening.
And if "can't be bothered to use the Assign screen" is your biggest complaint, it kinda does not look like the issue is
primarily with the UI. You don't really want to play a dragon
sim with all kinds of detailed numbers and stuff. I doubt the mod is ever going to fully accommodate you, but I guess we can try to find some middle ground.