http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Invention

Let me lead off by saying I like this board.

but WHY are boards still passing the review phase with attack display set to arrows instead of circles with massive attack borders like this?  From the artillery section if you move past missile I can barely pick out territories I want to attack with the arrows.  It's annoying and should be fixed.

$0.02

To be fair to the review board, this was brought up by someone in the review game.  I had also discussed with some people in a dev game prior to the review.  Some preferred arrow attack some preferred circle attack.  Obviously circle attack is cleaner, but arrow attack has the advantage of being able to mouse over borders to see the attack & defense dice sides.

I personally like the arrow attack, but I think I am in the minority so I will change it in the next few days.

In this case it's not an aesthetic choice as much as it's a playability problem.  From anything above missile it's difficult to choose territories to attack.

TOM - What we could use here is the ability to change the border display for a specific territory while retaining the boards border display setting for the rest of the territories.

Well, I've played a lot of games and never really found it difficult,  but maybe that is because I am more familiar with the board than the average player.   I'd rather Tom work on other more interesting features, and I'm happy to change it to circle attack mode.

I have no problem with the circles except that it is difficult to check the specifics of border mods. If some clear way to view border mods in circle mode is proposed (i.e. as simple as in arrow mode), that would be fine. But as is, I am not a fan of the circles.

Viper wrote:

In this case it's not an aesthetic choice as much as it's a playability problem.  From anything above missile it's difficult to choose territories to attack.

TOM - What we could use here is the ability to change the border display for a specific territory while retaining the boards border display setting for the rest of the territories.

this sounds like a good solution..  How would you set it up in the designer so that it is both not cumbersome to use and doesn't clutter the designer?

ideally, it would start out as circle mode to choose, once chosen it would switch to arrow mode where you could get your information (tho i think arrow mode needs to be updated a bit yet anyway).

alternatively the circles themselves would have the color & line style altered depending on border. similar to now:
color
white  = even
green = attack positive
red     = attack negative

line styles
solid        = normal attack
sunburst = artillery
dashed   = view only
fortify only?

The circle colors do change don't they?  I'm fairly certain they do, but the thing is you can't hover over them to see the dice mods like you can with the arrows.  So you don't know if the red is 5vs6 or 2vs6 until you make the selection.

The line styles for circle mode make sense and would be cool to see (as long as it doesn't make them too hard to see).

I would think that if the lines were there you might be able to mouse over them like you can the arrows now (well assuming you can actually get the arrow and not the territory like i seem to most of the time!).

I'll see what I can do - I have a few bugs to fix in the Player which I'm working on next.