Useless (and therefore, annoying) Advisor suggestions

[100thMonkey]

Platform: Steam
Build version: v1.2.6.7 + all DLCs
Severity: Low
Annoyance factor: Medium
Confusion for new players: High
Saved game:

The Culture - Ackdarian - 2769-03-16.7z

(4.48 MiB) Downloaded 11 times

The advisor keeps suggesting to build ships, repeatedly, even though I can’t build any, because of a lack of polymer. And if I click on the “Build Ships” button, nothing happens: no credit are spent, and no additional ships are being built.

Annoying. And would likely confuse and frustrate a new or inexperienced player, who might wonder: “Why does nothing happen when I click on ‘Build Ships’? What am I doing wrong?”...

Here’s one of the many Advisor Suggestions I got:

Advisor suggestion.png (38.84 KiB) Viewed 749 times

Here’s CC’s Build Order, which shows that I can’t currently build any ships.

Can't build (build order).png (90.27 KiB) Viewed 749 times

And here’s a tooltip from my capital selection panel, showing that I can’t build ships because of a lack of polymer:

Missing polymer.png (175.09 KiB) Viewed 749 times

Also: maybe it would be a good idea to enter the advisor suggestions in the log, for debugging purposes...

[hurkle]

Have seen this bug too.

You also get a very similar bug later in the game with the advisor message offering to build a new station, you click yes (or click go to the location then click yes) only to find the resources were spent on civilian ships and you can no longer afford the resources to build the base.

[100thMonkey]

The situation you describe is annoying for sure, but I'm not sure it's a bug per se.

In a RTS game like DW2, a lot happens all the time in the background. You might have noticed that new messages can appear while the game is paused, indicating that some processes were still going on.

You don't mention if you had paused the game or not. But either way, some processes involving resources usage and transportation probably went on during the time it took to read the message (or during the time required to manually go to the location). Which is likely how it's intended to be by the Devs (ie: not a bug).

From a UX perspective, I'd prefer that everything would stop immediately when the game is paused (except the interface, of course ). To avoid, among other things, situations like the one you described. Hopefully, there are good reasons, from the devs perspective, as to why that's not the case.

[fruitgnome]

Best would be to show advisor message but disable "build" command and if you hover over the button a notification why it is at the moment disabled (resource x missing - not enoug money).

[MaximKI]

Thanks, we'll look into this.