Wishlist and ideas

[AntKeeper]

Thank you for the nice game. It looks promising. After the couple of weeks of gameplay I can see that the game has a good potential. I just have some thoughts how to make it better.

• I wish to have screen orientation lock somewhere in settings. When I am walking it is easy to rotate the phone and everything becomes unplayable in landscape mode, sometimes bottom half of screen is white so I need to rotate the phone to portrait mode. Anyway the portrait mode is the best for playing on the streets so I wish to lock it.
• I'd like to have language option at least to know how command titles are named in English to discuss them here. It seems there are no significant errors in translation (Russian) but I'd like to have the ability to switch to English.
• Please remove most marks on the map like bright blue bus stops, POIs etc or de-saturate them. We don't need them usually and they make it harder to see game elements. At least make them as option. See attached screenshot. It is hard to quickly find my current location on it. I also don't need to have 3d building on zoom in. Maybe switching off all these things could make map less memory consuming. Not sure why but on my phone game just stops every 2-3 minutes.
• It is something like a standard for many GPS-related games and programs that if there is a button which centers map to my current position then long tap at this button will switch on the mode when the map automatically follows my position. It would be helpful.
• One-hand manipulation is "must have feature" for playing on the streets and as a passenger in transport (bus). It is possible to move and zoom the map now which is good but it is not possible to rotate the map. As this map also provides the tilt I'd like to change it somehow with one hand too. Saying honestly I wish just to remove it and have direct view from the top with the flat map. It is the only view which doesn't distort objects' positions. So I often reset it with 2-finger slide down gesture which is hard to execute with one hand.
• We absolutely need the statistics. Many people continue playing similar games just because of it. I wish to see at least the total area and number of my lands. It would be nice to compare it with other player's stats. 
• We have 3 in-game resources. Why not to show them persistently in the top of the screen updating on any changes? It is common practice for similar games. It gives us feeling of progress when we capture them without the need to go to construction/building tab (don't know how it is named in English, see above).
• Is it possible to speed up the game? Even on WiFi any tab change requires 1-3 seconds. Maybe there is no need to load everything from server each time?
• When I capture/upgrade the land it is not always clear what land will be upgraded. Maybe it should be highlighted somehow.
• I understand that it could be complicated and memory consuming but please consider showing lands of other players too. Without it the player just has the feeling that he is playing alone, you are missing something very important making the game less interesting to play. Maybe all attacking army positions could be displayed on the map too. Exploring the world and watching other players would add more fun to the game. Of course the map should not crash or slow down the game.

One big wish. Re-think all the screens, tabs and actions. They are sometimes confusing, simple frequent command may require many actions. E.g. to open Army Management dialog we need to open My Lands and slide right which sometimes may open side panel. Why so complicated? When I have the list of My Things opened I wish to move some of them to the warehouse quickly but I need to close this page, to open My Lands page, expand my base's section (by the way I suspect that most players have single base so why not to open it by default), to scroll the list down and at last tap the warehouse. Same for messages which I need to open often during attacks but I need to tap/slide, wait, tap again, wait. At the same moment info page is useless after finishing the tutorial but its button is always taking space on the bottom panel.

Edited December 3, 2017 by AntKeeper

[Mr. D]

Thanks for your suggestions, @AntKeeper!
Everything makes sense; most items you've mentioned are actually on our task list one way or another.

However, I have to mention that certain things are outside our control: Earth View is a layer containing the native Google Maps app, so all the gestures required to move/tilt camera have been designed by Google:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/controls#tilt_gestures

As you can see, we can disable them for our game, but we can't change them (and we don't want to disable the tilt as some people really like it).  And I'm afraid we aren't big enough to build our own world map with our own controls (yet)!

But I'll see what we can do about the other things you've mentioned.  

P.S. Until we build a language switch you can change the game's language by selecting a different language for your phone from "Settings". I know this is a global change, but if you don't mind changing the language back later it is one way to see the English translations.  

[AntKeeper]

I see. Nice to hear that you think it makes sense. As for the map just for your information Ingress has recently switched his map from Google to Open Streets Map. So there are options but of course it is up to you as a developer to decide what to choose.