Treasure Chest choice

International board General discussion
#1

What is your choice when you open a Treasure Chest?

  • Experience - virtually always (~99% of the time)
  • Experience - very often (80-98% of the time)
  • Experience - quite often (60-79% of the time)
  • Hard to say - depends on the situation - but quite balanced overall
  • Gold - quite often (60-79% of the time)
  • Gold - very often (80-98% of the time)
  • Gold - virtually always (~99% of the time)

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A nice thing in VCMI - to tentatively save us from one extra mouse click - is that the Chest window opens with a preselected choice.

As we’re all (most of us at least) natives of languages which use the left-to-right writing, naturally the choice went for the left as preselected option. However, I’m just a bit curious if this is indeed also the most practical choice.

Depending on the results of the poll, we can see if it’s best to keep this setting, or have Experience as default, or see if it can be made easily customizable for the player which should be the default one. Or alternatively, maybe we could have VCMI remember which was player’s choice for the last chest, and keep that as default until the player choses differently? :bulb:

Missing features & functionalities
#2

In my case it’s “Experience - virtually always (~99% of the time)”.

To detail that, my choice is actually as follows:

  • In the standard version, on Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty, I always go for Experience, without any second thoughts

  • In the standard version, on Expert difficulty, it may happen in the first couple of days that I go for the gold. But that’s rare, in case there are no piles of gold as well around, depending on my needs and on the content of the chest (higher chance I pick 1000 gold over 500 experience, in case that won’t take me to a higher level). But as from the middle of the first week, I already stop choosing gold at all.

  • In the standard version, on Impossible difficulty, I may choose gold a bit more often, but still for not more than a week (and again, mainly from chests with small amount of Experience)

  • In WoG - which I play 95% of the time over the standard version - experience is a no-brainer, as I always play with start resources on Impossible, so gold is not a problem anymore in the first days.

So - for my playing style - it would obviously be more useful to have the Experience selected by default.

#3

i don´t know how is in single player, because i don´t play it, but in multiplayer, any decent play go for gold 90% of the time.

#4

Hmm… Interesting. If there’s not too much effort, could those choosing gold (if any others, as so far we have only Fosprey) confirm that it’s also for MP games?

It’s true that I play mainly SP. The only MP I ever played of H3 was HotSeat, but that was together with friends as hungry for experience as I was. :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

Experience FTW! :smiley:

It would be good to have the experience per default. I never take the gold.

#6

I was playing quite a lot multipayer maps on hot seat with friends… and I mean the popular ToH maps + some random templates and I almost always select gold. ( The same for my firends).

It’s quite normal because you do not build capitol in first week like most SP do, instead you from the start should build up creatures… and as such you will need gold more then anything else.

So I can confirm that MP people select gold … :slight_smile:

#7

Of course now it’s too early to tell (we would need at least 50 votes to get a better idea of what players prefer), but I can see three possible solutions then (2 already mentioned above):

  1. Have VCMI remember the last player choice, and leave it default until player chooses otherwise. To take an example, that would mean: starting a SP game on Impossible does require some gold in the 1st week. So first chest would default on gold and - if player chooses that - all next chests in the following days will default on gold. However, once the player has reasonable amount of gold and chooses Experience, the next chests will default on Experience. This could be very useful on SP XL maps, which are played for months, and on which I bet single players stop choosing Gold from the 2nd/3rd week already.

  2. Or we could Gold per default, but somewhere in the VCMI menu (when sth similar to the WoG menu will be implemented) players should be allowed to change the default for chests to Experience.

  3. And last alternative, if after 50-100 votes in this tread, it will come out that all Single Players prefer experience, while all Multi Players prefer gold, to have VCMI behave as follows: Experience as default in SP and Gold as default in MP.

#8

first solution is IMHO the best …

#9

IMO first solution has just one problem for me: usually I select experience if chest was taken by the main hero, but if chest was taken by secondary hero, I prefer to select gold.
Maybe it will be better to remember not “last player choice” but "last hero choice"
This will require only one flag and not going to be too complicated.

#10

That’s indeed an even better idea, however to me it looks more complicated to implement (I see potential bugs). I might be wrong though - the devs will have the final word on this anyway.

#11

mhm i guess it depends on map if it’s biggest lets say normal level always exp i find more useful to find balance in buildings of monsters than actually buy them in second week it goes for fort/castle so here cash is useful tho i mostly played with my friend which have similar tactics to mine so it was pretty balanced :wink:
but yeah i guess on hardest level i would take just gold in first weeks :wink:
but again it depends on my wogifacation settings tho on hardest i would still take some gold :stuck_out_tongue:

#12

I usually take the gold (3/4 of the time) to buy army, if gold not required or hero less tha level 3 i take exp

#13

i virtually always choose exp
i choose gold if:
either i have gold deficit
or chest has only 500 exp (so it give 1000 gold which is good value instead tiny exp and is 2x)

well sometimes i even choose exp if it is 500xp

#14

May be there can be implemented a self-learning algorithm - after some choises the game automaticaly to select the most frequently choosen one?

Just an idea…

#15

I agree with all of you. When I play a single game, I try to take the chests for main hero almost always choose the experience. But in a multiplayer game, I almost always take the gold.

I also want to suggest an idea to get rid of extra mouse clicks when you open the chest (by the way it can be applied in other situations associated with the choice).That’s what it is:

Items have become the choice of a button. Why was it done so? Well, the "window» treasure chest choice does not cancel or close, player still has to make a choice, it is now possible with one click. So I allowed myself to add something, now under the choice experiment shows the number of points to the next level, at the beginning of the game, you certainly remember how much you have learned and where will be the level at least for the main heroes, but then it is impossible to know In any case, I have this problem, and a hint would be very useful, it will help answer the question “What is better to take the gold or experience for this hero?”. There may be clues such as a Pandora’s box (where the hero gets experience), as well as in the huts of the seer (when the hero is awarded experience).

It was about the mouse click, now let’s talk about control of the keyboard.

To further save time, you can type keyboard control, such as when you press «e» or «1», then there would be selection box under the left point (money), but if you press the «→» or «2», then respectively - under the right point (the experience). To approve the final selection, as before, press enter.

Additionally, if the amount received enough experience, the hero was a level, instead of remaining points of experience, we can display «+1 level» (or «+2 level», «+3 level»).
There are other windows that you can also use it, such as «get level» (there is also a choice of two skill), but I think it is suitable for windows with lots of choice, for example, obtaining skills in the university (« e »and « →» —left and right, «1», «2», «3», «4» — the choice of skill, respectively ,«OK» — is to leave).

Some ideas for remembering choices.
But you can save even more time if the program remember our last choice and we had to just press enter «not looking». This can be done like this, if a player made a choice by clicking the mouse or by keyboard, but was pressed alt key(ctrl, shift), then the next time a similar situation the same item would be selected.

For the hero or the player? Remembering for hero to me seems too complicated, in the end there may be many heroes, and the player is one, may get confused as for what hero what has been saved, and each time have to watch not to be mistaken. That is, spend the extra time and effort. Therefore, this idea seems to me not very good, remembering for single player would have been better in my opinion.

#16

The selection of dialog items with keys is already implemented. However, I’m not sure if we want to simplyfy (or complicate?) it further. Players should always have a choice of choosing one option and confirm it.

See how that’s implemented in VCMI and tell if you like it, current control is mentioned in manual. if you claim something should be improved, report feature request on bugtracker.

I guess exp indicator is a nice enchancement, but looks quite ugly as you propose it. SImply this one additional line doesn’t match the window which we already got used to.

#17

It could also be just a matter of getting used to. While I admit it’s not ideal, I don’t find it that ugly otherwise.

The alternative would be to add the “till next level” information in the R-click info window, but that comes with pluses and minuses:
Advantages:

  • space to make it more detailed, as I feel it’s not very clear if “577 remaining” is what we still need when picking the chest, or only after selecting the experience
  • perhaps saving game resources. If the game would have to calculate the remaining exp. points every time we pick a treasure chest, it may cost more than if it had to do it only when we R-click for it
  • aesthetics: as Warmonger said, some may prefer keeping the original looks of the window
    Disadvantages:
  • it will need one extra click to reveal it (so I guess the question is how often are we curious to know this)
  • not everyone will know the feature is there unless they’d read the manual and someone would point it out to them

If we are to implement this, it would be nice to have it more detailed, perhaps something in the lines of:

The third line would be particularly useful if the WoG script which gives extra gold/exp to some chests is enabled (so if it’s easy to code it as such, we can make it part of the code of that script if it feels useless otherwise).

#18

Warmonger is right submitted by me version “looks quite ugly”.
I liked the Zamolxis idea to place additional information in obtaining experience in the right klick.
I hope that this information will in all events to gain experience (such as the award of the seer’s hut experience).

About the keyboard controls. Inadvertently, I did not notice that you can change the points of selection using the number keys. But the fact that I was expecting that this will be an arrow keys, which is why it had not been made.
In addition, these keys do not work in all places, which should have been working, I really have not checked everything, but for example when visiting taverty, I can not switch to the selection of another hero.
On the idea of ​​replacing items selection to buttons. Well, this idea can be useful when (and if) the game will be ported to a device with a touchscreen. I think there it would be helpful.