In todays development update were going to have a look at some nifty features and quality of life improvements weve already added to Silence of the Siren in the early stages of development. Lets start once again at a Fossorian base.

1. Dependencies

When expanding the base, there are various dependencies between the different upgrades. In the catalog, we directly highlight these when youre browsing through the options. You can also see them all listed in the building details window of course, but that would mean opening another panel every time.

2. Shortcuts

Next, lets have a look at how easy it is to recruit units: there are shortcuts to hire all units of each type and even to recruit the full army at once. If you dont have enough resources, the two white buttons allow you to automatically hire as many units as you can afford, starting from the weakest or from the strongest type.

3. Mini shortcuts!

We can go one step further though, some buildings have a mini version of their shortcut panel that appears if you hover over them, so you can save one more click. :)

4. Trading

The final place well visit at the base will be our Trading Post. Sometimes youll need to exchange resources to be able to afford units or buildings, sometimes youll need to exchange a lot of them. We found out that giving a few options of how many to trade is more convenient than trying to fine-tune a slider.

5. Reorder your commanders!

Now, were out in the desert with Bulletproof Benni and Captain Holester. Sometimes youll realize that your commanders might have switched roles and theyre not in the order youd like them to be in - no problem, lets just swap them!

6. One by one!

Army management also allows quite a few options. You can split a unit stack in half or in any ratio, but for distributing for example your starting ranged units into several slots, you can drop them one by one by right clicking.

7. Outlines everywhere!

While all the interactable and pickable objects on the map have quite distinct graphics, were finding ourselves quite capable of missing one from time to time - not if you press [Alt] though!

8. Dialogs in check

The next two are closely related, so lets keep them under #8: some dialogs will have a shortcut button for the most common action, saving you for example going to your commanders inventory and using or equipping an item.
Clicking the end of turn button will check if you still have any available actions at your bases or any commanders that can still move. Still, if these dialogs dont make sense for your playstyle or for example in the late game, any dialog with the eye icon can be disabled and for example all picked items will just go to the commanders inventory.

9. Mini me?

For the last two, lets go into a battle! When big armies clash and the situation becomes a bit hectic, feel free to hold the [Ctrl] key.

10. Tactical knowledge!

At the start of the battle, you often want to move as close to your enemies as possible without letting them reach you - no need to check their movement number in the unit info panel and count hexes, just hold [Shift] while hovering over them with your mouse cursor.
So, these have been some of the ideas we had and have implemented in the game (that wed already find hard to live without). :) [previewyoutube=d_WUy7NRRR8;full][/previewyoutube] Do you have any other suggestions of for example features youve missed in other games or found useful when added by the modding community? Let us know in the comments! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147380/Silence_of_the_Siren/

[ 2023-11-02 15:55:15 CET ] [ Original post ]