[suggestion] More / better tooltip descriptions.

I imagine this is already planned, but I wanted to make sure it was out there and make some suggestions.

Coming to beta 2 as a new player, I found a number of game features to be a little ... cryptic.  In fact, I'm still not sure about some of them (e.g., what does a Flag of Celerity actually *do*?  Make my units faster?  How much faster?  Does the Flag of Experience give me more XP from kills, or does it give me XP bonus over time, and how much of each?)  Other games I've played have solved this in a very nice way, which is to have the tooltip for every game feature describe its function and some of its attributes.  Sins of a Solar Empire does this particularly well, IMO, even going as far as telling you what the "main" role of each unit in the game is.

Demigod has some of this (in the Skills tree and the Citadel), so I'm guessing the missing tooltips are just because no-one has gotten around to writing text for them, but I've noticed a number of places where tooltips would be useful:

 

  • Since I mentioned the Citadel: there's an upgrade there that increases the gold income by "+2".  I'm guessing that's per second, but writing it out would be helpful.
  • I think the Health Crystal restores a fixed percentage (around 15-20%?) of my health and mana per second.  It would be nice if its tooltip explained this.
  • The Portals could say that they spawn units periodically.  I don't know if the spawn interval is "designed" to be hidden, but if not you could include it and even include a countdown.  (however, I understand that maybe we aren't supposed to know *exactly* when the next wave comes)
  • I don't understand the mechanics of the Towers of Light / Dark.  How many HP do they have, how often do they fire, why do they sometimes shoot *each other* instead of the enemy (channeling power from multiple towers for a particularly strong blast?  Is it purely additive, or is it subject to diminishing returns?)  A brief summary of this -- building stats and some notes about how they work -- would be handy.
  • Same goes for forts and archer towers, except that their mechanics seem straightforward ("they fire at stuff.  It dies.")  I was particularly surprised the first time I tried to attack a fort -- it looked like a tiny little thing that I could level in seconds, but it just laid waste to my Demigod and his army.  Maybe that also suggests they need more menacing graphics, but I guess that would be another thread...
  • Also, you might consider showing the attack range of a building when it's selected, or maybe just when the tooltip is shown (technically that's not a tooltip, but I just thought of it while I was writing up this list).
  • Like I said, the flags could use better tooltips.  The Celerity and Experience flags are particularly opaque, but you might as well document all the flags for completeness.  (EDIT: I forgot about the "Valor" flag; I still haven't figured out anything about what capturing this is supposed to do, other than annoy the enemy and distracting the AI demigods)
  • While I'm at it, the Citadel could say something like "Your base.  If the enemy destroys this you lose.  Walk here and right-click to purchase upgrades for your buildings and army."  (but in better words. :-) )  The enemy Citadel would say something to the effect of "The enemy Citadel.  Destroy it to win."
  • When playing as a General, it's not clear what the different units you can purchase *do*.  I think that minotaurs are melee attackers, archers are ranged attackers, and monks / priests are healers, but their tooltips just tell me that higher-level minions are more powerful than lower-level ones.  Also, is it deliberate that the exact amount of damage / healing done by each unit isn't listed?  It seems odd that it's left out when (most of) my skills show exact numbers.  This information could also be on the tooltips for the summon buttons, and perhaps also the select buttons.
  • The "Select Special Minions" button could say "Spirits" or "Night Walkers" depending on who you are.  If you want to emphasize that it's the same button for each Demigod, you could have the main label be "Select Special Minions", with text below it explaining that since you are Lord Erebus, this selects your Night Walkers.

Ok, that covers everything I could think of.

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