On equipping crafted items on trained troops

I abuse this in a different way.

• You can teleport items from any unit to any other unit (anywhere on the map) instantaneously.
• In your global inventory, amass one pile of stuff sufficient to equip your largest group.
• As you select each group, have them equip from the pile.  Move and fight with them.  When that group is done, go back to them and have them unequip everything.
• Your rings and good armor can pay off this way once per group per turn, without limit.  Everybody share those five Rings of Tutor!

The drawback is obviously that if the AI attacks you during its turn, your defending group might be buck naked.

Anyways, this solves the OP's problem.  After crafting an item, I don't assign it to anybody ... because everybody will share it.  Woot!

Gilmoy you're right, but this still doesn't solve the issue with the pop-up in the crafting screen, when you craft an item.  It's pretty much useless by mid-game, and pop-ups are inherently annoying.  So why have it?

Far too much work. On the higher levels you get so many resources that you can equip everybody with the best gear possible. Far less work than constantly moving items around.

I am far more interested how to get rid of (aka sell) items, even if it would be just to clean up my equipment list.

The screenshot.

Equipment dialog showing excess craft components; actually the total list is more than 10 times longer than can be shown in the popup window. And every hero/unit is fully equipped (i know Tanis has no shield, i gave it to another weaker unit; he does not need it).

Game info: Turn 155, level insane, map Oasis. I am about to kill Aegethon and then be off to the Sorcerer King's lair.

mqpiffle,

I agree that the popup for item distribution is quite useless. Therefor i simply ignore it and later distribute the items from the equipment window for a selected hero/unit.

SD might as well remove that popup.

Useless? How else are your lower than 18th level heroes supposed to equip any 18th level swords that you forge?

Eek, a bug. Crush it, squash it ...

No wait, it lets me cheat, so sssshhh, don't tell anyone. Maybe they won't notice it, so it will not be removed.

Well, I was joking of course.

I don't mind the pop up personally.

Real Men Draw Pictures With Their Extra Gems!

RPGs (and fantasy 4Xs) generally lack the concept of a party-level equipment UI that allows for convenient redistribution of stuff.  They all reduce to click-level interactions, which scales up poorly.

• Let mannequin denote a unit's torso-like layout of boxes, into which you can equip stuff.  Diablo started it, and every RPG-like uses it now (including SK).
• An "ideal" UI would be something like ... a dynamic graph editor, with each node = 1 unit's entire mannequin (shrink if necessary), plus one pool in the middle.
• You could also define a clotheshorse (? -- hehe), which would be a template / slice / layer of stuff that partially fills a mannequin ... e.g. a set of equipment that should all stay together (but the set is draggable as one atomic unit).  Already, that lifts the level way higher than clicking every item in the set 1 at time.  (In C, this is a struct.)
• When several characters convene, this UI pops up, and you can drag-and-drop entire clotheshorses of stuff between them, or to/from the pool.
• Because the UI is, at heart, graph-based, it automatically scales to the number of entities involved.

That'd also work for ... GC* n-way diplomatic agreements, k-way cargo transfers between ships in a space hex, and any other situation in which you distribute patterns of stuff between n > 2 parties.  The first game that goes there will create a new epoch.  (And then our descendents would write: that game started it, and all genres use it now)  "Clothes"horses could also address the inventory-spam problem, in the same way that having folders in your OS shell solves the flat list of files problem.

Then the (meta-)issue becomes: what proximity (or other hierarchical organization) do you use to limit the scope of such interactions?

• RPG: Same room, or same castle.
• Space cargo: Same hex / planet.
• Sorcerer King: same map (should maybe be: same city?  same ZOC?  same army?)
• Imagine it from the Sorcerer King's pov: while he was winning his game, his enemies surely traded among ... same-alliance of many nations?  He had to counter that by allocating favor among ... same-lieutenant stacks?  i.e. some scopes are abstract or social, not in a metric space (or spacetime).
  

SK's equipment-teleporting is a byproduct of the fact that it defines no intermediate level of proximity.  Everybody is connected to everybody else through the global stuff pool.  This is maybe not even a problem, just odd.

• As you note, eventually you have an excess of good stuff, so this feat ceases to matter.
• Hence, it's just a short-term exploit that slightly overpowers the player in the early mid-game.  But that's OK; since SK is asymmetric, the player should be overpowered.  You will be crushed and yanked like an insignificant beachworm in other ways.

Getting back to the OP's original gripe: the post-crafting popup is exactly what I'd expect from a "click-level UI".  It's exactly a click-level, one-at-a-time, local-only perspective, right?  It's the easy thing to provide.  What you really want might be to see the entire graph-UI of the whole world first, so that you could sweep your gaze over everything (even across many scopes that cannot actually trade), and then decide what need is most urgent.  Right?  We're basically doing that in our heads by memory whenever we craft.  Ironically, I don't mind the pop-up because it's so far from ideal that I don't rely on it to be useful.  I maintain the graph in my head, and then the pop-up might even save me a couple of clicks.

Let me describe how i outfit a new unit:

I craft an item. On this moment i get the popup in which you can select the designated wearer. If i would select a hero/unit this would require me to make multiple clicks - in which i don't see the difference between two (or more) identical units - and then click the confirmation button, or i directly click on the confirmation button - which costs me just one mouse click.

The next item - after the crafting, again the choice between multiple mouse clicks or a single one. And so on, and so on, until all the items for the new unit/hero has been crafted.

It is far more efficient to craft multiple items (followed by a single mouse click) and then go to the right unit/hero (where you can see his equipped items) where equipping the right items is just one click per item.

The actual existence of the crafting placement popup is a false user facilitator control. False facilitator because it gives the illusion(1) of control over the placement of item to the player while in reality it diminishes the information representation(2) of useful information. This means that the player either has to rely on his memory or keep flipping back and forth between the unit/hero detail window and the crafting window (lots of clicks and time). Therefor the popup is both a hindrance in efficiency (as in the number of mouse clicks) as it is in clarity (as it hides useful/needed information).

So either lets get rid of the popup; or make the popup show the equipped items on the selected unit/hero and default to the unit/hero on which the last crafted item was placed instead of going back to 'none' after every item crafted.

My vote: Get rid of the popup.

(1) the illusion of control is in this case that because of the popup the player thinks 'i can now equip this newly made item on the right unit/hero. And then immediately craft the next item.'.
(2) the actual items already in use by the selected unit/hero are not visible, which information is key to the decision on whom the newly crafted item must be equipped. 

and don't forget that the same item that works for a single unit also works for a group if three