Of TSO's flaws, the most egregious are probably the UI issues. The game is littered with horrible design choices that force players to click way more than necessary. Here's a list of suggestions to ease the load.
Star Menu
The star menu should automatically join all similar resources together in single icons. When an icon is clicked, the player should be given the option of how many resources they wish to expend when relevant. Adding resources to the storehouse should not require a click on the mayor's house, it should simply ask how many and deposit them directly. Adventures, buffs and deposits should be combined into single icons as well.
Further, it should be possible to more precisely configure what resources to show in the star menu. Instead of taps for showing one category at a time, each category should be possible to toggle off and on in the display, similar to how searching in the trade office works.
Provision house
Ideally, the provision house should no longer process materials in "groups" of 1-25. Instead, jobs should be independent of each other, and the interface should allow you to create any number of jobs at a time, so long as you have the resources for it. This would allow players to rearrange jobs as desired, without having to wait for a full stack of retired bandits if they suddenly find out they need a gift basket quickly. This would also alleviate problems with RSIs arising from events with ridiculous numbers of clicks (Anniversary, most prominently)
Alternatively a much easier fix would be to add one extra field, which allows you to chose how many stacks of the job you want to create. This would retain many of the problems with the provision house's bad design, but it would at least fix the clicking issue, which is quite significant, especially with the upcoming golem quest. This would take very little time to implement, and would be possible to achieve modifying nothing but the client.
The Barracks
The barracks should receive the same changes as the provision house. Soldiers should be added by typing in the number you want, within the bounds of your resources. They should be possible to rearrange in the queue and cancel on an individual basis.
Similarly to the provision house, a worse but much easier to implement solution would be to just add an extra field denoting the number of "stacks" of the currently selected troops you wish to train. However, the ability to rearrange troop training order in the barracks is really needed quite direly.
The Trade Office
The trade office tables should have a new field called "ratio" or something similar. It should show the ratio between trades to make it easier to determine which offers on TO are best. When sorting by ratio, the list should be sorted first by resource, and then by ratio within each resource. (If you were searching for bread, it would show all bread for coin trades first, in order of descending ratio, then all bread for granite trades etc.)
The history list should be lengthened drastically. Instead of showing buyer on one side and seller on the other, it should always show the viewing player on one side, and the trade partner on the other. Further, the list should be significantly lengthened, and players should be given the option of downloading their trade history in txt or other format, to keep track of trades. Players should be given ample time to do this before trade history is cleared. From the trade history, it should also be possible to click any trade and quickly put an identical one up on TO.
Adventures and buffs should be traded as other resources. Baskets shouldn't be limited to stacks of 25, and adventures should be sold in any numbers. It should also be possible to add more than one lot when selling adventures and buffs.
Direct Trading
Direct trading should undergo similar changes to the trade office, allowing for buffs and adventures to be traded in any amount in a single trade. It should also be possible to set up more complex trades allowing players to quickly trade more than one resource (100 bread and 50 coal for 10 bronze swords, for example).
Finally, when using text to search for resources, the text should be remembered individually for the player and the trading partner. Since nobody is trying to trade fish for fish, there's no point in the "fi" still being in the text box when the player brings up the opposite part of the trade.
Adventures
When sending generals to adventures, rather than opening the "send army" menu for every single general, it should all be done in one go. Generals should be toggled off and on to indicate which ones to send, and there should be several buttons to quickly toggle the desired generals: "None", "All", "Any with troops". This would save a great deal of clicking when starting epic adventures.
Once your generals are loaded up with troops, it should be possible to save the current troop configuration for later, with a name - "BK Cannon Vet loadout" for example. Then later, when pressing the button, the game should check if the appropriate troops are in the player's army, and load them up according to the configuration if they are.
Further, there should be a "quickload" button which simply loads troops onto your generals, starting with recruits and moving up through the ranks until the player runs out of troops or room on his generals.
It should also be possible for players to sell adventure invites directly on the trade office. Ideally, this would be done simultaneously with removing the "kill a troop" requirement for lootspots. If BB really are worried about scammers as their recent decision to pull giftable gems off the market would indicate, then finding a safe way to transact lootspots should be their top priority. A tailor lootspot is a much more serious scam risk than a paltry 220 gems. But I'm moving off the topic of UI here, so to summarize - lootspots should be tradeable as direct trades or on TO. The buying player should automatically be invited upon payment of resources.
Finally, a player should be able to uninvite a player who hasn't yet accepted an invitation to an adventure (so long as the player didn't pay for it)
Economy Overview
The economy overview should have a drop-down box, allowing production values to be shown in other measures than 12 hours. Most importantly, the duration for the most important buffs (with and without premium) should be selectable, to quickly allow determinations regarding buffing values.
It should be possible for players to pause and start work yards directly from the economy overview, without having to close and reopen the window every time a workyard is paused or started.
In cases where a resource is declining, and one of the resource's "parent" resources are also declining, the icon should be shown as red rather than yellow.
The economy overview should include buttons to quickly shut down all versions of a workyard. This would be useful in shutting down and starting up goldmines, coinages and other workyards you only want working when buffed.
Chat
The chat window should be recoded to allow selecting several lines of chat at the same time. This would allow copy-pasting of conversations, which can be very useful at times, especially for guild leaders.
The "News" tab, when someone buffs you, should include the name of the player rather than just "your friend".
The 5-second limit to text chat should be removed in guild chat, in favour of letting guilds moderate themselves. Similarly, the obscenity filter should be possible to deactivate for players who are not interested in being shielded.
The removal of links from the chat should stop - people post links anyway, just without the http:// and www parts. It has no effect other than as an inconvenience.
End of suggestions
Lastly, I just want to say that these are not small issues. Some of them are bordering on the ridiculous. The provision house and barracks interface wouldn't fly in a 15 years old RTS, so why are they still here? Certainly fixing these glaring errors should take higher priority than introducing treasure hunts and expensive golem quests with rewards that make them not worth doing. Please prioritize these issues!
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Originally Posted by Nogbad
