Contained in these 3 posts are some suggestions for reorganizing the
Olympia II turn report. I feel that having a turn report that is well
organized and provides all (an amount which can be quite voluminous) the
information in a way that can be understood as easily as possible is very
important. This is being reinforced more and more as the contents of my
turn continue to grow. While reorganizing the turn report the concepts I
have tried to follow are first to present the sections in a logical order
and such that related sections are adjacent and then within each section to
put the important and most used parts where they will be found first
without searching through the section. I also found some of the action
reports to be labourious to search through due to the intermingling of
names and unit numbers, so where possible I have seperated them.
These suggestions are enclosed in three posts due to their length.
Part 1,(this one) contains a list of most (all if I can remeber them)
of the changes I made.
Part 2, contains an edited version of my turn report such as it would
look with the changes I have proposed. (I use Courier 9 as my fontif that
makes a difference)
Part 3, contains the original turn report before editing.
Changes
-----------
1. Seperate major sections with a double line (=========).
2. Change the order of the first major section to be
- turn and month
- faction hierarchy
- noble points
- stat summary
- weights and carrying capacity
- stack summary
3. Remove line between noble points and noble cost
4. reorder the stats to be so that name (truncated if necessary) is first.
If more space is wanted, removing the undr column wouldn't be a big loss as
it is listed just above.
5. Reorganize the weights and carrying capacity section. I find the total
weight column to be more confusing than helpful, and it isn't really
needed, so I removed it and expanded on the column titles.
6. Now comes major section 2, which I changed to be the character
information section, as I find that I use this often and am constantly
flipping between the character stats and information section while writing
my next turn.
7. Order the characters according to the order given in the faction heirachy.
8. Move the activity log to the end of each characters section, and label it.
9. Change the Carrying capacity line to the Weight/Capacity line as shown.
10. Underline each character name (as well as most headings throughout the
turn report) and divide each character with a single line line (--------)
above the character name
11. Now comes the location major section, which has combined the location
contents and location activities sections from the original turn.
12. Divide differnt locations with a full line (------) above the name and
underline each location name.
13. Reorganize the seen here section to be in the order: unit number, lord,
name and contents. This makes it easier to read the names and unit numbers
as they are not intermixed.
14. Reorganize the Activity log, which now accompanies the location
contents, much the same as the seen here section.
15. This requires changing the order of some lines from 'city bought...' to
'....sold to city'.
16. Move the ships docked after skills taught section.
17. Move the market report for cities before the seen here section.
18. Change the order of the columns in the market report to be:
item,trade,price,qty,who,name. 'Name' lists the name of the unit which is
offering the sale and is truncated is necessary to fit on one line.
19. Change the order of the trades which get listed to be sorted first by
item sold/bought then by buy/sell and finally by precedence.
20. For the activity log don't reprint the day number unless it is a new event.
21. Seperate the seperate skill sheets by whole single lines (----------).
That is all....., if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me.
Harold
hal@ll.mit.edu