Royal Carriage "Done Reacting"

[AdamH]

I play an Action card, I call a Royal Carriage on it (sometimes this happens when I don't call a RC also but I haven't quite figured out exactly when), and I still have one or more RCs left on my mat.

I have to click a button that says "Done Reacting" to continue with my turn, sometimes more than once. I realize there are situations where this is necessary in order to allow for all legal options, but I believe it's happening all of the time.

Unless there's something that I could do in between calling Royal Carriages that has to be done right then, I should be able to just continue on with my turn without clicking a "done" button. Even if you have it so that it always asks until the logic is there to figure out when you need to ask, there's no reason ever that I should have to click that button more than once.

[markus]

The multiple clicking has bothered me in the past as well (similarly with Coin of the Realm), but I fear that there's no general rule that can solve that, because there are too many edge cases.

It is necessary to click the button twice for Royal Carriage, for example when you Throne Room - King's Court something, because you might want to call it on the last Action Card, the King's Court or the Throne Room.
For CotR, however, only Mandarin, Storyteller, Diadem, and Horn of Plenty come to my mind, where it might make a difference at which point in a chain you call it - subject to supporting cards. But probably I'm also missing something.

[markus]

I missed Bonfire (with Villa).  ;)
(Alms+Villa should be fine, if you allow calling it only at the end of each action chain.)

[AdamH]

Then it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of these "edge cases" and then not bother asking when none of those are in the kingdom. When I just play an Action card, RC it, and it asks me to decline calling another RC multiple times there's something wrong with that interface. It's not clear to me how it's implemented based on the behavior I've seen, but the way it is now, compounded with the fact that it's unclear at times what exactly my click is going to do, results in an interface that's confusing for the default case, which is never acceptable.

I understand there will be times when I'm in a KC chain with RCs on my mat where I'm going to have to click a lot and there's no way around that. That's not a reason to make the interface bad the other 99% of the time. It needs to be improved.

[Ingix]

I think most of the Reserve cards would profit from an on screen representation that shows them 'activateable' at the correct times.

For example, if you just resolved a Rebuild, the client would mark all all CotR's and Royal Carriages as activateble (maybe with the little plus sign), but would still allow you to play Action or Treasure cards from your hand, just like if you had no reserve cards.

This way, the optional effect is still doable, but you have to actively use it (by clicking on Royal Carriage/CotR) instead of the way it works now where you have to actively decline it if you don't want to use it. This would get rid of Adam's cases where he has to decline further Royal Carriages.

Of course, this doesn't solve Markus' cases where an action has just been resolved and the game is scheduled to continue with something else instead of a player having to decide what to do anyway.

[Watno]

That is already happening, Ingix.

However, when something happens automatically after you decide wether you call a Royal Carriage, the game engine needs to explicitly told what you decide before it continues.
After you play an action, you are in the stage where you can call a RC on that action. If you do, you're now in the situation that you can call a RC on the second play of that action. If you decide not to, you're back in the stage where you can call a RC on the first play of the action. It's not trivial for the game engine to detect that it doesn't make sense for those two decisions to be different

[markus]

One thing that you could do is the following:
1) Whenever I would be asked to call a reserve in the current implementation, check whether not calling and continuing with the game engine reveals any new information. If that is not the case, don't ask me but just continue until new information would be revealed.
2) Now, that you have to ask me, give me the choice on which of the cards that were skipped in step 1) I want to call it, if I decide to do so.

I think that would cover a lot of cases, especially for CotR.

[luser]

Its even simpler as calling rc/cotr in middle of chain is strategic mistake. Reacting at end is better as same when you call rc but you don't have to due to extra information.
Similar with cotr as you should react only before storyteller/black market or if you don't have actions and finished tr chain.

Then using done is bad interface for rc, Better is to show options to call rc on active tr/action(possibly arrow on play area action/tr) or click on card if you don't want to call it, no extra click necessary.

[AdamH]

I would really like to agree with you, but I'm pretty sure there's some edge case where you want to call Coins in the middle of a chain -- say you play Storyteller and you want to play Diadem with it, and calling Coins earlier on in the chain gives you more Actions so you can draw more cards. It's less difficult to come up with an example for Royal Carriage.

I remember thinking about this at length when MF was pushing out Adventures. There's not really a good way to make an interface that offers you all available legal options when theres a Throne Room chain (or similar) and you have one of these cards on the mat. It's really unfortunate but I think that's the way it is.

That said, this is not a reason to make the interface suffer for the other 95% of games. It should be fluid, seamless, and intuitive.

[Ingix]

Its even simpler as calling rc/cotr in middle of chain is strategic mistake. Reacting at end is better as same when you call rc but you don't have to due to extra information.

As much as I can sypathize with you, the game should allow all legal plays, not just strategically correct play. It should use an as easy as possible interface to do that, agreed, but the number of cards that could potentially interact with that is just to great.