Ape Apps

An engine setting to hide all premium structures from the build list, to clean up the list for users that want to play free without having a hundred gold named objects flooding the list.

Having premium content on the build tab is essentially advertising players to buy the premium. It's a free to play game with non-intrusive ads. Having to scroll past what could potentially be yours won't ruin your experience of the game.

It kinda does ruin my experience, it takes me 3 times longer to locate things I need in the build menu, because I have to filter through all the gold named things and I browse by icon usually to try and find stuff. Having the setting within the engine settings, will generally allow the more experienced players go in and remove them. Most first time players just get in and start playing the game.

Personally I am considering premium, but not till a few things are tended to, like the fact that the desktop client appears to be doing something my antivirus doesn't like ( https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=16936 ).

Not to mention, premium objects are meant to be decorative only, providing no real bonuses, right? So if they don't provide a bonus, I'd like a checkbox to toggle them off, even if I am a premium member. To clean my build menu up basically.

There are only 2 premium content items that are favourable to their non-premium content variants. Those two are the aluminium roads, which offer faster travel for your rovers/worker drones and the turbo drones which offer 40x faster build times. Just because the premium content makes you move your finger to scroll one more time doesn't mean it takes you 3x longer to find something, you just haven't learnt where the buildings are in the list. I would say removing the premium items would make you relearn the positions you have already learnt, making you search even longer than an extra mouse scroll.

Personally I don't like how the turbo drone is HEAVILY superior to the only other drone that builds what it builds. Later when those drones build something its the difference between having to wait 15 minutes for something to build and not needing to wait 30 seconds. Don't even get me started on how long the hall of congress or the statue of unbridled excess would take without it. It took like an hour for hundreds of turbo drones to make the hall of congress, and thats 40x faster? That is too much of an advantage for it not to be p2w and should be adjusted. But I do understand the need for bast to do this one thing to get people to pay for a completely free, non-ad-intrusive game. It is a fine line that needs to be thought about carefully.

One way we can solve this is to allow the list to be searched actively through an input box, rather than needing to use a drop down to select which thing your building might be in, you can enter a few letters to filter all buildings that share those combinations of letters anywhere in their name.

However you didn't read what I said, I look through the list at pictures rather than names to identify something, and the list changes all the time when you do research so your theory on "learning positions" is invalid.

Perhaps if the game would group things more properly, rather than having the second level home and the second level premium home be 10+ items apart in the list.

First of all, you never once said you look at the pictures, not the names. In fact you specifically said that you scroll past gold names, which is counter intuitive that you only look at the sprites.

Secondly, while it is true that things change position a lot when unlocking research, but if you haven't played long enough to unlock the research you probably haven't played long enough to memorise roughly where the buildings you want are.

Lastly there are groupings it collects buildings in. You don't go looking for your capitol in the all buildings menu, you look for it in the government menu. Granted there are a few items that only appear on the all buildings menu, but that's where memorisation comes in.

I do think it's a good idea though to have a search filter, if you know the name of what you want to build just put it in and it's immediately there.

"I browse by icon usually" - In the second post of mine.

The gold named objects have similar shapes to the ones I'm looking for sometimes and throws me off.

I don't have good memory, some bit of brain damage causes me to lose random things so even if I play long enough, I won't be relying on memory, at all. Its ridiculous I have to mention this in the first place, forcing people to memorize constantly changing things in order to play...

But whatever, my point is done.

I agree, for non premium players its useless to see the premium stuff.

if you want premium how do you do to see what you will buy?