"Select Product" Window could use some improvments

[JohanPB]

Two improvements would make the Select product much more usuble.

1. There should be a possibility to filter products by Product Class. This is important for product class rich retail stores, such as General Stores and Supermarkets.
2. The city filter must give the possibility to filter by a specific city. So far , it's only the current city and all of them. This used to be fine when playing on vanilla Cap lab, not so much on CES.

[David]

There should be a possibility to filter products by Product Class. This is important for product class rich retail stores, such as General Stores and Supermarkets.

Do you suggest adding a new product class selector below the current product type selector?

The city filter must give the possibility to filter by a specific city. So far , it's only the current city and all of them. This used to be fine when playing on vanilla Cap lab, not so much on CES.

Would like to know under what circumstances you would want to select products from a specific city.

[JohanPB]

Do you suggest adding a new product class selector below the current product type selector?
That would be a possibility.

Would like to know under what circumstances you would want to select products from a specific city.

When there are more than five cities, as CES allows up to fifteen cities, it is not easy to pick the right one.

[saffgee]

What the OP said, but also maybe make it a bigger window and split it in two parts.
So it could put most likely products near the top in a separate part of the window (maybe 2-3 deep) and then the rest of the window (as it is now) where you can switch between the current view modes. The idea would be to order the products in the top part by expected (aka versus default) profitability or something like that, regardless of which city they are in/from. Also make a typable field that will filter by name. I know you can already select a first letter, but maybe make it more accessible than that.

With many mods adding a large number of products, when running a game with lots of competition it can quickly become quite a chore to go through these lists in the endgame.

[David]

Right now, you can press a letter key and it will jump to the first product with its name matching the letter, then you can just scroll the mouse wheel to scroll down the list if the first one isn't the one you want. Not sure if having a text box will make a significant difference.

Now that we have a couple different suggestions as to how it should be improved or designed.

Could you create a mockup screen of the new interface that you envision? That will be more effective for discussion and for figuring out which design is the best.

[JohanPB]

1. The city button should be replaced by a dropdown listing all cities, like the supplier selection.
2. The Product selection should be enriched, in pretty much the same way the Firm selection works on the minimap.
   

   

   Firms-side by side.png (162.82 KiB) Viewed 723 times

   In this list it is possible to choose a class of firm "Retail Store" and also filter among the sub type.
   
   For exemple, for a Drugstore which allows to sell both Drugs and Body Care Products , the list whould be
   • All products
   • Body Care Products
   • Drugs
   • Bath Lotion
   • Cold pills
   • Cough pills
   • ( more products... )
   • Shampoo
   • Toothpaste

David, I knew about the first-letter shortcut. Unfortunately, both the "C" category(33 products ) and the "S" category (20 products ) are painfully overloaded in the base game, and, as saffgee pointed out, it gets only worse with mods. That's why we need something better.

Also, the improvement I suggest doesn't need any major modification of the current interface, just replacing the city button by a dropdown, just like the other choices.

[David]

I think these are good suggestions. I've forwarded them to the dev team for their consideration.

[Arcnor]

Agree with these completely.

With mods it definitely gets very hard to find anything. Especially semi products that multiple competitors are marking.

[David]

Update: the dev team has accepted the suggestion and will work on improving the Select Product window.

[JohanPB]

That's great news David. Please tell us when we can test this improvement.