Author Topic: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page  (Read 12888 times)

Offline hellrazor

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #15 on: May 20, 2015, 06:18:57 pm »
You don't need to sort at all ;-)
From what I've seen and read all your soldiers are supermen and wonderwomen anyway.

Well there are enough deaths on the way. But having higher starting stats makes them as you called supermen & wonderwomen like :D

Offline redv

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #16 on: May 20, 2015, 06:28:36 pm »
Edit: this would be a step-by-step example:
1. deselect everyone
2. sort by rank
3. select 2 rookies you like
4. sort by psi strength
5. select 2 psi guys you like
6. sort by strength
7. select 5 strong guys you like
8. sort by accuracy
9. select 5 accurate guys you like... now you have 14 soldiers selected
10. (optional step) select original order
11. use right-click to move two rookies on the top
12. use right-click to move two psi soldiers on the bottom
13. experienced soldiers are already on correct positions... done
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of workflow I had in mind.  I also tend to sort by TUs so the low TU people can get more experience.

Perfect example! :-))

I suggested another way:
1. select several soldiers.
2. press the "auto-arrange" button. Done. ;-)

The "arrange" as I described before.

Offline myk002

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #17 on: May 20, 2015, 07:19:52 pm »
@redv: sounds cool, but it's far beyond this PR.  If implemented, it could be added as one of the options in the combobox, though.

Offline Meridian

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #18 on: May 20, 2015, 07:56:39 pm »
Yes, sounds cool, but it has two problems... to which I don't see any solution.

First problem is step 1 ("select several soldiers").
I have a lot of soldiers and without the sorting functionality, it is difficult for me to decide which ones to select in the first place. It takes ages to manually go through all of them and decide who to take... remember this was meant to help you pick your crew... not to just reorder an existing pre-selected crew.

Second problem is step 2 ("auto arrange").
I work in IT for many years now... and I have never seen any non-trivial algorithm "intelligent enough" to replace my own decisions.... even if this was implemented, in 99.9995% of cases, I would have to make manual changes... which makes it useless.

Offline Meridian

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #19 on: May 20, 2015, 09:31:52 pm »
I think I found one small bug/glitch:
If I do some manual changes first... then open the combobox... but don't select anything (i.e. want to close it without applying any sorting), it will still apply the "ORIGINAL ORDER" even though I never clicked on it and the text in the combobox still says "SORT BY..."

Offline myk002

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #20 on: May 20, 2015, 10:52:37 pm »
thanks for finding this!  fixed.

Offline redv

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #21 on: May 21, 2015, 03:01:24 am »
Yes, sounds cool, but it has two problems... to which I don't see any solution.

First problem is step 1 ("select several soldiers").
I have a lot of soldiers and without the sorting functionality, it is difficult for me to decide which ones to select in the first place. It takes ages to manually go through all of them and decide who to take... remember this was meant to help you pick your crew... not to just reorder an existing pre-selected crew.

Second problem is step 2 ("auto arrange").
I work in IT for many years now... and I have never seen any non-trivial algorithm "intelligent enough" to replace my own decisions.... even if this was implemented, in 99.9995% of cases, I would have to make manual changes... which makes it useless.

In my games never been more than 20 soldiers per one base.
Therefore most of them I know after several missions.
But if it's a problem, you can use XcomUtil_Statstrings.rul for picking a good crew.

"Sort by" is not intended for picks a crew by design. "Sort by" designed only for reorder.
Therefore you need 12-13 steps and many-many clicks (each time) to get a crew of dream :)
Even if in most cases you need only add 1-2 soldiers instead wounded or dead ones.
Perhaps, manual reorder will be faster. Therefore I think this option is useless.

Described above algorithm not designed for replace your decisions. The algorithm just repeats your decisions. Therefore the statistical model should be trained before use.
This is some kind of expert system, but very simple. I not expect 100% accuracy, but 80-90% will be fine.
The idea is simple:
1. collect stats data of your soldiers and positions which you choose for soldiers. It's easy.
2. when you press "auto-arrange" will be reproduced your decisions: fit the soldiers stats to match to the collected stats data. If you think about it a little, the algorithm will be obvious.

Offline Meridian

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Re: "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page
« Reply #22 on: May 21, 2015, 09:36:25 am »
OK, I respect your opinion, and respectfully disagree with you.

I find it very useful and vote for it to be merged into vanilla.

PS: I have 74 soldiers in my base; I am using this only to pick my new crew... I have a different crew for every mission... and this feature is saving me more than 70% of the time I had to spend before. I am not using this feature for reorder, I do the reorder manually after I am done picking the crew.