Thanks man. 😊
Before I get onto responding to your questions, I would just like to say how much I appreciate that you guys are such critical thinkers. Never stop questioning me on ideas/decisions, and certainly never stop suggesting alternatives. You are making UoN a better game than it otherwise would be.
Good call on the Engineering and High Priority tags. Do you think making them darker might help?
In regards to Internal Comms message replys, I had two reasons for keeping them very short. One is to not slow down the pace of gameplay, the player already has plenty to be doing without being forced to read lines of text (you can ignore the subordinate's message and go straight to the responses, if you want). The second is that I didn't want to be putting words into the players mouth, where the reply might be nothing like what I would say. This is certainly the time for feedback on those decisions though.
Messages get archived once you have dealt with them. You will be able to view archived messages, where it will show which option was chosen. You will not be able to interact with archived messages.
In the case of the example, if you chose Quick Fix that repair would be completed and 18% Instability would added to the system. You could then order the Technician to do a complete fix by clicking on the Repair button, but the 18% Instability would remain until you had a Technician Stabilize it. In the fiction of the world Stabilizing is the recalibration of the systems parts. So a system does not need to have structural damage (Integrity loss) to be unstable.
I do intend to have a context sensitive request system which will raise Internal Comms messages. For example in Tactical I could click on a Turret and choose the "Increase Power" request, which would generate a message for Engineering to increase power to that Turret. The Engineer would not have the option to increase power automatically, but instead would have quick responses, something like "Yes", "No", "As soon as I can" and "Not possible, sorry".
