FreeOrion

I noticed one of the optional milestones for 0.4.7 was to clarify the weapon text for newer players.
Issue 996: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/issues/996
Earlier discussion: hijacked 0.4.6 thread

Rather than copy over the entire stringtables/en.txt file and make people dig through it, let me mention one addition and two examples.
If there are no objections or significant improvements suggested in the next few days, I'll try to commit this and submit a PR. (Even if it is not ideal, hopefully it will make more sense to a new player.)

- For the "Direct Weapon" Pedia entry, I added this sentence: (I used the word "can" instead of "will" because of the Flak Cannon.)

- The Laser weapon part has a table listing shot damage:5 and number of shots:1. Not touching that.
The text used to say:
The Laser, a more powerful ship's weapon than the Mass Driver.
I'd change that to - The Laser4 tech description currently says:
Improves Laser weapons by three levels, increasing strength by 6.
I'd change that to:

mem359, the changes look good to me.

I suggest going ahead committing it, pushing it and creating the PR. github automatically creates diffs and it is easy for people to comment on the changes.

Setting up github and making your first PR is a one time pain, but if you intend to stick around it will be worth it.

Start on the help page with the setup, fork and be social topics.

Good luck.

LGM-Doyle wrote:I suggest going ahead committing it, pushing it and creating the PR. github automatically creates diffs and it is easy for people to comment on the changes.

Thanks for the links to those help guides (in particular the "fork").

Pull request 1449 has been submitted.

Edit: I got some feedback, and I'm going to delete PR 1449.
While I was experimenting getting GitHub set up, my code repository merge history got messed up, which adrianbroher noticed. Even though my branch only has changes to en.txt, it is necessary to be clear that I started from only the FO master. So I will delete that branch and create a new branch (and PR) at some point.

Also got wording feedback from geoffthemedio. That will take some thought. To make the text less verbose and less confusing, at the same time, will be troublesome. I'm copying his notes here, so it doesn't get lost when I delete the PR.

proposed changes are overly verbose and sometimes misleading.
might help to break unrelated sentences into separate paragraphs.

getting an upgrade within supply is unclear about whether the effect is only active while in supply and won't work when not in supply

referring to "one level" or similar of weapon damage, and referring to specific amounts of damage is confusing

referring to specific amounts of damage, and then referring to other effects in a separate sentence is confusing. instead, say "to 5 (before species effects)" or somesuch, or just accept that a single source of a bonus can't tell you what the total result of itself and other potential bonuses will be, and just say "+2" or similar.

"will increase (decrease) shot damage by 2 per bonus (malus) level" is very unclear

mem359 wrote:I'm copying his notes here, so it doesn't get lost when I delete the PR.

PRs don't get deleted when rejected or superseded by other PRs, just closed (and tagged "invalid", "superseded" etc., whatever applies), so nothing gets lost.

PR 1451 has been submitted, to address Issue 996

Hopefully, I got the procedure right this time (thanks adrianbroher), and the text has been streamlined (thanks geoffthemedio).

I didn't realize until now that Flak Cannons also receive a (different) pilot species effect, so I added a comment there.

I still don't understand the text for the Solar Concentrator effect, but I put in a link from the Laser Weapon part to it anyways.