Greetings! Thanks for the feedback.
Auction Speed Up
Speed up or reduced time during the game when players are "doing nothing", namely during auction while waiting for a timer to expire, is an enhancement that gets brought up to me occasionally. In fact, that category of write in responses figured prominently in the survey I recently conducted.
Thinking on it, I am a little apprehensive about doing it or how it should be done. To paraphrase Dani Bunten: what happens around the game is as important as what happens in the game. I don't think it matters so much in a solo game, but I worry that if there is more of an impulse or pressure to skip those windows of time where players could propose & initiate deals, etc., some of the heart and soul of MULE might be diminished.
For the MULE sequel, the publisher requested player turns be simultaneous. That'd speed up the game for sure, but at what cost? It's important to observe and think about what you're going to do on your turn. Dani Bunten begrudgingly agreed but that became a slippery slope for the infamous "bombs request" that led to Dani walking away.
As you have noticed, I am a bit guarded with stuff like this and collusion. However, I've softened up a bit, especially after the survey. My current sentiment is to make these sort of things as democratic as possible, on par with your idea about "all players vote".
The scheme I've come up with is very similar to the one you present. However, you bring up an interesting point about the player pressing into their origin / bounds--that could be useful for indicating something! If all players (computer players alike) are not moving and all human players are pressing their primary buttons, the timer speed increases to some rate faster than the speed for when no players are moving in the trade range (between and at where the trade bars varies).
Repurposing the primary button during auction means I would definitely have to come up with an alternate scheme for initiating collusion.
Again, because of the survey and vocal fans like you, this enhancement is higher priority than most (especially collusion).
Skip Computer Player Turn Action Buttons
What is the reason you'd like every button to skip computer player turn actions? Some of the buttons are reserved for other actions, such as bringing up the main menu and what I call the "game dashboard" (where you can currently go to change a player's controller), "start" & "select" respectively. It's possible (and very likely) I will introduce other actions to other buttons as well. For instance, in the unreleased MULE sequel, with the Sega Genesis controllers had 3 buttons, it was possible to view the entire landscape from within the town if you needed to look at your plots (maybe you forgot what kind of mule you needed--I know I do this all the time!). So, in the end, it might be a little weird to have an odd configuration of a subset of buttons to vote for a speed up. I also have to be cognizant of the people playing with keyboard or mouse (have you tried mouse control yet?).
Status Summary Animation Speed Up
You are the first to request this feature. But after the survey, I expanded the general notion of speeding up the game and thought about the places where speed up might be useful. Other areas being during all round event animations and plot production. Again, there is a sort of drama & suspense to watching the plot ticks pop up, where we're almost praying for a good yield. But you might make a good argument that there is definitely something important happening there and it's not as dull as watching the sands of an hourglass empty.
That being said, I thought about this idea as well. And being a player but also a developer, I've watched this animation a lot! This one is a little complicated with legacy behavior. I would want it to be unanimous like the proposed auction speed up. But because the primary button has the function during this screen to hide a player's score and progress to the next phase, it would introduce the scenario where people accidentally do the latter. I suppose if there *was* a dedicated "vote to speed up" button, it wouldn't be an issue, but that idea has its own drawbacks.
I bet if we put on EEGs, we'd probably see a lot of activity during at least the first half of the status summary animation. We are already performing postmortems and scheming what we need to do next.
Speeding up this animation has a side effect that not observed during the auction timer speed up: the planeteer moving animation will look a little funny. Although, something I could achieve not possible with speed ups using emulators is that I could keep the music at the correct speed.
So, because of these complications, this particular enhancement scores quite a bit lower in the priority queue.
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I apologize if I've created a big wall of text. I love to talk MULE & MULE enhancements. So, please keep the ideas coming!