One issue I sometimes have with huge maps and all the races is that the military situation can get pretty unreadable due to the amount of fleets and similarities between the colors (marauders like Phidi, and Orthin like Tinkers). This is of course even worse if the same faction is located twice or more on the map.
But then I thought of Rome 2 and starting canging the colors of empires in the developer options to resemble their diplomacy overview and presto:
[attachment=0]Map.png[/attachment]
This works on both magnification levels as well: the differences are still realtively visible on the ship paint levle when the galaxy map is zoomed in
All the necessary colors are already available for all races (green, red, white and blue/gold - light blue is ok but gold might be even better due to contrast with the background) so I can only assume that there was a plan at one point to have a FoF option in the menu to color the ships
Either this was the case or not, would it make sense/be possible to easily implement such an option?
The idea of course would be to have the color of a race be determened by their diplomatic relationsip to the player
Ideally the option would be offered on the galaxy map directly as in peace-time it might not be used often and player might want to switch between the default and this view several times in a short time period and thus hiding the option in the main menu would be suboptimal (her again Rome 2 got it very right as the option is managed there as a layer/filter of the strategic map)
This of course would still not allow for giant mapes with >8 races to be easily readable but would go a long way (the rest can be covered by variations to the logos, leaders, system/planet names and race names of races found multiple times on the map) and might be very usefull for those playing on huge with all races already