Suggest - Features and Improvements

[casqouro]

Suggestions re: game setup,

(1) When setting the number of star systems to be used, holding your click on the up/down arrows should cycle through the numbers. Right now you have to do a lot of clicking to make changes, which is a bit hard.

(2) Double-clicking a faction on the faction-select screen should advance the user to the next screen, rather than them having to move the cursor across the screen to click 'next'.

[Gyrfalcon]

When you double-click on a ship to select all of that type, it picks the top-most ship as the focus. I'd prefer that the center-most ship be the focus, because, with a large fleet, I end up having to scroll-up to get the ships to move straight forward.

ETA: Or, really, I want it to use the ship I double-click on as the focus, which it doesn't seem to do consistently.

[sven]

When you double-click on a ship to select all of that type, it picks the top-most ship as the focus. I'd prefer that the center-most ship be the focus, because, with a large fleet, I end up having to scroll-up to get the ships to move straight forward.

ETA: Or, really, I want it to use the ship I double-click on as the focus, which it doesn't seem to do consistently.

What exactly do you mean by "focus"?

Right now, for the purposes of multi-ship movement orders, the UI assumes that you want to move all the selected ships so that their centroid is under your mouse.

If you double-click on a single ship to create a multi-ship group, I could, conceivably, interpret move orders relative to that ship by itself, rather than the group-centroid, but, I think that would create a fair amount of UI awkwardness, and probably more player confusion, as the selection set can be adjusted after the initial double click (indeed, if you hold down SHIFT, you can quickly created combined groups of a couple different ship types). The core problem here, perhaps, is that the UI currently doesn't have any effective way of showing the player what point it's interpreting move commands relative to.

In older builds, I'd show darker motion ghosts when your current cursor position implied an illegal a move command. We turned those off while making some tactical UI adjustments a while back, but, the dark ghost ships were helpful in letting players quickly figure out where to move the mouse to get a multi-ship movement order towards a particular spot. Might be worth bringing those dark shadows back, in some limited form. Maybe only turn them on when you have multiple ships selected?

[evil713]

As I read it the "select type" which I believe you have disabled in the next patch would not use the center of the selected ships formation and instead use the ships closest to the top of the screen, ie maybe should of been a bug report rather than a suggestion.

the request here is when using "select type" that the movement command would be centered on the ship double clicked rather than formation center.

[Gyrfalcon]

I'd like it to be clearer how many troopships I need to invade a particular planet. I can't find any indication of how many planetary population can be conquered by a Planetary Assault Force. It seems to be one PAF can conquer 2 civilian pop, but that's just my best guess.

[Arioch]

The ground combat system is due to completely change, as discussed in this thread.

Currently, 1 PAF is needed to capture each population point, but some hulls carry double the number of PAF's. This will change.

[Gyrfalcon]

There are some planets with 20+ population, which would mean I need 20+ Troopships to take them intact. That seems a bit excessive, particularly that that planets I'm talking about are in Raider systems, not faction systems.

[Arioch]

There are some planets with 20+ population, which would mean I need 20+ Troopships to take them intact. That seems a bit excessive, particularly that that planets I'm talking about are in Raider systems, not faction systems.

That's one of the reasons why it's being changed.

[Ygneous]

Some of this has been posted before and I just want to give it more weight, some is new (I think).

My wishlist for new features (mostly UI elements), in order of urgency:

- Allow refits to an existing hull design. Being able to refit whole batches of ships as one production job would be wonderful. (Refitting a Yorval destroyer fleet... oy vey)
- Make an option to pin certain planets to the top of the planetary report, and/or let me name my planets.
- Have each race description include a list of their climate preferences.
- Make sure fleets in transit don't have their icons directly over orbiting fleets. In very busy areas of space, it can get difficult to click on enemy fleets in transit and figure out who's attacking me where. OR, allow the player to zoom in and see an area in more detail.
- Allow the battle view to zoom out further.
- Give access to detailed ship information in battle - the same sort of basic enemy ship information that you can check before battle. Let me see the names of my own ships, and open a detailed report of their remaining shields, hull, armor, and crew.
- Make defensive weapons the last selected when attacking. My ships always want to fire their defensive weapons first.
- Display weapon ranges and power draw in their description.

- Lastly, my personal wish: Please let me stockpile food. Give me an option to tell my transports to transport double food to planets that import so that they will build up a stockpile in case of blockade. My race can destroy planets in an instant and build a biosphere from scratch on a barren rock, but we can't make non-perishable food...

[halftea]

- Give access to detailed ship information in battle - the same sort of basic enemy ship information that you can check before battle. Let me see the names of my own ships, and open a detailed report of their remaining shields, hull, armor, and crew.

You can do that now. You just need to select an enemy ship (yellow box around it I believe) and double click on the lower picture. It will bring up weapons, system health, crew and everything. I find it very helpful in determining what damage a Raid can cause as well as redirecting weapons fire.

[sven]

Thanks for your list Ygneous -- as I've said in other places, repeating other testers suggestions isn't a bad thing. "Upvoting" helps me get a sense of the consensus opinion.

- Give access to detailed ship information in battle - the same sort of basic enemy ship information that you can check before battle. Let me see the names of my own ships, and open a detailed report of their remaining shields, hull, armor, and crew.

As halftea just said, if you click on the small lower-right hand window showing a targeted ship, you should bring up these stats. That you didn't find it after all your testing suggests that I should look for an alternative, more intuitive way of bringing up these screens inside a fleet battle.

[Ygneous]

As halftea just said, if you click on the small lower-right hand window showing a targeted ship, you should bring up these stats. That you didn't find it after all your testing suggests that I should look for an alternative, more intuitive way of bringing up these screens inside a fleet battle.

This makes a lot of sense; I will start using it. It would be nice to have the ship's name just above its picture and an "information" button at the bottom.

A few more battle UI suggestions, one each at high, medium, and low priority:

- Command groups - I'd like to be able to save a group selection of ships in battle (with ctrl+1, ctrl+2, etc) and use that hotkey to reselect them. Bonus points to have a little 1, 2, etc. show up at the top of the screen to remind me what groups I've made.

- Turn start notices - there's the grey bar along the bottom, but I'd like to also have a pop-up notice that my turn has begun.

- Fleet formation options - I don't need detail, but it would be nice to be able to choose between "fastest in the front" and "fastest at the back" before a fight starts, as well as "squeeze together as tight as you can", "use current default spacing", or "spread out a bit".

[Gyrfalcon]

My wishlist for new features (mostly UI elements), in order of urgency:

I'll upvote all of this.

[Unbroken]

These changes definitely get a thumbs-up from me as well. I'd also perhaps include a 'turn summary' feature in battle, as a means of reviewing what happened during the previous combat round in case the player misses something important or wants clarification on their turn.

[Unbroken]

Sadly true. I need to nerf the AIs ship production. (In an earlier build, they were very confused by food and metal, and not doing much of anything. So I let them cheat around those 2 resources, and now they're just way too strong.)

Was thinking about a bit about this problem from the Bugs thread. Would it be possible to at least partially rectify this issue by having the AI build its colonies based upon what each world can do (relatively) well?

For example, if the AI has a world under its control that is mineral Rich versus all its others which are Normal or Poor, it would realize, 'hey, this place is good for making metal compared to my other worlds, I'll apply a mining-world template here', which could be as simple as two mines and a farm.

I do understand it is an overly simple approach, as the AI would hamstring itself quickly if all its worlds were metal-rich by putting mines everywhere. I suppose at that point, it'd need to run a periodic check every few turns to see if its metal income is sufficient for it to build the ships it wants. If it's metal income is too high (compared to some arbitrary baseline, I guess), it'd scrap mines and replace them with something else. If it's too low, it'd look to place mines in the most productive available slots possible. This would also work well when it techs up as it'll recheck its income and adjust accordingly - not the most efficient system (as scrapping doesn't yield much money right now), but better than letting the AI skirt the resource system entirely.

The same sort of thing would apply for Food as well, with a check for having enough transports to keep its empire rolling. Also, the AI should, on higher difficulties, buy the first structure on a new planet and ship 1 pop there (if it's not some tiny planet with a 2-pop cap and enough transport capacity exists) in almost every case to give it a leg up in its early development.