@Stardock - UI changes?

Boy, on the MOO3 forum, I would have been flamed, deified and/or villified, in no particular order. Or I might have been sent to a thread where this is being or has been discussed. Maybe it's the layout of the Galciv forum, but most threads here seem to get few or no responses and are buried quickly.

Does anyone out there besides me think that the UI could use some enhancements, or do people think it's perfect the way it is? Has anyone heard anything on this topic previously?

There's quite a bit of it that could be improved, but I seem to recall the devs saying that UI changes will likely wait for the expansion (this summer, that is; free and not too far off). Perhaps my current pet peeves are that you can't find a system by name efficiently, especially if it's not colonized yet; and that if, during the "projects completed, please make new choices" phase, if you go to the details screen and push "done" it ends that entire phase rather than going to the next planet. You need to hit 'back' and 'next', instead.

Yeah, sometimes responding to posts here becomes an upstream battle, mostly at peak traffic hours. As for the UI, we'll be fixing the Governor's screen, adding Rally Points, as well as a Tech Tree display in the upcoming Expansion pack. We're trying to make sure the changes we make are worth the re-download size of some of the screens (some getting upt to 3 megs in size). Are there any specific things you were looking to have changed, or was it more of a general "Are you guys looking into changing the UI?"

~SDC~

It's almost certainly been mentioned before, but on the trading screen, it would be REALLY useful to be able to right-click something to get the usual in-game description. For ships, bases, and systems, it would be spiffy if a map -- even a very non-detailed one -- could be shown to indicate where it was.

Yeah, we have some Hypertext features in the works that should help with this. The map is possible, but as always, if time allows. Keep the suggestions comin'...I've been kinda out of the loop with some of the screens I've been working on...I'd like to know what players would like to have in the Expansion Pack.

Another bit: It might be a useful visual cue to indicate that a sector was only partly explored by, say, showing a thinner nebula background on the minimap.

More useful to more people might be a way to filter planets by abilities such as starship quality. However, there's a fair number of ways to sort that list even now... if that were a drop-down list so it'd be click-click to choose a method instead of click-click-click-click, it would be faster to use. Starship quality in particular comes to mind since it makes a pretty healthy difference. 'suppose one could always name the system "Starship x%", but that's a bit gamey. "Pirate's Cove" would be better.

Oh, and if it's intended that destabilization / espionage not apply to minors, those sliders should be hidden / disabled when switching to the Minors screen.

As a matter of fact, I do have some specific suggestions with regard to UI enhancements. Most of these things are already in the general suggestion thread, but these are some of the things I would like to see.

A scalable main map. This is the most important for me.

Anomolies shown on minimap

More detail in minimap with regard to undiscovered areas

More easily discernable icons for minimap ships

Box in minimap sometimes obscures other icons

If you pass on a ship move, it would be nice if the game would cycle through all the rest of the ships before coming back to that ship.

Allow a number to be entered for colonization and transport or have a shift-click that will increment in units of 100.

Have many more ways of sorting ships and planets (see suggestion thread)

Have lock mechanisms for the economic sliders

Have undiscovered star positions show up on the main map

My kids are driving me crazy; they made me forget the others...grrrr

I guess my original question was from a more general standpoint. Maybe it's just that I'm age challenged (i.e.; old), but although I really enjoy the game, the sheer volume of searching, dragging and clicking that I have to do gives me a sore wrist and detracts somewhat from my gaming experience.

Anything that you could do in this area would be greatly appreciated. Again, my biggest beef is that the radar range goes right to the edge of the main map, and this makes it hard explore without dragging the map around. I know that you can autoexplore, but I like more control over my ships.

Another UI feature I would like to see is ships and planets automatically being automatically centered in the minimap when they are chosen or activated.

It would also be nice if there were another level of guard/sleep for ships so that only enemy ships (not planets) will wake the ship up. Then you could have ships guarding planets and monitoring new ship production without having to manually skip their movement each turn.

Another request is for a feature for survey ships that would wake (or at least zoom to the ship) up the ship from autosurvey if an alien ship is in radar range.

Thanks again for an enjoyable game!

With the hyperlink idea...please link the random event links to center the map on the planet in question. It does me no good to know that Phaecda just got raised to 35PQ if I have no idea where Phaecda is...

Would be nice if the good-alignment UI weren't quite so bright. Just bring it down one notch I think.

A button to show anomalies in the minimap would be excellent. I wouldn't have it on all the time; just whenever my survey ship(s) finds itself surrounded by sectors and sectors of empty space, it would be helpful to know quickly which general direction to head to next without a lot of manual searching.

Some kind of UI assistance counting squares. When I need to know which destination is the closest to my current ship, or which ship is closest to a certain target, or even just how far apart to space my sensors. Usually this problem happens when the distance is very large, like many sectors. Sensors with Eyes have a diameter of 35 parsecs. That's a lot of squares to count and it gets very tedious.

There are certain places in the game when a static picture of your robot shows up in a box, (like when you click the button under the 'Terran Senate'). The robot that appears there is always the neutral one. It doesn't reflect the alignment of your actual robot.

The scaling of the ships has always bothered me. Why are frigates smaller than corvettes and battle cruisers? They should probably be scaled according to relative strength and/or hit points.

Being able to zoom in on your ships to see them close-up would be very cool.

When a ship is selected, show a shaded disk in the minimap displaying its sensor range. That would help both for highlighting the currently selected ship, and also for setting up sensor nets so you don't have to count so many squares to avoid overlapping.

Many very nice ideas in this thread. I definitely second the "guard but don't care about planets" thing, as I often have a couple ships near enemy planets close to my trade routes. Maybe "guard" should be modified not to take planets into account ...

Another way to streamline gifting / asking of items would be to add an option for when you right-click a ship or system, e.g. "Mark for trading", so that the next time you enter the trading screen marked items appear -- on your side as an offer, or as a request from the Other Guy, if they happen to belong to whoever you're talking to. This would make it far easier to gift a small fleet, versus writing down ship names/numbers.

There are two places where info for things that are built show up. I prefer the info only showing up in one screen. If it's something that I need to make a build decision on, I think it should show up in the planet production screen. Nonproduction items should show up just in the section at the bottom right part of the screen (production items where the governor knows what to build next already do this).

It would also be nice to have a build cue for ships.

It would be nice to be able to get a minimap view from the production screen. It can be hard to remember where the planet is and therefore what ship (and social project) to build next, especially in bigger maps.

Another good trading UI feature would be when a trading offer (or any diplomacy offer for that matter) is refused, you get kicked back to a screen with the original trading offer and have an opportunity to up the offer without having to start over from scratch.

It would also be nice to be able to toggle to the minimap from the diplomacy screen and see where ships and planets are located

Actuarian -- Have you tried the "Tactical" button (upper left) while on a planet's production selection screen? I just noticed it last night, heh.

Nope. I'll see what it does. Thanks.