Okay, after I got through the initial awful experience of SDC and into the game proper, I had a good time. Very good, in fact. However, I've noticed a few little UI niggles and crashes. Whilst I can't do much about the latter, I've got some suggestions for the former. Some may have been mentioned before in one of the many numerous such threads, so please bear with me
Version is 1.1, clean install.
Here we go...
1. Sort tech research list is not resorted correctly. Say I sort the tech research by Name, when I am next presented with the "What shall you research now?" bit, whilst it still says "Name", the list is not sorted by name, but instead by the default sort.
2. There's an odd issue I've experienced where any new building I go to build says it'll take 50 weeks. I then check and uncheck any of social / military / research and the time goes back to the "correct" value. I'm not sure what causes this.
3. Minimap travel lines are not updated as soon as a new route is set or changed.
4. I'd like to be able to select a destination point and see which ship/s are heading there
5. There appears to be an extra turn inserted after you load a game? Eg. Elections are coming up next week. You save and make your turn and elections come up. Reload though, and it takes *two* turns for elections to appear?
6. Civ Manager has icons for its tabs, but no other tabbed screens have icons... erm, why or why not?
7. Foreign Stats tab is sometimes not selected visually. I think this occurs by saving a game, selecting a different tab and then reloading a game. It's fixed by going to another tab and back.
8. It'd be nice to limit movement within the Research screen to the bounds of the trees. At the moment it seems as if you can scroll forever in any direction.
9. On the topic of research, it'd be nice to have a "condensed" view with smaller graphics. Sure you can go to "More" and make the view bigger, but there's a lot of space in the research screen that could be utilised so you can see more stuff at once.
10. Launching a colony does not update the population on a planet until you go out and back in. It'd be nice to have it update immediately for if you're launching two or more ships
11. News at the start of each turn would be good if it reflected changes you make. Eg. "Research Centre completed on X, now building nothing" - so you go in and build, say, a farm - when you return it now says "Research Centre completed on X, now building Farm". Ships that are constructed could perhaps have (Launched) listed after them if you launch them. This would help greatly when a lot has happened in the one turn that needs your attention.
12. Silders. They're a bit hard to drag left and right unless you are still over the UI control. If you've picked up a slider, it should react no matter where your mouse cursor is until you release the mouse button. This would make quickly dragging to the start or end of a slider much easier.
13. The AI, even on easy levels, seems to not be hindered by the fog of war? If I put scout ships near resources I can see, it seems that my opponents' first ships are often ones relevant to that resource - constructors for crystal things, colony ships for planets - no scouts ships spotted. It might just be me, but it seems very suspect
14. The Turn button has an area on the minimap where it's active - which makes click that side of the minimap a danger!
15. Options screen - some columns and their titles are mismatched. eg. the title for one section can be at the bottom of the left column but its options are in the second column. Would be good if it was grouped properly
16. I get slight clicks in the audio of videos. I've tried disabling AA, updating drivers etc. etc., but to no avail. Other games with video, eg. Oblivion, play just fine... I'd wonder if GC2's BINK player needs an update (they seem to fix bugs almost every other week...). Vid card is a geForce 6600 (84.43) and soundcard is an SB Audigy 2.
17. My race's abilities in the Create Game screen are at -3! How did that happen? I don't know, but here's my guess: I played the demo and customised the human race abilities. Then I uninstalled the demo and installed the full game. It might have installed the "default" set of values without clearing all the old ones - hence, I've got more abilities assigned than I should be allowed.
18. Sector grid references - it would be nice if the current sector you're in has its grid slightly lit. This would help with what the reference is. An option to display numbers outside the playing field which label the grid references would be awesome.
19. When you change camera views, the camera always jumps to the top and then moves to the new view, instead of moving from where the camera is. Would be cool if it could do that, because the jump is a little bit confusing
20. You can zoom inside ship designs, revealing the emptiness inside. Though the code may not exist given the nature of the game, it'd be cool if the camera could not go inside ship designs (this is a bit picky and may not be feasible, I know...)
21. When viewing an opponent's stats, if you click through each of the vertically stacked tabs more than once each, the stats go blank (ie. nothing is shown at all, just a blank box).
22. When viewing relations, it would be nice to be able to click a race's icon to select them. Also, it would be nice to have a colour highlight behind each other race indicating their "friendliness" with the currently selected race, rather than having to associate the textual list with the icons (which is hard when you have ten races in the game).
23. BG stars "disappear" when you zoom out too far. Could they fade or disappear in a nicer way? I have stars cranked all the way up because they look nice and the disappearance is very visible. This is purely cosmetic. Or perhaps an option to not hide them at all at extreme zooms if your PC can handle them?
24. The inertia of the camera movement means you can move the camera outside the grid map. If you look around at certain angles and zooms outside the map, you can make the game grid go black.
25. Not all lists work with the scroll wheel of my mouse eg. the list of Most Powerful Civilizations. One or two also do not update properly if you've scrolled down and then click a different item that should return the position indicator to the top.
Yes, I know... another long list. I hope that some of these can be put forward for inclusion in a future patch. Some might not be worth looking at (eg. the clipping with the camera), but I feel that a lot of these little touches could greatly enhance the feeling of control and management of your race in GC2. Thanks for reading
