The UI and You

Two words only:

Thank you

It is gratifying to see the developers continuing to put effort into correcting/enhancing the game. It does seem to me that this is not the norm among some of the larger game companies. Can anyone say Master of Orion 3?

I am completely convinced that this is a complicated piece of software with I'm guessing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It has to be extremely easy for some errors to simply not get caught during testing. Continue the great work, please!

Is there some central place to post a list of cosmetic/annoyance bugs that will be reviewed by the programming staff?

Is there an explanation for why the AI doesn't seem to, if I've read some of the posts correctly, initialize properly?

Good luck on your quest to slay those sneaky, elusive, pesky bugs!

Thank you.

MY UI SUGGESTION FOR 1.2 :

You see that "goto" button, in the window that appears when you finished building a ship? Well, please make this button so that it centers the strategic view on the planet that just built the ship. For the moment, it goes to the shipyard, which is completely useless. Even more, when you leave the shipyard, you aren't even centered on the building planet ; the view just returns where you were.

* Auto-Focus on next availabe Ship with Moves ** OMG! Perhaps I never payed attention…perhaps it’s worse playing on a large Galaxy…I don’t know, but I wanted to KILL auto-focus half-way through my last game. Cari’s currently turning this into an option…one that I will promptly disable.

Oh joy, oh joy.

You my friend are now officially my god.


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A new option I would like would be the possibility to make ship moves instantaneous. Especially on larger maps it can take quite some time to move your ships, especially if you have dozens of 50 movement constructors...

Keep up to good work.

Ugrok: I'll bring that up to the team, but note that you're taken to the shipyard for the purpose of selecting a new design if you wish. I do like the idea of centering on the planet though.

Vandenburg: Cari's your new diety, not me My office-wise cursing at the feature was just the straw that broke the camels back. She's the one that knew how to fix it.

I also like your suggestion on instant movement on ships (very useful on those gigantic galaxies)...that was something else I ment to list but forgot to. Thanks for reminding me

As for saving clicks, I like the proposed changes, but I would like to add...

Colony ships...When I pull up the Planet Screen to see the Unowned Planets, if I click on one to move the screen to it, might it be possible not to de-select my colony ship? I hate having to click the find button a few times until I find my colony ship again.

Also, finding starbases are a nightmare for me on gigantic maps. The mini map is useless for this as you can't show just starbases (if there is a way, I can't find it). The Starbase Screen (planet screen) list all starbases on the map, so finding mine becomes almost impossible. Then once I find them I have the same problem as I did with colony ships, the constructor has been de-selected so I have to track them back down while trying to remember which starbase I had that can be upgraded. (not to mention the fact that you cant tell what upgrades you have or haven't got on the SB.)

All in all I enjoy the game, but those two are annoyances to me.

Thanks for the continued support for the game!

I hope that some consideration will be given to add some starbase management tools. Many have been mentioned.

I am of course speaking of some kind of auto upgrade option or an icon that tells you a starbase has improvements available.

Thanks for the efforts so far.

** Colony Management List ** Added shield so you know what planets are defended. Tweaked income display to now display Net Income instead of plain ol’ income…should be more useful. Also tweaked the list so it shouldn’t reset to the top when returning from the Planet Screen.

What means net income? Tax income minus expenses for the planet? I'm not sure if this is really useful, but I wouldn't mind either.

One suggestion regarding the colony management: Please implement some kind of quick build function or list for planets in the colony list, similar to the one for ships (I know there are problems because of the tiles, but I'm sure there are possibilities).
And please include some kind of "decomission all buildings" and/or "delete all ongoing improvements" for planets, too. It's always a clickfest to shape conq... - ahem - liberated planets to your liking. Thank you.

Oh, two more things for the colony list: It would be nice to have an indicator when a planet has empty tiles, it could save a lot of time on larger maps. Maybe an extra column with the number of empty tiles right next to the planet quality would be the best idea.

The other thing would be a highlighting of the planet's production/research focus, and the ability to change that directly on the list (right-click, maybe).

Please the most anoying thing i am finding is when i want to upgrade ships in the shipyard, the little icons that tell you what the ship has are almost useless, their is no text or info and makes it very hard to work out what level of the item you have in your ship, I strart taking ages to remove and check what the item is and what level and space it takes up. Upgrading is becomeing such a pain and time consuming, Can you have a description or some pop up screen that tell you the information you need when the mouse goes over the items in your ship.
That would be the biggest improvement to the game.

** Colony Management List **
It would be nice to be able to focus the different planets on military/social/research here.

It's a start, but I can certainly think of a lot more obvious changes or additions required before the UI is truly friendly and easy to use

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=274&AID=111357

I've identified a further 20 or so issues since forming that list of 48, but there's not much pointing stopping my game to keep taking notes until some of the issues I had listed are fixed.

Starheaven does have a point. In the shipbuilder it would also be nice to have the ability to Remove stacked items. Like if I change my mind, if I want to remove something and other pieces are attached to it, maybe give a warning/prompt but if answered yes, remove everything.

Also, obsolete should give a prompt in case of accidental clicking or maybe a list of obsolete ships in case you want to pull one out of mothball status.

The thing that annoys me a lot is that there is no "run all automated orders button".
I mean, since most goto orders take not "integer" number of turns turns, but between x and x+1 turns (like 5.4weeks), that means that since goto-orders are done at the end of the turn, you will effectively have unused movment points in last autopilot turn (no way to spend them since goto is done at the end of the turn).

If there was a button to force goto for all units, before end of the turn, i could see if some unit has finished its autopilot and spend remaining movement points.

p22: I'm not a 100% but I think thats what the
"skip moves left over from autopilot"
option does. Uncheck it and you are good to go

Hooray! Thank your for addressing these things.

If you're still taking suggestions, I'll copy my post from here: Link. It sounds like you've already fixed some of these issues, but there's others in here I'd love to see as well:

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Yes, the planet and colony management UI definitely could use some improvement. It's not bad if you have only a few planets to manage, but in a game like my current one, in a huge galaxy where I have nearly 200+ planets to attend, it really needs some improvements.

Some improvements I'd love to see:
- On the colony management screen, *please* remember the currently selected planet and the position of the scroll bar and restore them when the screen is exited and then re-entered. If you're going down the list of planets to make a change on each one, you currently have to remember where you were on the list and scroll back down to it every time you leave the colony management screen. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it becomes painful if you need to keep flipping from the colony management screen to the planet screen and back dozens of times per turn, and every time you have to refind your position on the list.

- Speed up the time it takes to display the colony management screen. With ~200 planets, it takes 5-6 secs to come up *every* time. Again, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it becomes painful if you need to keep flipping from the colony management screen to the planet screen dozens of times per turn.

- On the colony management screen, show the focus setting for every planet and allow it to be changed from there. (Highlighting the approriate box the Mil/Soc/Res production columns with each planet's focus and allowing clicks there to change the focus would be perfect).

- There should be a way from both the planet and colony management screens to make the main view center on the selected planet. Owning many planets in a huge/gigantic galaxy, it's hard to remember where every system is located and it becomes a pain to have to search around the map for where, say, Wardell III is located. (If there's already a way to do this, I'd love to know it!)

- Being able to sort the planets by various columns on the colony management screen is very useful and is, for example, a great way to find all planets producing, say, Enhanced Factories and then maybe quick-buy them. It's be even more useful if the previous/next planet buttons on the planet management screen followed the same sort order. That way, you could sort the planets into groupins as you need, then select the first planet of interest, go to the planet management screen, and from there, just click next to get to the next planet in the list *as it is currently sorted*, without needing to go back to the colony management screen first.

- It'd be nice if the colony management screen at least showed if each planet had any ships in orbit (ie: a showing shield symbol), or even better, showed the number of ships, or even better than that, had a popup where you could view and launch ships without having to go back to the main map.

Ugrok: I'll bring that up to the team, but note that you're taken to the shipyard for the purpose of selecting a new design if you wish. I do like the idea of centering on the planet though. Vandenburg: Cari's your new diety, not me My office-wise cursing at the feature was just the straw that broke the camels back. She's the one that knew how to fix it. I also like your suggestion on instant movement on ships (very useful on those gigantic galaxies)...that was something else I ment to list but forgot to. Thanks for reminding me

Some quick comments:
- If the Goto selects the planet, you can still get to quickly pick a new ship to build from the planet shipyard info on main panel, but it will also has the additional benefits of finding where the planet is and letting you see what's parked there. (You can do that by clicking on the blue ship icons on the right, but they don't always show up if you're producing more ships than can the blue icons can fit on screen).

- I second (third?) the instant ship movement option!

Thanks!

- I second (third?) the instant ship movement option!

Me too!
Both for player ships and for the AI during its turn. (I already chatted with Cari about it, she called it the "teleport" function which exists already for ships out of the player's view.)

I see our focus on UI issues is a good thing

All your suggestions will be noted, but we'll obviously have to sort and prioritize them: something that's important to you may not be to everyone else.

I'll definatly talk to Cari (head of ship movement) about the instant ship movement. The only thing I could see being a problem is some unforseen hit-detection cheese, but perhaphs I'm wrong.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

I see our focus on UI issues is a good thing

It sure is, and I'm very glad you are once again responding to suggestions from the user base. Top marks.

The auto-focus doesn't annoy me at all, but it is clearly a big problem for a lot of people and deserves option status.

The one, most annoying UI feature for me (and I'm sure you've already covered part of this in the ship details changes) is the fact that you have to un-fleet a ship and move it to a clear space in order to upgrade it - takes forever when you've got a lot of different ship types. The ability to upgrade from within the fleet manager would be great.

It's me again, on that "goto" button. I know, i know.

What about adding a button then? A shipyard button, that would lead directly to the shipyard, to modify the design ; and a "goto" button that would lead to the strategic view of the planet? Or at least, when you leave the shipyard, center the view on the building planet?

Don't know if it's a good idea, maybe it will be too many buttons...

Excellent work! The single most irritating feature is gone.

I'd like to second improving the colony screen functionality. Changing production focus would reduce the switiching between planet and colony screens - and having a retractable lower screen area with minimap and miniature tilemap for the selected planet would solve everyone's problems.

But really, just thanks for making autofocus optional. I'll be able to play the game without scaring my flatmates now.

PS, there are lengthy threads on the forums chock full of UI complaints. If you're looking for inspiration, try there.

heres one:

even though I'm doing the demo atrm and don't know if its different in the game, there needs to be a way to tell the difference between planets and ships on the minimap because they are symbolized both by a triangle.

and heres one annoyance, the turn button is too darn close to the minimap because if you try to click the bottom corner of the minimap, its easy to accidentially click the turn button

I'd like to see ship specific rally points assignment in the goveners screen.

example:

All planets building constructors send them to rally 218

All planets building fighter mk5 send them to rally 219

or

All transports head to rally to 220

Instead just the option for all ships head to 220 you could select a specific ship design to head to a rally point that meets a need.

The rally point system is miles better now then on release but this would put it over the top for me.

Before v1.11 when you had moves left after auto orders where done the ship with moves left was autofocused. Now it no longer is. Which means it can be a pain to find the ship with moves left so I usually end up hitting skip until the new turn is ready. I'd like that particular type of autofocus back please. I would also find a keyboard command and/or button to "find ship/fleet with moves left" useful.