Time to ressurect my old UI thread. Basicly it sums up almost all the annoyances I have with current DA UI.

UI improvement ideas

The most critical UI improvement I would like to see is the following:

- Same class buildings should always be at the same spot in planetary building list. Current system with changing building names create confusion since the building list changes all the time.

Each class building should be color coded, example. Factories could always be surrounded with blue color and so on?

I'd wish there was a way to set up patrol routes via waypoints, i really want recon vessel looking at my borders to see if a enemy is mounting up for a war. Micromanaging 3 or 5 different patrol vessels just to keep my military in proper readiness is quite annoying..

Terror stars aren't enabled in TA yet.

I highly agree with both of these.

Also, how about an "Automate" button for survey ships on the main UI like Miners get? And maybe an "Auto-Explore" button for other ships that aren't constructors, miners, or survey ships?

Well, why do the Drengin have access to Market Centers and Black Markets, Entertainment Networks and Arenas?

I noticed there are a lot of light colored areas on the new surface maps. This makes it hard to see which tile is selected at times with the kind of transparent white glow depicting the selected tile. Maybe change the indicator to a solid white or more middle ground color would help.

I am colorblind so this may be a bigger issue for me than others.

Please change the spy system!
The current system is garbage, the old way was a great deal better. Change it to how it was and add a counter esp system to keep people from constantly keeping those spy networks on you.
Randomly stealing your enemies ships, collecting data, troop movements, inciting rebellions, stealing funds are all things your spending should do and more.
countering these effects from outside influences should be what the counter espionage slider do. as well as give you a heads up on who did what, how accurate that information is and what you can do about.
Update: Race A has been caught spying on us however we arn't sure if its really them. we have leads that it may be X or Y behind this and framing them because they are our Allies. no indications on if B C or D had anything to do with this.
keep the spy system simple.

I wish that espionage were useful against minors. Some of the "minors" due to mega-events end up being more powerful than most "major" civs. Using agents against a minor civ with three times the player's population and production isn't "wasting" them.

With Tech trading I think The different races should not want to give up their unique technologies without a price. For instance I had no problem trading for slave pits or navigation centers. The only reason I would give them up is for a hefty price or your unique techs and at an advantage to me. Another reason I could see trading away my unique techs is I'm at war and need ships. I would like to see computer players not willing to give away thier unique techs so easily.

My few cents:
Don't rearrange tech tree on trading/stealing
For starbase construction, automatically jump the focus to the last module type you built on the starbase - Making an Economy starbase with factories on it easier and faster to build.
Make more balanced super abilities - Abilities like Super Annihilator (Spore ships = ), Super Warrior (If you can destroy enemy ships in one turn, you don't need armor, and if you don't need armor you have more available firepower), so on, are incredibly good. Others aren't quite so good.
Add something, maybe in the scenario options, for turning on/off events. I personally would turn off stuff like the Jagged Knife event, but leave stuff like the Pirates.
More fleet bonus modules.
Auto-Repair modules for battleships, so that you can build a self-sufficient fleet of battleships.
Perhaps a 'Starbase Navigation' tech tree with long research times which increase the 4 starbase per sector limit.

About Minor Races:

All other things aside, I was thinking that there should be a way (either by an event or by them making some achievement) for a Minor Race to be promoted to a Major Race, assuming there are <10 major races currently (counting player).

I think this would really mix things up, to have a race that has been minor so far suddenly become an actual power to be dealt with.

Also, I think the Dread Lords and Jagged Knife should be Major Races, not minor, and those events should only happen when there are <10 major races. Actually, to really mix things up, I would prefer it if those events didn't happen until at least one major race has been knocked out of the game (possibly do this for promoting minor races, too).

I could have sworn that I had a couple things to tweak, but right now this is the only one I can think of:

- Make clicking in the text areas when saving a ship design work (pretty please?)

I end up designing and tweaking ships frequently enough that this is extremely annoying when you want to just add a version designator (e.g. My Ship, My Ship M2, etc.)

orriginally posted in game talk but eh.

After reading quite a few threads, and playing pretty much exclusively huge/gigantic galaxies, i would like to suggest that a look at how the ai desides what is a useful ratio of transport to regluar ships might be in order, as a way to increase difficulty, especially in regards to late-game (when most techs are researched by all civs that have survived the Mid-game wars)

As an example, in the current game im playing, the most powerful enemy (status with me, at war) currently has 100+ planets, 923 total ships.. but only 4 of these are transport vessels.(and if i counted right, only four or five planets acctually building transports) In a tiny/small/medium galaxy with a limeted supply of planets, this would be fine - 4ish transports should be able to take out a planet once defenders are gone, and obviously in those galaxies, one planet means ALOT more relitively speaking than in a gigantic galaxy.

This ratio is representative for just about every game ive gone through, the only exception being the Korath ai, who do to thier spore techs, seem to focus more on building invasion ships. Increasing the ratio of transport ships to normal attack ships would greatly increase the AI's ability to both increase its teritory and defend its teritory (by taking planets back) - meanwhile making the human player value the use of "defensive" fleets alot more.

Id also like to suggest that the dev's take a look at the way range mechanics work on the larger galaxies, restricting the "base" range. This would in essance force the AI to make better decisions simply by restricting thier over-all options.

Lastly, the AI itself is doing a great job of targeting mining starbases as high priorty targets, but contrawise does not defend it's own mining starbases at all, or rarely at best. given the huge overall benifit of some of the mining bases, this could use a tweak. (and please, consider allowing starbases to be parts of fleets - give the various types of starbases differant logistic points - or allow it as a modding option)

end 2bc,
thanks for the great game by the way.