Ship deployment screen suggestion thread

Right now it’s pretty labor intensive to deploy ships for any of the larger maps. I’m usually a bit lazy so I tend to throw a cookie cutter deployment at a challenge because it’s so much work to create a new deployment. Here’s a few ideas which could make the deployment process less arduous for space admirals who don’t have secretaries to handle this job yet:

  1. Easiest one first (I think): Right now it’s really really easy to hit the escape key on the ship deployment screen and exit the deployment you just spent 10 minutes working on. Especially since escape is the shortcut to exit the ship design screen. The ship design screen will pop up a dialogue asking you if you want to exit without saving. It would be great if this feature could be brought over to the deployment screen.

  2. Add a copy and paste feature. Now that the iPhone can do it, it’s only logical that GSB should have it if it wants to be an iPhone killer. :wink: Basically it would be useful to copy and paste small ship patterns into a bigger fleet.

  3. Add “paint program” features. Deploying space battleships is kind of like drawing in mspaint. Except your pictures can’t fly around and make things explode with big laser cannons. It would be nice to just hold down the mouse button and drag in a straight line to deploy a row of cruisers. Having to click to deploy ships isn’t so bad when you need to put down 6 or 7 cruisers. But deploying 20-30 cruisers starts to feel like a chore.

  4. Oh yeah, maybe cruisers and frigates could be treated like fighter squadrons. So instead of deploying just one at a time, you could deploy a whole block of them at a time. Changing the square formation to a rectangle or diagonal line would make sense though since square formations aren’t the most useful. Or just give players the ability to move the ships around after plopping down 16 cruisers at once. Since most of the controls are already there, I would guess this would be easiest to implement (I hope).

Also, it would be nice to be able to draw a box and fill it in with cruisers. I guess an airbrush feature wouldn’t be so useful, but yeah that’s the general idea. I hope some of these features make it into the next release. :smiley:

Another good suggestion from you, Hannibal.

Why thank you. :slight_smile:

agreed with von bork. :smiley:

Oh, the escape exiting without confirmation is one of the worst things in the game, if not the worst. Makes me quit every time it happens since I just can’t get back to my carefully laid out ships setting and battle plan.

Other suggestions are good as well, but the escape issue is the most annoying.

This is going in to version 1.25. In fact I’ve done half of it now. It currently always pops up a dialog, so I need to just make sure it tracks changes first. But anyway, consider it done…

Yay! That will be so awesome :smiley: