With the new anomalies we’ll need to design specific ships for them. Well for every race I’ve got 10-20 designs between cruisers, frigates, and fighters. Well if I redesign even half of them for each anomaly I now have 70+ designs for each race… That’s a big mess with no organization.
For the ship design screen you should be able to create folders, that you place ships into. So you could make four different ones for each race, then add sub-folder however you want. I would probably make sub-folders for different anomalies at least, but you could also do it for classes of ships, rolls of ships, etc.
Then for the deployment screen you pick which folder to show from. I’m not sure the best way to do this, either it could show ships just in that folder, or ships in that folder and every sub-folder in there.
On the deployment screen it would also be nice to add more data to show what ships you are putting down. I’ve been adding speed to my ship names because some times I only want to use ships of the same speed, and can’t figure it out any other way. It is also annoying when I can’t afford to place any more ships, and I’ll want to see how many frigates I have to take off to afford a specific cruiser. I can’t tell which cruiser is which because they all now say you can’t afford to place it until I take off enough ships to afford them all. I’d like to still be able to see what the cruiser is called, even if I can’t place it.
YES. All of this would be great. One small addition (which is sort of implied in your last paragraph) - show the cost of each ship in the deployment screen tooltip as well.
Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, the whole “ship silhouette icon” thing doesn’t do it for me. All it shows me is which hull the ship uses, and that’s completely useless to new players who can’t identify a ship by its silhouette yet. So the icons are graphically pretty, but just showing me a list of ship names, with options to sort by ship class and maybe other characteristics (such as speed) would be a far more usable interface for deploying ships.
I kind of like the silhouettes, I do find myself hovering over them a lot though to find out the name of the ship because I often build multiple types of ships on the same frame. It might be nice if they had an overlay of their name, even if it was just the first part of the name.
Yeah. I would have a ton of ships, but because of the time it takes to get names and whatnot, every time I start playing around with a different race, I erase everything and restart. Folder creation and naming would be super useful.
I end up doing the same thing as loki. Even with only 20 or so designs, my list of ships has become unwieldly.
IMO, placing ships should be like placing weapons and armor: you choose the icon, it shows you all the stats for that ship (cost, armor, shield, speed, etc.), and you can drag it into the battlefield.
In fact, since the icons don’t really tell you much, ditch them entirely. Maybe use a tree view, categorized by class, then in order by name. That’s usually how I think about my ship placement: I want such-and-such cruiser now. As it is, my ship designs end up having names like “Imperial heavily shielded anti-fighter cruiser”. That’s a long name and most of that information could be derived from categorization rather than sticking it all in the name and mousing-over all of the icons to see them.
My typical ship name is ‘Reb Cruiser, SR Beams, Mk. 4 - Shields’. :-p At least since the icons are sorted alphabetically, I know which way to go to find ‘Reb Cruiser, Missile, Mk. 2 - MIRV’!