- Zoom. It’s hard to select ships on large maps.
- Organize designs by class. Unless one recognizes the silhouettes, it’s hard to distinguish between a cruiser and a fighter.
- Put the ship design’s name on/under/above/etc. of the icon. I tend to favor one or two hulls for most of my designs, so it’s annoying to have to wait for the tooltip to see the name of each design.
Here were some of my ideas:
- When having a ship selected, allow a modifier key to be pressed such that when you click on another ship you get a radial menu letting you chose to escort, protect, etc. said ship.
- Have a modifier key to allow you to copy (including orders) the selected ship(s) when you drag (i.e. select a formation and hold down the ctrl key while dragging to copy the entire formation).
- Have the “formation” order applied to a group that you select rather than requiring the targeting method currently employed.
- Change the ship selection menu to a spreadsheet-like menu that shows the ship size, hull, and name.
The ship selection menu could definitely do with a bit of work - just being able to see the name and cost of the ships rather than the silhouettes would make life a lot easier!
Another quick suggestion: maybe shift+click to pick up 5 of the selected ship. It’d certainly make it easier to spam frigates!
Incidentally, the selected ship name is invariably bigger than the 7-character space allowed for it in the box (on the upper LHS of the screen), so I nearly always get names like ‘ship_65…’ on my 1280x1024 screen. Which doesn’t look great.
…and the final suggestions for tonight!
- The ‘add orders’ screen auto-closes when used… perhaps keep it open so that multiple orders are easier to issue?
- Maybe auto-save the deployment before starting the battle?
- The battles are FAR more gratuitous when they’re played back faster! How about making the default speed a bit zoomier? The equivalent of 1.3 would be about right.
I’d love a ‘ship variant search’ box - I use a LOT of variants and I don’t like tweaking ones I’m using for in-progress fleet builds that I’m refining. Having a little search/filter that takes a string argument and shows only ship variants with that string would be GREAT. (Eg - I’m working on ship variant one, so I save the ships with ‘var1’ in the file name. I enter ‘var1’ in the deployment screen and only ‘var1’ ship designs are shown.)
I’d quite like a tagging structure and module search on the ships, that way you could only look for the anti-fighter hulls, or hulls with ecm-shock on them. It would make it much quicker to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Yeah, bunches of similar looking icons when you’re building your fleet makes it tough to do.
I have my auto-sorter working though. Fighter models begin with A, Frigates B, etc. But I shouldn’t have to do that.
A start to that screen would be to make the fighter icons much smaller, the frigates a bit smaller, and leave the cruisers the way they are. That would already be a big help. Or color-code them. Something to tell the classes apart. I’m always clicking the wrong ship, so a highlight around the last ship I clicked in the list would help me remember which ship I’m making 12 copies of.
But really, I’d just like to see the ship model spelled out, and a way to quickly make copies of it, with orders saved along with it.