So everyone’s eventually gonna end up with a huge list of ship types to deploy in the battle preparation, as well as a large number of different hulls coming from mods in the ship design screen.
I believe it would be beneficial to have filters to be able to find the ships/hulls you’re looking for quickly and easily.
In battle preparation, I suggest 3 small icons, Fighter, Frigate and Cruiser, above the ‘Add New Design’ button which can be toggled on and off (red when turned off or something) and then hide the designs of that hull type. That would allow to quickly see only the ship type you want to deploy.
On that same note, I’m also thinking it might be hard to find the exact design you want when you have several ships of the same hull. Mousing over every one to see their name is slightly inconvenient.
To remedy this, I think it would be nice to have short code for ship, designated in the designer which is shown directly on the button for each ship in the battle preperation. For example, I make a new frigate and give it the code GX-01 or whatever, and in the battle preparation it it’s shown in a corner of that ship icon.
Here’s a mockup of what I’m thinking it could be like:
(and yes, that is the galactica :P)
Another (or additional) way to help with this would be filters based on ship names. Have a textbox at the top somewhere, and typing in something to search for hides all designs which do not have that text in their name. That would be very helpful as I’m sure most players have their own naming conventions and name ships something with “anti-fighter”, or “heavy shield”, “missile”, etc. to help identify them. So having a name filter would allow people to quickly find the ship types they need for whatever they’re planning right now.
Now for hull filters, it would be nice to have similar options (name and/or hull type filters) for the hull selection in the ship designer. The current implementation of selecting a hull for a ship is a bit tedious.
Maybe having a different view type with a simple list of hull names and their types (fighter, frigate, cruiser) on the left with their stats shown on the right would help? 
That’s all for today. I believe these things should be relatively easy to implement, but I’m not 100% sure if other players also believe that helpers like these are important.
Discuss!
- surray