A list of possible UI and minor gameplay improvements

[gunner6]

I've spent the past week taking note of all the minor UI and gameplay anoyances that should (in my opinion) be changed. I've polled a few friends about this and came up with the following list of suggestions.

Disclaimers: I'm deliberately *not* (intentionally) including bugs on this list. I'm also not going to address what I see as targets for major overhaul (e.g., trade and sectors), except for minor points about needed improvements in the systems *as they are*.

UI Changes

Organizer:

• Transport fleets should show their location in the organizer, and hovering over the fleet icon should show your their current orders, just as with every other ship

Notifications:

• There should be a notification when you get a new pop (through migration and reproduction)
• There should be a notification when you gain Federation presidency, and when you're about to lose it.
• There should be a notification when a truce is about to expire, like in CK2
  
• Notifications should be more easily configurable in general, like in CK2

Tabs

• From the Planets list (Empire Tab), you shuld be able to build spaceports and modules by clicking on the empty module locations
• There should be a list of surveyed habitable planets in your space or neutral space in one of the tabs (sortable by size, habitability, distance, etc.)
• There should be an option to list empires by relative power, number of pops, and number of planets in the Contacts tab
• Terraforming progress should appear in the Situation Log

Sectors:

• Shift-clicking when giving resources to a sector should add in larger increments, e.g., 500 or 1k
• When managing sectors, changes should not take effect until you click Finish.

Other:

• There should be some indicator of whether or not it is "safe" to remove a frontier outpost; e.g., the game should tell you which systems will be lost if you destroy it.
• The "create new fleet" interface could be better. Drag and drop between two columns would be useful. Sorting/searching by ship class and model would also be useful. Finally, when I click a ship to move it to the new fleet, it shouldn't scroll back up to the top of the fleet list.
• The Surface Queue should appear as a list to the side of the Surface tab (like the spaceport build queue)
• The fleet capacity tooltip should show your total fleet breakdown (for those of us who split our fleets and don't feel like counting)

Minor Gameplay Changes

Fleets:

• You should be able to mark systems as "avoid," so that your fleets will try to path around the system (and non-military ships, including transports, should auto path around systems where there are known hostiles, if possible.
  
• There should be rally points for newly constructed fleets. New ships should auto join existsing fleets at the rally point.
• You should be able to set a specific system as "home" for ships/fleets, and order the fleet to go there by Shift-clicking the return button

Government:

• Non militarists should have a policy which allows their fleets to safely ignore/ be unable to attack unarmed vessels
• Mandates should have a chance to change after a term finishes, with an improved chance if the mandate was fulfilled.

Trade:

• You should be able to request that other Empires transfer you systems via trade. Of course they shouldn't agree without good reason (i.e., you have a strong claim to the planet, they're a vassal, etc.)

Other:

• Changing a species' habitability preference should cost a Gene Point
• You should be able to tax your vassals (the amount would be changeable as a policy)
• Mining/Research stations should have a "deactivate" button

 

[myrsl0ken]

I agree with everything. Good write-up!

 

[FGWeasel]

I fully agree, especially with the list of habitable planets.

 

[Saint_Rukus]

Very nice write-up! I agree with most of them, especially with configuring notifications. Not being able to set ones to automatically pause and/or pop-up (ex. research complete) seems very odd considering how that is a common feature in CK/EU/Vic.

 

[Hamsterix]

Good list, agree with everything.

 

[Hopit]

Discovered anomalies need a list also.
Personally I only start investigating them when I have a lvl 5 scientist, and then I'm always at a loss where what anomaly is...

 

[gunner6]

Some recent additions:

UI

• Military Stations should appear in the outliner
• Terraforming Stations should appear in the outliner
• Terraforming progress should be shown on the terraforming station itself (I shouldn't have to go to the planet, then click terraform to see the progress)
• When hovering over a growing pop, it should show the time remaining until fully grown (I shouldn't have to do the math myself)
• In the Situation Log, debris should get it's own collapsable list (so it doesn't clutter the log)

Gameplay

• When allies using a different FTL type are following you, they should path towards the final destination, not the intermediate steps (e.g., if you're using wormholes, your Warp and Hyperlane allies shouldn't follow you back to your wormhole station if you're just going to pop into the system next door to the one they were in)
• Allied fleets should not follow your fleet if it's docked

 

[Theatril]

• You should be able to mark systems as "avoid," so that your fleets will try to path around the system (and non-military ships, including transports, should auto path around systems where there are known hostiles, if possible.

I agree with pretty much everything you've written up, but this one got to me. Don't non-military ships already avoid these systems if you've put on the "evade" option? At least that's my experience

 

[Panzerschreck]

Additional UI:
In the detailed Galaxy View Mode there should be an indication, if a System contains a not-developed (Pre-Warp) civilization.

 

[Mini Reddish]

A couple of minor things that I'd personally like to see that I don't think you've mentioned already.

- Create an order to colonize a particular planet. So that it will take the nearest space port of the desired race/ethos you've selected for that planet, and build a colony ship to then be auto dispatched there when needed.

- Upgrading a building, if there is only one option to upgrade to, can it just upgrade it? Further to that, allow the tooltip for the upgrade button to also show the costs for the upgrade.

- Split the output sorting into the mass, energy and sciences so I can sort by what type it is I actually want. At the moment I think it just sorts by a sum of all of them.

 

[OdinTGE]

• Changing a species' habitability preference should cost a Gene Point

I agree with everything but this.

Further changes:

• We should be able to re-order things in the outliner. I'm aware you can re-order the categories. I mean if I want to be able to move the planets around in the planets section, the fleets around in the fleet section etc.
• Add a Terraforming Station section to the outliner
• The new gray arrow in 1.2 that shows a building has an upgrade but is missing a requirement (resources, better planet capital, etc.) needs to not show up if the only upgrade available is to an Empire Capital building and the planet isn't the Empire Capital
• We should be able to turn off the upgrade arrow (gray or yellow) on an individual basis. This is mostly for farms as you often get a planet to the correct amount of food with a non-max farm.
• We need to be able to downgrade buildings (mostly just farms)
• It would be nice to have some small indicator on the outliner next to a planet if that planet has an upgrade available.

• The new 1.2 Non-Aggression Pacts and Defensive Pacts need to have some sort of minimum duration. Currently they're not "pacts" at all as you can just make and break them repeatedly. This is both silly, and causes the AI to spam you with notifications about pacts forming and breaking. I assume the relationship between the two empires is sitting right on some break point value and as it moves around they just keep changing their mind.
• In 1.2 (maybe 1.1 too?) evasion added by admirals is multiplicative. That is if you have 10% evasion and the admiral adds 15% your new value is 11.5%. Step one is nerfing the admiral trait down to probably 5% from 15% then making it additive so 10% becomes 15%.

Gene Modding needs a ton of help.

• As I said above I do not think changing habitability should require a point. However, right now it does require a point in a way. Despite it costing nothing if you do not have a point available you cannot click the Modify button. This needs to change. If it's not going to cost a point, which it shouldn't, then we shouldn't need a point left loose to use the habitability change.
• If you modify a sub-set of a species (say, add industrialist) then later move them and change their habitability they have their traits listed in a certain order. If you then go back to the original species and first change their habitability before adding industrialist they are now considered two different species despite the fact that they are functional identical.
• We need the ability to rename species when we modify them.
• Currently you have to control a species' home world to modify them. This is wrong. I'm not trying to modify the pops on their home world. I'm trying to modify the pops living on my planets. If they're in my empire let me modify them.
• I'm not 100% on this but I feel like we should have the ability to undo modifications to get trait points back at a later date.

One empire-style I really enjoy the idea of is the "Benevolent" Overlords. An empire that espouses unity and the betterment of all while really just exploiting everything they can find. Functionally that means I never mod my primary species or move them to non-ideal planets. Instead I want to uplift and/or enlighten and/or conquer people to do all that menial stuff for me. I then use the insane negative Ethics Divergence from Spiritualist and Collectivist to make sure everybody totally agrees that everything is great and nobody should question the empire. This is technically possible now but there are many UI/Mechanics issues. Some of them were covered above in the section on Gene Modding.

Other issues are UI related. I am more than happy to pay the influence and society research required if I want to modify some Proles (pre-sentient trait adding +20% minerals) to have industrious then modify their habitability repeatedly and resettle them all over the empire to work all the mines. What I am not happy about is the insane UI hoops I have to jump through to make this happen. I'm not even sure I have any concrete suggestions here but right now trying to get this done is a nightmare. That's just for making miners. Add in trying to get thrifty and intelligent pops on all the right places and it becomes practically impossible. I fully agree that there should be cost involved if you want this kind of species exploitation but the cost should come from game mechanics, not user frustration with the UI.

• One suggestion is that when allowing migration pops should value being able to work a tile they're good at. So if an industrious pop is on a planet where he can't work a mine (because they're all already taken by industrious pops) but you have another planet habitable by that species the pop should try to migrate there to work a mine.
• To go along with this we need a much better way to see the traits of a pop at a glance on planets. As it is if you have some pops with materialist and some without (but they're all the same species portrait) you have to click each pop looking for the materialist pops to put on your labs. This goes for any trait/ethos that benefits a tile. We really need a way to spot the pops we want much faster and with much less clicking.