Anomaly investigation is perhaps too dense to manage.

[Minuro]

I've been playing Stellaris a lot lately, especially with Toxoids and Overlord new features, and during the game (in a 1000 stars galaxy) I got the impression that the exploration process is somewhat tedious, especially if you have more than one science ship.
My experience is: I'm managing whatever planet or war. Suddenly I'm interrupted by the message of a new anomaly discovered, I choose to investigate. Then they interrupt me again to explain what has been discovered, which is often just a huge piece of text that I already know (because I've played so much) and also the creation of a project on that system that doesn't automatically start resolving, but instead requires assigning the same science ship and then return to the automatic exploration. The problem is that this process, constantly repeated and which can also get a lot worse if you have several ships probing, is quite dense. I think the current system would be greatly improved if research projects could start to be solved by pressing a button on the anomaly screen itself.

I also think anomaly investigation should have even fewer steps. I understand that choosing whether to investigate a very difficult anomaly or continue exploring is part of the gameplay, but there comes a time when it's a torturous process that interrupts you more times than you'd like. It is usual that I stop exploring precisely to stop receiving messages, because I'm too busy with other things to babysit my science ships.

 

[HFY]

I got the impression that the exploration process is somewhat tedious, especially if you have more than one science ship.

IMHO it's not exploration in specific which is annoying about pop-ups, it's the whole game UX which is too reliant on pop-up interruptions as its only communication channel for some information.

Like it's great that someone wrote at length about this mechanically irrelevant digsite's backstory but I'm in a war and I'm going to hit escape to get back to that war (and several seconds later I might wonder what I missed but it's clearly not more important than winning the current war).

Exploration is bad about interruption pop-ups, special projects are bad about interruption pop-ups, diplomacy is bad about interruption pop-ups (e.g. the new "We pledge secret fealty!" which not only interrupts by removes all other windows on the screen, hope you weren't working on any ship designs because they're gone now), etc. The game as a whole is bad about interruption pop-ups.

This could be fixed.

We see an example of a better interface in science research, tradition discovery, digsites, and first contact -- there's an icon which you "Hey when you get a chance click me and get a thing!" -- this is so much better than the interruption pop-ups, and it's already in the game.

I'd really like it if more new features used that mechanism, instead of getting more intrusive and harder to work around.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Imperator solved this problem.

There was a dedicated part of the UI for “Queued Events” and these events would automatically resolve themselves unless you took action. Anomalies are somewhat like this in that your scientists automatically investigate them, but I wish they Paradox took it a step further. Scientists should investigate and resolve anomalies on their own all the way to completion unless you specifically tell them to do otherwise.

There also shouldn’t be anomalies where you agree to do something in the event and then have to manually move your science ship to address that thing. If you say you want your science ship to resolve something, it should just do it. The moon collision one is like this where you agree to watch the collision and then have to manually move your science ship to the location of the collision.

 

[HFY]

There was a dedicated part of the UI for “Queued Events” and these events would automatically resolve themselves if you took action. Anomalies are somewhat like this in that your scientists automatically investigate them, but I wish they Paradox took it a step further. Scientists should investigate and resolve anomalies on their own all the way to completion unless you specifically tell them to do otherwise.

I would want a per-ship toggle because sometimes I'm in a hurry -- racing an AI to claim a system maybe -- or because I have a 2nd science ship with Carefree + Custom AI who can do the actual investigation faster, so I want the scientist with Roamer + Meticulous to find more anomalies and NOT investigate them.

Other times yeah, just investigate them, nobody else is going to jump-drive behind the Phobe FE to get at this cluster in the near future.

But it should not default only one way or the other.