Disclaimer: These are not pretty, they are supposed to help illustrate my ideas. Paradox designers would make them much prettier!
First of all after over 50 hours in the first week I gotta say this game is awesome. I love it! We all know there are some kinks here and there, but we are all here to try and help make space great again. Most UI problems don't really pop up till the mid to late game so here are some ideas on how to smooth out running a large empire so it doesn't feel so clunky after building your empire for 10+ hours!
First lets cover Fleets and Armies. These can be a pain to manage once you start needing to replenish a fleet during a large war where each battle is a slaughter on both sides. And it can be a pain to go through and click each army and throw on an attachment across multiple planets.
Spaceports
What we really need is a centralized spaceports tab where we can queue up upgrades across our Empires, fleets at the click of a button, and overall just a centralized system where we don't have to switch between 4 menus for each spaceport. These menus could be additional tabs on the Empire Overview.
From this menu you would see what level a spaceport is, what modules it has, and what is in the queue. You would be able to select the spaceport, or multiple of them all from this menu. You would get a build tab over to the side and would be able to queue up whatever you needed.
There would also be a "Create Fleet Template" where you build your ideal fleet composition in a new overlay menu that pops up. When selecting the "Fleet templates" button the build menu would change to the templates menu (and the fleet template button would switch to "Orbital Construction") showing everything you've created and their total cost. Then via some options not present in this mock up would be able to select whether it would build from the selected planet(s), throughout a sectors set of spaceports, or Empire wide. It wouldn't have to be a complicated algorithm, simply find the shortest build queue, add ship from template, repeat until all are queued! EDIT: Queued Fleet templates rally at planet built at, sector capital, or empire capital depending on build choice.
Also when clicking on an empty module the context would switch over to the modules build tab to queue up!
Also when hovering over a ships icon in the build queue a tooltip of what class that is would pop down, the tooltip I took was from an active fleet so it would be displayed without all these fleet modifiers.
I didn't mock up the armies tab, but it would have a similar setup. Armies templates would be a soldier type + an attachment. There would be a view of all current armies and you could see without selecting them if they had an attachment and could click it if empty and add one. Perhaps you could shift select multiple armies and have a remove attachments button that clears all selected and an add attachment that adds the same one to all selected. We just need to be able to click 3 times and have managed our empires 50+ armies instead of clicking 150+ times...
Planets of Interest
This is more for the early to mid game, but would be helpful late game also.
This would be an extra tab on the situation log. It would have some filters at the top to select between habitable planets, anomalies, potentially primitives and pre-sentients? (these may be redundant to species menu). You could look at just what you wanted when going in via option checks like the Empire Contacts menu. You would be able to sort them by distance, see what the habitability is per species within your empire, this little part might need to scroll for larger multi-species empires, what level is an anomaly and it should probably show its base risk before taking skill into account. Perhaps there is a class of "interesting" planets I am forgetting, but they could be rolled into this one nice centralized menu so you don't have to pause and scan the galaxy for what you were looking for.
So what other UI improvements would you like to see? Please share your ideas and mock ups, whether they be in paint, a scan of a napkin, a sloppy screenshot photoshop like this, or you know some super sexy professional designer level stuff that will put the rest of us to shame
First of all after over 50 hours in the first week I gotta say this game is awesome. I love it! We all know there are some kinks here and there, but we are all here to try and help make space great again. Most UI problems don't really pop up till the mid to late game so here are some ideas on how to smooth out running a large empire so it doesn't feel so clunky after building your empire for 10+ hours!
First lets cover Fleets and Armies. These can be a pain to manage once you start needing to replenish a fleet during a large war where each battle is a slaughter on both sides. And it can be a pain to go through and click each army and throw on an attachment across multiple planets.
Spaceports
What we really need is a centralized spaceports tab where we can queue up upgrades across our Empires, fleets at the click of a button, and overall just a centralized system where we don't have to switch between 4 menus for each spaceport. These menus could be additional tabs on the Empire Overview.
From this menu you would see what level a spaceport is, what modules it has, and what is in the queue. You would be able to select the spaceport, or multiple of them all from this menu. You would get a build tab over to the side and would be able to queue up whatever you needed.
There would also be a "Create Fleet Template" where you build your ideal fleet composition in a new overlay menu that pops up. When selecting the "Fleet templates" button the build menu would change to the templates menu (and the fleet template button would switch to "Orbital Construction") showing everything you've created and their total cost. Then via some options not present in this mock up would be able to select whether it would build from the selected planet(s), throughout a sectors set of spaceports, or Empire wide. It wouldn't have to be a complicated algorithm, simply find the shortest build queue, add ship from template, repeat until all are queued! EDIT: Queued Fleet templates rally at planet built at, sector capital, or empire capital depending on build choice.
Also when clicking on an empty module the context would switch over to the modules build tab to queue up!
Also when hovering over a ships icon in the build queue a tooltip of what class that is would pop down, the tooltip I took was from an active fleet so it would be displayed without all these fleet modifiers.
I didn't mock up the armies tab, but it would have a similar setup. Armies templates would be a soldier type + an attachment. There would be a view of all current armies and you could see without selecting them if they had an attachment and could click it if empty and add one. Perhaps you could shift select multiple armies and have a remove attachments button that clears all selected and an add attachment that adds the same one to all selected. We just need to be able to click 3 times and have managed our empires 50+ armies instead of clicking 150+ times...
Planets of Interest
This is more for the early to mid game, but would be helpful late game also.
This would be an extra tab on the situation log. It would have some filters at the top to select between habitable planets, anomalies, potentially primitives and pre-sentients? (these may be redundant to species menu). You could look at just what you wanted when going in via option checks like the Empire Contacts menu. You would be able to sort them by distance, see what the habitability is per species within your empire, this little part might need to scroll for larger multi-species empires, what level is an anomaly and it should probably show its base risk before taking skill into account. Perhaps there is a class of "interesting" planets I am forgetting, but they could be rolled into this one nice centralized menu so you don't have to pause and scan the galaxy for what you were looking for.
So what other UI improvements would you like to see? Please share your ideas and mock ups, whether they be in paint, a scan of a napkin, a sloppy screenshot photoshop like this, or you know some super sexy professional designer level stuff that will put the rest of us to shame
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