The Fleet Manager has *serious* usability problems right now that make it, at best, a chore, and at worst, a nightmare. Some of these are exacerbated by bugs with destroyed reinforcement fleets cluttering up the Fleet Manager to an absurd extent, and some are exacerbated by the 3.6.0/Orion changes to strongly discourage simple fleet composition (e.g. all Battleships with a Titan).
The Fleet Manager UI is already pretty "busy" so I hesitate to suggest adding more controls to it. But I think that there are two that are really, badly needed:
First, a Remove Empty Fleets button that acts on all fleets (like Reinforce Fleets does), to remove any fleets with no ships in them. The worst of this can (and definitely should) be addressed by tagging reinforcement fleets and removing them automatically if they are destroyed, if the player didn't customize the reinforcement fleet since it was (automatically) created. But there are still situations where you can end up with player-created fleets that get emptied (e.g. merge/split actions) and it's unclear whether auto-deleting these empty fleets is best. Adding a button to clean them all up and keeping the behavior as-is for player-created fleets might be a fairly safe way to reduce a lot of pain here.
Secondly, now that you have to have complex fleet definitions, it's a pain in the neck to build up a bunch of replicas of the same composition. That wasn't so bad when you just had to click "max out the Battleships!" but now with Orion, you have to add a whole bunch of ships (just the right number of each), times each fleet, ugh, it's not very fun to keep doing all this work over and over. Adding a "Copy Fleet Definition" button to the per-fleet actions (like Upgrade Fleet, Disband Fleet, etc.) would help out a lot especially given that players are forced to use complex fleets with 3.6.0: The button would just mint a new fleet definition using the same layout as the prototype fleet it was duplicated from. The new fleet definition starts out empty, of course, and the player has to reinforce it... but that would take out a lot of the nuisance of having to manually build up meticulously configured complex fleet definitions.
The Fleet Manager UI is already pretty "busy" so I hesitate to suggest adding more controls to it. But I think that there are two that are really, badly needed:
First, a Remove Empty Fleets button that acts on all fleets (like Reinforce Fleets does), to remove any fleets with no ships in them. The worst of this can (and definitely should) be addressed by tagging reinforcement fleets and removing them automatically if they are destroyed, if the player didn't customize the reinforcement fleet since it was (automatically) created. But there are still situations where you can end up with player-created fleets that get emptied (e.g. merge/split actions) and it's unclear whether auto-deleting these empty fleets is best. Adding a button to clean them all up and keeping the behavior as-is for player-created fleets might be a fairly safe way to reduce a lot of pain here.
Secondly, now that you have to have complex fleet definitions, it's a pain in the neck to build up a bunch of replicas of the same composition. That wasn't so bad when you just had to click "max out the Battleships!" but now with Orion, you have to add a whole bunch of ships (just the right number of each), times each fleet, ugh, it's not very fun to keep doing all this work over and over. Adding a "Copy Fleet Definition" button to the per-fleet actions (like Upgrade Fleet, Disband Fleet, etc.) would help out a lot especially given that players are forced to use complex fleets with 3.6.0: The button would just mint a new fleet definition using the same layout as the prototype fleet it was duplicated from. The new fleet definition starts out empty, of course, and the player has to reinforce it... but that would take out a lot of the nuisance of having to manually build up meticulously configured complex fleet definitions.
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