Several GUI Improvement Ideas.

So far I like the game a lot but I feel that the controls are a bit cumbersome and could use a bit of improvement. I also think the amount of information given to the player on events going on in the galaxy is rather limited. So I have a lot of various ideas to help improve things.

1) Personally I don’t like the bar on the left when it comes to selecting units. Even in small games you want to select units in a hurry but you have to either leave the system drop down open which takes up a lot of space or you have to constantly open and close it. In large games it becomes a giant scrolling window of frustration.

My idea for improving unit selection is to have a right click pop-up window. What I mean by this is when you have no units selected if you right click on a star then an info window, much like the fleet info window you get now when you hover over the left bars on zoomed out view, will appear. The units will be listed in stack format but when you mouse over the stack like say (Cobalt Frig x24 100% 100%) It will have another side info window displaying all the ships in that stack. You can then left click on a single ship or stack to select it and the window will close. If you want to select multiple ships or stacks you just hold shift while you click and once you release shift the window closes and the units you highlighted are selected. In a way this is a lot like how the Windows Right click menus work. This way you can easily pull up a list of ships around any planet and select them without having to sort through the long empire list on the side. Or having to try and pick a single ship out of a large battle as the right click menu can work at all zoom levels.

2) The alert system what notifies you of incoming ships, battles, and etc. isn’t clear a lot of times and I don’t often know the planet names by heart especially since they change every game and I don’t wanna play with the name list up. I think visual one screen cues would be a lot more helpful. What I mean by this is whenever and event happens that you get an alert for a small icon with an arrow in the side could be placed next to the planet in question. This way we can imidately see where this event is happening and not have to hit space bar to zoom to it. If you want an example of what I mean by this think of CIV4. When your cities has a Celebrate the Emperor day a lil Smiley Face would appear with and point on the side indicating the city. It also had this same icon style pointing out resources and other events that happened. This makes it a lot easier to see what is happening and where.

3) This also has to do with the alert system but in a different way. I think the 4 boxes on the left side are a waste of space. You could just as easily have small 4 icons that are unhighlighted in a corner and then when an event happens they light up or flash letting you know some event has accorded this will free up that space for more important info.

4) In regards to the slide bar when I have stack turned on it only stacks them in max groups of ten which I don’t like because I usually wanna select all my ships of that type which could easily be over 20 so I have to select 3 things instead of just clicking one. That’s kinda annoying not to mention it takes up even more space. Could it be set to stack all units of a single type in ONE stack?

5) I don’t know if it’s possible to change what is displayed when you mouse over a star at different zoom levels but if it is I think it would be nice to have more info when zoomed all the way out. One thing I like at the mid level zoom is the 3 bars that appear around the planets and when you mouse over them you can view allied fleets, enemy fleets, or buildings. But when you zoom out to max view it’s kinda nice to look at as you see the whole galaxy but it also losses a lot of that detail. So my idea is when your zoomed out on the galaxy stage and you mouse over a system instead of just showing that planet’s info card could you show 3 info cards? The left one being allied fleets, middle being the planet, and right being the enemy fleets. That way you can quickly view the status of things without having to zoom in and out constantly to keep tabs on battles in two different star systems.

6) I noticed when your at star level zoom there is a light red outline sometimes around planets that have battles over them. Well I was wondering if you could have some kind of red ring or maybe make the planet icon flash red when your on the galaxy view level so that you can more readily identify which planets have combat underway.

7) When it comes to research I often miss the alert that it is finished. And the light flashing of the button when R&D is in progress is not that noticeable. I was thinking some kind of clearer indication that R&D was happening and also the progress of it would be nice. So I was thinking how about a green background or something that slowly fills in the button as research is done. That way you can easily see how long until the next item is done without having to mouse over it or open the R&D window. And when no R&D is in progress the button’s background color could change to say red so it’s clear at a glance that nothing is happening. Also if you add R&D query like was mentioned in another suggestion where it starts when you have enough cash instead of paying up front then you could have it flash yellow meaning something is queried but you can’t afford it yet.

8) When it comes to the AI their messages are so vague and so annoying I ignore them for the most part. This also brings up the problem that I often don’t realize right away when they have sent me a treaty offer. As just I think it would be nice if the Diplomacy icon would flash or have some kind of indication that you have treaty offers pending.

9) In the middle of the control bar at the bottom of the screen it shows a picture of the selected ship or the focused ship if you have a group selected. Well this is fine if you have a single unit selected but I’d like it if it displayed a list of all the ships I have selected kinda similar to the way ships are viewed on the empire bar with lil icons. This way we can see the ships in the selection and their health bars. This also would open up some management options like if you want to focus on a different ship in the group you click on it so you can use it’s abilities. If you wanna drop a ship you can shift click and it wouldn’t be part of the selection anymore. This could help make ship management easier.

Let me know what you think of my ideas for improving in the GUI.