Hooray! Thank your for addressing these things.

If you're still taking suggestions, I'll copy my post from here: Link. It sounds like you've already fixed some of these issues, but there's others in here I'd love to see as well:

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Yes, the planet and colony management UI definitely could use some improvement. It's not bad if you have only a few planets to manage, but in a game like my current one, in a huge galaxy where I have nearly 200+ planets to attend, it really needs some improvements.

Some improvements I'd love to see:
- On the colony management screen, *please* remember the currently selected planet and the position of the scroll bar and restore them when the screen is exited and then re-entered. If you're going down the list of planets to make a change on each one, you currently have to remember where you were on the list and scroll back down to it every time you leave the colony management screen. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it becomes painful if you need to keep flipping from the colony management screen to the planet screen and back dozens of times per turn, and every time you have to refind your position on the list.

- Speed up the time it takes to display the colony management screen. With ~200 planets, it takes 5-6 secs to come up *every* time. Again, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it becomes painful if you need to keep flipping from the colony management screen to the planet screen dozens of times per turn.

- On the colony management screen, show the focus setting for every planet and allow it to be changed from there. (Highlighting the approriate box the Mil/Soc/Res production columns with each planet's focus and allowing clicks there to change the focus would be perfect).

- There should be a way from both the planet and colony management screens to make the main view center on the selected planet. Owning many planets in a huge/gigantic galaxy, it's hard to remember where every system is located and it becomes a pain to have to search around the map for where, say, Wardell III is located. (If there's already a way to do this, I'd love to know it!)

- Being able to sort the planets by various columns on the colony management screen is very useful and is, for example, a great way to find all planets producing, say, Enhanced Factories and then maybe quick-buy them. It's be even more useful if the previous/next planet buttons on the planet management screen followed the same sort order. That way, you could sort the planets into groupins as you need, then select the first planet of interest, go to the planet management screen, and from there, just click next to get to the next planet in the list *as it is currently sorted*, without needing to go back to the colony management screen first.

- It'd be nice if the colony management screen at least showed if each planet had any ships in orbit (ie: a showing shield symbol), or even better, showed the number of ships, or even better than that, had a popup where you could view and launch ships without having to go back to the main map.

Ugrok: I'll bring that up to the team, but note that you're taken to the shipyard for the purpose of selecting a new design if you wish. I do like the idea of centering on the planet though. Vandenburg: Cari's your new diety, not me My office-wise cursing at the feature was just the straw that broke the camels back. She's the one that knew how to fix it. I also like your suggestion on instant movement on ships (very useful on those gigantic galaxies)...that was something else I ment to list but forgot to. Thanks for reminding me

Some quick comments:
- If the Goto selects the planet, you can still get to quickly pick a new ship to build from the planet shipyard info on main panel, but it will also has the additional benefits of finding where the planet is and letting you see what's parked there. (You can do that by clicking on the blue ship icons on the right, but they don't always show up if you're producing more ships than can the blue icons can fit on screen).

- I second (third?) the instant ship movement option!

Thanks!

- I second (third?) the instant ship movement option!

Me too!
Both for player ships and for the AI during its turn. (I already chatted with Cari about it, she called it the "teleport" function which exists already for ships out of the player's view.)

I see our focus on UI issues is a good thing

All your suggestions will be noted, but we'll obviously have to sort and prioritize them: something that's important to you may not be to everyone else.

I'll definatly talk to Cari (head of ship movement) about the instant ship movement. The only thing I could see being a problem is some unforseen hit-detection cheese, but perhaphs I'm wrong.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

I see our focus on UI issues is a good thing

It sure is, and I'm very glad you are once again responding to suggestions from the user base. Top marks.

The auto-focus doesn't annoy me at all, but it is clearly a big problem for a lot of people and deserves option status.

The one, most annoying UI feature for me (and I'm sure you've already covered part of this in the ship details changes) is the fact that you have to un-fleet a ship and move it to a clear space in order to upgrade it - takes forever when you've got a lot of different ship types. The ability to upgrade from within the fleet manager would be great.

It's me again, on that "goto" button. I know, i know.

What about adding a button then? A shipyard button, that would lead directly to the shipyard, to modify the design ; and a "goto" button that would lead to the strategic view of the planet? Or at least, when you leave the shipyard, center the view on the building planet?

Don't know if it's a good idea, maybe it will be too many buttons...

Excellent work! The single most irritating feature is gone.

I'd like to second improving the colony screen functionality. Changing production focus would reduce the switiching between planet and colony screens - and having a retractable lower screen area with minimap and miniature tilemap for the selected planet would solve everyone's problems.

But really, just thanks for making autofocus optional. I'll be able to play the game without scaring my flatmates now.

PS, there are lengthy threads on the forums chock full of UI complaints. If you're looking for inspiration, try there.

heres one:

even though I'm doing the demo atrm and don't know if its different in the game, there needs to be a way to tell the difference between planets and ships on the minimap because they are symbolized both by a triangle.

and heres one annoyance, the turn button is too darn close to the minimap because if you try to click the bottom corner of the minimap, its easy to accidentially click the turn button

I'd like to see ship specific rally points assignment in the goveners screen.

example:

All planets building constructors send them to rally 218

All planets building fighter mk5 send them to rally 219

or

All transports head to rally to 220

Instead just the option for all ships head to 220 you could select a specific ship design to head to a rally point that meets a need.

The rally point system is miles better now then on release but this would put it over the top for me.

Before v1.11 when you had moves left after auto orders where done the ship with moves left was autofocused. Now it no longer is. Which means it can be a pain to find the ship with moves left so I usually end up hitting skip until the new turn is ready. I'd like that particular type of autofocus back please. I would also find a keyboard command and/or button to "find ship/fleet with moves left" useful.

in general, I think the micromanagement of planets needs to be toned down a little. although I am doing the demo and not experiencing the latest stuff.

I love you and I can't wait to turn the auto-focus feature OFF!

Thanks a lot Stardock, you're doing excellent work...

Is there any way to allow changing of the default options regarding auto-upgrading of improvements and auto-building of tile upgrades (soil enhancement, etc). I just found these options (in the details area I think of the colony screen), but decided it wasn't worth the time to go through and change them for every planet. If I could default to having the tile upgrade version off that would be very nice, because I much prefer to wait for a planet to fill up before unlocking new tiles, or to just wait and either declare neutral or build the orbital terraformer.

The auto-upgrade buildings I like on, because the hassle of turning upgrades I don't want off is less than that of manually selecting ones I do want, but others might not like it, so that would be nice to have as an option too, either at game setup or the main options screen.

As always keep up the fantastic work.

While you guys are looking at the Colony Management screen any chance of getting some sort of indication that a planet may or may not be focused on a particular production? Even if it is just to highlight the number representing the focus would be a huge help when trying to find all those planets that were focused on SP that I now want to focus on say RP.

Definitely looking forward to all future improvements.

I think this was mentioned somewhere, but I miss the GalCiv I way of being able to select both a planet/star and a ship. This is how I would look at the PQ of the planets. Now, there are mouseovers, but when I doubleclick on a planet, I lose ship focus, which is a little irksome after GalCiv I.

Thanks! The changes look great