I think this game has a lot of promise. But methinks with such scale and ambition UI will make or break this games .Concept of massive battles is awesome - but without proper UI it will degrade to tedious micromanagement and "swarm" tactics.
Sadly supreme commander could be stated of massive RTS game falling far short in many aspects due to poorly designed UI
Anyway things I noted so far:
Little things
-View rotate button should be remappable
-Allied color should be slightly different shade of green
-Borders in research screen should stand out more
-It should show max level of planetary upgrades right on the button (e.g if it only allows 0 upgrades or max upgrade level is reached button should be grayed out)
-Also max logistic/tac points should be showed beside planetary construction button
-There should be an option to display planet names on left pane all the time (I know about
alt)
-Fleet icons should be displayed on main screen. With Alt button fleet icon should show on all ships in a fleet
Empire Management Enhancements
1)Unified Colony management screen
Same thing as in galciv2 and other 4x TBS
1 row - 1 colony. Showing Planetary upgrades buttons ,current upgrade level, amount of defences (little icon with number -hangars, gauss guns ,etc ) -at min .
Preferably pull down menu for ordering structures and ships and rally point destination.
With 60 plus colonies going to each individual planet is ridiculous
2) That brings up to the 2nd point - auto placement of structures needs work. I think in most of the cases my algorithm goes like that:
Place repair station in the center, place all other structures within its radius, place guns closer to outer orbit of the planet, place other structures closest to planet.
So at most I would probably want to pick repair station location -call it build point. And make auto placement algorithm work from there
Automation could be even smart enough to pick the best build point location in some cases (with one jump point -or where I don't really care)
3) Fleet management
-Rally point management - see all rally points from all shipyards in one screen (possible scrollable) - and assign those rally flags to fleets ,systems ,etc. Integrating it with shipyards build queues is a good idea too
-Fleet Strategic commands - patrol, defend . - Star wise. e.g. if I assign one fleet on patrol duty it follow patrol route between systems . Till it detects hostiles at which points it picks shortest path and goes there
-fleet management screen
Doing it all trough groups is really really old school and really not sufficient for such massive scale . Solution? -fleet management screen
Shows all ships you own with dragging and dropping between fleets . Possibly integrated with rally points management .
4) tactical fleet and ship management
Within fleet you should be able to assign behaviour and formation to ships within. For example select siege ships and assign "planet attack only" "do not roam" . For group of fighters you could pick assignment to defend particular ship (it is really sucks when all your fighters along with bombers swarm away to bomb some structures while enemy bombers pick at their home carriers
it could be done many ways -but my point here is some sort of high level control is needed. having to babysit and micromanage each fleets so siege frigs don't kill themselves for nothing really is bad for "massive"