So in the spirit of thinking about expansions (with the next release around the corner), I was thinking of what would my top 5 QoL improvements for GC4 be right now. Not really balance items, just things that would make the game smoother. It's always hard to come up with "just 5" but I took a shot at ones I didn't think would be toooo big a deal (but of course I recognize sometimes its suprisingly difficult to change UI things).
1) Volley Hotkeys, and "auto-volley when attacking" option. I want a simple hotkey to volley with beams and with missiles, and it would be nice to have an option that when attacking a fleet, it auto volleys before the attack takes place as a toggleable option.
2) Ideology Text Updates: A lot of ideology descriptions are vague or just flat out wrong. Also for the ones that mention a wonder, I should be able to highlight the text and see the wonder so I know what I would be getting.
3) A button to "auto send supply ships" to this planet. You do this a lot for new planets, get the stardock up, put up supply ships, set it to infinite, set the rally point to the planet. Its a nice way to get a new world a going, but its a lot of clicks. A simple button to do this would be greatly appreciated.
4) Use previous design button just....uses the previous design. Setting up an update to a ship is weirdly complicated right now, its a lot of clicks for what should be a 1 button press operation. Let me select the ship, I press a button, boom ship design screen comes up with that design.
5) New Rally Point streamlining. Another simple thing that is weirdly complicated to do right now (especially renaming a rally point). Should be a quick 1 click on a map kind of operation, I do a hotkey, click on the map, boom window comews up that lets me name it, and done.
My Honorable Mention: This would have made my list but with the talk of a "fleet builder" on the horizon this request might obsolete. I would like the ship builder screen to account for military overflow. For example right now my queue might say "2 turns to build the first ship, 3 turns to the build the 2nd ship, etc". However, in reality it will only take 2 turns to build that second ship because of the overflow after building ship 1. I wish that was taken into account.
