Sins UI Suggestions, Minor Glitches, and a Radical Add-On Concept

I have some notes I’ve been taking over the past few days regarding some UI issues in Sins of a Solar Empire as well as a few playability quirks. Counting on the fact that Blair and the rest of the devs read the forum, I figured I’d assemble things into a nice, coherent, bullet-point post to see if I can get some feedback.

• The current path being researched needs to glow just as the present tech does.




• There needs to be a stack of planned researches to the right of the research frame, preferably freely draggable since they’re paid for up front, letting you reorder as things become needed.




• Projected time until completion should probably be on the InfoCard for techs currently being researched. It has the “Upgrade Time” for techs not being researched so it makes sense it’d track the time remaining since it’s showing percentage anyway. Time remaining is more useful in a real sense.




• There needs to be an easier way to reassign the lead ship in a Fleet after a better candidate is added than having to band-box the whole lot, making sure your chosen ship is selected, tabbing as necessary, then hitting Make Fleet. If you try to do it just from fleet selection and then tabbing to the right ship, it doesn’t work, and that’s the intuitive method.




• “Stop Resource Focus” should probably renamed “Trade Focus”.




• If you have your second fleet selected on the Empire Tree and select another, and your Empire Tree is longer than a screen long, the position in the tree abruptly jumps and may keep you from double-clicking the fleet for focus. My suspicion is that it is jumping focus to the system entry where that fleet is rather than just selecting it. The Empire Tree shouldn’t ever scroll up or down without me being the scroller.




• As has been mentioned elsewhere, the InfoCard definitely needs to pop up in the corner furthest from where the mouse is pointing. It does have a terrible tendency to overlap what I want to look at.




• You should get a message when a ship auto-joins a fleet or, in some cases, fails to. I end up with swarms of unattached ships following around fleets who don’t coordinate for some reason.




• Squadron launch is supposed to be disabled in Plasma Storms, but I just pwned an AI flagship by launching a swarm of 30 bomber squadrons right into the teeth of a Plasma Storm. Does that only apply within the heart of the storm itself or is this a bug?

And then there’s this, which is not a UI issue, but definitely something I think the old Barking Dog folks will understand and empathize with:

• Bring back the Beastfleet!

We already have factions which focus on exploiting on each of the three major facets of the research trees: economics, military and colony support (TEC, Vasari, and Advent, respectively). What we don’t have is a fleet which specialized in the last branch of research: fleet cap. The current fleets also represent three of the major branches of SF literature fururism, hardtech (TEC), psionics (Advent) and nanotech (Vasari). What we don’t have is a faction representing biotechnology.

Homeworld: Cataclysm had the Beastfleet, which is a pretty good approximation of something that would fit into Sins without requiring an immense amount of aditional coding. Put the focus of their power on supporting large fleets of ships with lesser focus on planetary infrastructure. If we’re going to be making transparent Barking Dog references anyway, one of the capital ship options should be a mobile Frigate / Cruiser factory — which, of course, drives up the requirements for fleet cap even more and might lead to a play style very strongly focused on mobile defense/offense management.

Now, I’m not suggesting bringing back the Beastfleet without filing off the serial numbers, but the idea certainly fits into the narrative structure of Sins and wouls slide neatly into the narrative as the force chasing the Vasari.

And, hey, if Clee-San is an option for the factory capital ship, I certainly would get the joke.