UI Changes for Quality of Life/Sanity
Modding should not be the solution to every game problem
GalCiv3 Forums
1. When you colonize you have no idea where that planet is unless you have a photographic memory. I'm fond of telling people I have a "pornographic memory" because my memory is so good it's disgusting, but I still can't remember where every planet I've scoped and sent one of my bazillion colonizers to grab. The problem is the event screen takes up the entire screen.
I propose that as the event unfolds, the graphic for the event fade away so you can see the actual game/map screen, and the event text slide/shrink/something off to the side, so one can clearly see where the planet is.
1a. This also applies much of the time when a planet is idle and you tab/click to go to it, you have no idea where that planet is, whether there are starbases near, star port near, enemies near, etc. I almost always have to esc out and come back to the planet after figuring out where it is.
1b. Same thing for starbase upgrades.
Another solution here would be to put some type of representation of the mini map on the planet/starbase screen so you can get some kind of geographical reference. It would also be nice if there was a more explicit way of knowing that a planet is under the influence of starbases. You can figure it out by hovering stats but there's no easy way at a glance to know the world you're dinking with has X number of econ starbases affecting it.
2. Add moves left/moves to the fleet panel. The only way I know to figure out how many moves a fleet has available is to hover over it, which is tedious when that's critical info. Individual ships show their moves on the ship panel, but fleets do not, and this is a painful inconsistency. Seriously, my brain hurts just writing about this. ouch!
3. I've gone on about this before. Do something with the planet screen to group/prioritize/something the available projects better. Scrolling a ton sucks. Give us the option for a smaller font here so we can see more items at once without scrolling. Make collapsing sections within the list for types of tiles (econ/prod/sci/terraforming/morale/influence/wonders/military) and make those settings persist PER PLANET so if we're specializing worlds we can hide the things we'll never build per world so we might not have to scroll at all.
There is room on the planet screen for the list of available projects to be bigger/longer too, a lot of this screen is wasted with a picture of the universe showing all around it. It's nice to have the visual of the planet but that doesn't need to take up 30-40% of the screen. I swear sometimes I feel like the UI in this entire game is designed with phones or tablets in mind instead of PCs and monitors, because so many of the UI windows are tiny and lacking functionality or information.
