News and Notifications

[DarthVicious]

Minor suggestion here.

Would be nice if the notifications could be grouped into categories that make them easier to track. As it is I often miss things that I would have liked to be notified of, or have an over abundance of unnecessary notices.

Example: the top notification bar which shows events like protection expired, is mostly fine. I would like to reduce the construction spam in it though. I dont need to be informed of every solar collector that has been completed.

On the other hand, the news list on the left has some items that get lost in the clutter, like incoming fleets, invading armies, spotted councillors. There are things here that I would really like to be able to track better, or to remain on the top of the list until its resolved.

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My suggestions for handling this.
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The councillor list (on right hand side of the screen) should include spotted enemy councillors (color coded by faction). This way I can just click on them to go to them, or view whatever their stats are, much like I would do for a turned councillor.

The army list should include all enemy armies that are in my nations or heading into my nations. This way I could tell easily that a territory is under threat, and I could just click the invading army to go there.

The fleet list should include enemy fleets that are on an intercept of one of my assets. This would make them easy to identify and track.

The fleet page should include a 'flag' or 'star' so that I can tag an enemy fleet I want to monitor, and it gets added to the fleet list on the right hand side of the screen.

The right hand side list should include a 'destinations' group (or favorite destinations list), which lists all planets, asteroids, moons, bases, orbits that I have tagged, and only those I have tagged. This would make it easy to navigate to those destinations, or direct fleets to them when doing a transfer. For example I might tag a promising asteroid on the prospecting page, and so have it listed as a future destination. This would make it easy to select those bodies as well, like just clicking ceres in the list would take you there.

Tip for those who didn't pick it up already. When doing a transfer for one of your fleets, you can click a friendly fleet in your fleets list to set a destination, rather than hunting through all the destinations in the transfer window popup. I have on occasion parked a corvette at a supply depot and renamed the fleet to ''phobos dock' or 'LEO 1 dock' just to make it easy to send fleets there. Thus having a favorite destinations list here would work the same, and could cover your supply depots, shipyards, and so on.

[neilwilkes]

These are some really well thought out ideas to my mind & I am in almost full agreement with each & every one of them.
The only one I would change is the Probes - yes, manually setting a tag on interesting asteroids is cool but even better would be a separate page somewhere that tells me not only what I have already sent probes to but also what has already been probed by me - with asteroids in particular, finding some of the unnamed ones again if you don't set up a base or an orbital immediately the probe arrives - for whatever reason - it can be a bugger finding them again. Currently I write the name down on a scrap of paper, but not being able to search for it in the Solar System view is a pain so it would be great to have the Solar System searchable as well, rather than scrolling endlessly around in an increasingly desperate attempt to relocate the rock I am looking for.

[anonusername]

A better notification system would make a big difference. I lose track of stuff constantly because the flood of notifications is impossible to follow on high speeds. Ideally, it would be possible for the user to configure which messages auto-pause, which pop-up, etc.

[DarthVicious]

These are some really well thought out ideas to my mind & I am in almost full agreement with each & every one of them.
The only one I would change is the Probes - yes, manually setting a tag on interesting asteroids is cool but even better would be a separate page somewhere that tells me not only what I have already sent probes to but also what has already been probed by me

I cant recall where I picked this up, but pressing 'P' when in solar system view will add a symbol to objects which you can use to figure out what's been probed or not, and I think you can click it to build a base.

Also, I will often probe dozens of random asteroids then forget about them. You can always go to the Intel > Prospecting page and click on a column to sort all objects by that resource. This helps immensely to know where to build outposts or which enemy outposts are worth taking over.

[neilwilkes]

Many thanks for those tips - I will take a look at these shortly & post back with what happened.
I had (rather stupidly) not checked the intel page but will do so very soon, and the 'P' tip could prove to be a serious time saver.

Much appreciated

EDIT
P works really nicely.

P in Solar System mode.jpg (385.63 KiB) Viewed 1048 times

[anonusername]

Is there a manual somewhere documenting all the various shortcut keys?

[DarthVicious]

Settings > Controls