I love this game!!!! What a massive breath of fresh air. A game that does not assume its audience is dumb. I love the complexity of the mechanics and the real/hard sci fi approach. This is what PC strategy gaming should be about.
I am tryign to keep my suggestions small, restricted to QoL stuff, rather than game mechanics. Ofc, totally up to the devs what they take from it, how they implement it, or whether they post it on a wall to have a laugh at.
GENERAL
- A faction summary page or home page (for your own faction) would be nice. Maybe with leader portrait, current objectives, and most especially global and faction wide bonuses that you have unlocked, with expiry date if it applies. Whether these be from techs, orgs, events. Things like solar flares, economic boosts, mining bonuses, etc. While the tooltips are fantastic, they only provide totals, and not a breakdown of how it was derived, and some modifiers like solar flares, +5 mining from base visits ec, are never shown explicitly anywhere.
- Zooming everywhere when you click something gets to be tedious, in most cases, you just want to select something and assign an order. Its not always necessary to zoom to the location. Perhaps clicking the nation flag or object icon would zoom there, but just selecting an item in a list should not zoom there.
MISSIONS
- Checkbox "Assign Permanently" when *initiating* a mission (like public campaign, or increase unrest, or advise). Waiting for the first mission report then clicking assign permanently is unnecessary, and is usually forgotten by the time it comes around.
- The two week mission cycle is a bit jarring. I can be browsing techs, or designing a ship, and suddenly everything closes and i get zoomed to a councillor. Can we just pause the game and flash the game speed indicator? This way i' will know its the end of the turn, without having to stop what I am doing.
- Sometimes one of my councillors is on a ship traveling somewhere (MakeMake for e.g.) but the game insists on zooming to them despite me not able to assign them a mission. Can they be automatically skipped or ignored if they have no valid missions available?
SOLAR SYSTEM
- Search button for navigating the solar system. So many asteroids, centaurs, trojans. I'm lost.
- Planet Navigator/Browser window which pops up on the left when you click a planet is awesome, but would be nice if it allowed to switch between major bodies. (A planet row at the top?). So you can quickly swap from one major body to another without having to scan the solar system looking for it.
- More popup forms to have a CONTINUE button, and not just a CLOSE button (ref war declaration, base decommisioned, etc).
- Can we have a slider which hides objects based on size? So as i shift it to the right, only the major planets remain. Just to remove clutter. A 3 or 4 step setting would be perfect. Similarly for distance. If i am browsing jupiters moons, dont show asteroids or trojans in the background. Maybe a button or keybind to show local system only?
- A 'tactical' view of the solar system showing enemy fleets, and their transit vectors, so you know which ones to watch out for.
INTEL - ENEMY COUNCILLORS
- Councillor navigator/browser window which also pops up on the left to have a row of faces to allow switching to alternate councillors (rather than going to Intel screen to select alternate councillor).
FLEET MANAGEMENT
- Split fleets should have the same home base as their 'parent fleet. It would save re assigning home base every time you split a ship or two off.
- When setting a home base, filter the picklist to only orbital bases,, or bases with a shipyard.
- Fleet upkeep? Is it shown anywhere?
- The fleet navigator, is pretty nice, but is there a way to auto-filter it to 'Friendly Ports', or 'Enemy Targets', or 'Nearby Ports' without clicking or browsing through half a dozen other windows, or memorising names of asteroids that you need to send you fleets to, then trying to find those asteroids by wading through the navigator?
- By 'Nearby Ports' i mean maybe listing 5 to 10 friendly bases sorted by travel time or dV expenditure. Browsing the Solar System and doing mental orbital mechanics calculations to try and determine whether Mars, Ceres or Jupiter is a better destination from the asteroid I am currently orbiting is painful. Surely there must be a way to optimise this?
BASE MANAGEMENT
- Hab lists which clearly show net output (or cost) in columns, and is sortable. This way I can find that base that is draining all my nobles, or wasting water.
- Flag a base as a 'template', so when you build a second base in the same environment you can assign the template. Let this work for modifications and base upgrades too. E.g. I can flag Mars base 1 as a template. When I plant base 2, I can just say copy 'Mars base 1'.
- A rebuild button, for when a base is damaged in a bombardment. Rebuilds damaged/destroyed modules without me having to do each one manually.
NOTIFICATIONS - UNDER ATTACK
- I have no idea that a region in one of my nations is being attacked by a megafauna, or an enemy army is invading it, unless I happen to see it on the globe. These notifications (if they exist) get lost in the message spam. There should be a permanent indicator for such things, that I can click on to go there.
- Incoming enemy fleets, especially those that are only arriving in several months, are very difficult to keep track of, and remember. It would be nice to get a reminder from time to time, or just 7 days before arrival, that the aliens are about to arrive at your research ring.