RSW

A couple newbie observations about the core game.

1. The turn report news in the interface isn't as detailed as the one on the website. For example, it combines a lot of movement and combat info into vague overall statements (you have witnessed combat at ...). I'd ideally like more of a blow-by-blow, especially on combat. For example, "World 58 fired on fleet 32, reducing its fleet size from 20 to 16." Or for movement, "World 37 reports that the Unachee fleet with 52 ships has arrived and is now orbiting the planet". Or maybe there's already a way to view the web version of the report in the interface?

2. I would like it if there were a way to display on the map, rather than the fleet number, the number of ships in the fleet.

1. You can select "Report" from the Windows menu. This will give a report very similar to the one available on the web page. In addition, you can select the "Details" tab in the upper-left panel, which will show a detail panel for the currently selected world and/or fleet, and this detail panel shows all of the same information as that available on the web page.

2. Not a bad idea, although I'm a little hesitant--it might be easy to get confused about which mode you're in. (Is that fleet number or number of ships?) However, if you hover the mouse over a fleet, it will pop up a little panel that will tell you, among other things, how many ships are on the fleet. (Furthermore, you can configure exactly what details are shown in this panel via the Preferences window.) Does that suffice?

David

I'm aware of the pop-ups. But frequently, I want to find the largest fleet in an area. Hovering over dozens of fleets, waiting a few seconds for the info to pop-up on each one, all adds up. I can get the job done, but it feels slow, and since fleet size (at least in the core game) is the most important piece of information, I'd much rather have this info available at a glance.

Hmm, fair enough. But if you have "Fleet size" set to "Ships" or "Forecast ships" (the default setting), then you can see visually which are the fleets with the largest number of ships--they will be drawn bigger than the others. Granted, if you're looking for the absolute biggest fleet, you might have to hunt around a bit to differentiate between one with 20 ships (say) and one with 21 ships. It's kind of hard to imagine having to hover the mouse over dozens of fleets to find the biggest one, though.

Another idea is to bring up the fleet list in the bottom tab, and click on the "Ships" or "Forecast ships" column to sort the fleet list by number of ships. Then scroll to the top of the list and see what's there. This list includes all of the fleets that you can see, of course--if you only want to restrict it to the fleets within a particular area of the map, you can draw a circle around the area of interest, which will select all of the fleets in that area. Then those fleets will be highlighted on the fleet list, making it easy to pick them out (and easy to identify the largest fleet in the area).

The difference between "Ships" and "Forecast ships" is that the former reflects the number ships at the beginning of the current turn (before your current orders are executed), while the latter reflects the expected number of ships at the beginning of the next turn (after your current orders are executed). The forecast might turn out to be wrong, of course, depending on what the other players are doing.

David

A lot of that I had figured out, but not the part about selecting a region of space for highlighting in the fleet list. That should help. I guess there may be other subtleties to the interface I still need to discover.

Speaking of which, what does Track world size from sort do?

When you enable "Track world size from sort", it automatically changes the world size function to correspond to the world list column sort. That is, whatever column you click on in the world list becomes the function that determines the world size. For instance, if you click on "Population", then the world list is sorted in order by population, and also the worlds are drawn such that the largest worlds are the ones with the highest population.

When "Track world size from sort" is not enabled, then the world size is fixed, according to whatever property you set it to (if any), regardless of the columns you click in the world list.

David