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[Cyan Leader]

So after playing the game for a few (dozen) hours this weekend I came across a few personal issues that I think could be fixed with a few UI adjustments, some that might slightly change some gameplay options. I'll leave those here and see if you guys agree with them or not.

One of the things that new players may be the most confused about is why supply consumption keeps going up or down, which is tied with the with repairs/CR recovery of their ships. Alex has always advocated for the use of the stop repairs button so we can fine tune our consumption, but as it stand I feel things aren't as clear as they could be. Therefore, I thought up of small additions to the UI (I'm no artist so please bear with me):






In this first shot we can see my relatively small fleet being eaten alive by supplies consumption. I don't have any idea what can be causing that just from that screen besides the obvious CR bar. I can pause the game and go to the Refit screen to check things out there, but wouldn't it be better if I could simply glance the screen and have a much better idea of what was going on, without interrupting campaign gameplay? Thus, enter:






Most things are explained in the image, but the gist of it is to give players a good idea of what is going on (and handling it) without moving to the more detailed Refit screen and thus not interrupting gameplay. I realize the CR bar at the bottom left does a lot but I always felt it was lacking. I'm no UI designer and I'm sure a better job can be made in regards to the information being displayed, but I believe the stuff being show there is important and should be visible to players on all times during the campaign.

Secondly, when battling another fleet we are usually faced with this dialogue option:






It is probably a pet peeve but I have lost count of how many times I pressed 2 out of habit when I actually wanted to control another ship. So here I'd like to propose two solutions. Either:

A. Have an option for the game to always ask what ship you will pilot right on this screen, or

B. Allow the players to change the ship they want to pilot here:






On the deployment screen. If players are able to commandeer any ship during combat without consequence (for now?) then there should be no reason why we can't make that choice here prior to deployment. I'd suggest being able to change officers here too.

Finally, the gameplay change I mentioned earlier comes into play at the previous screen. Counters has always been a topic of discussion here and while I'm aware Alex isn't keen on hard counters, I feel that the Ship Variants feature is kinda wasted as you only really use them on stations and to make sure you actually have a backup of your settings if you end up losing your ship. So the idea is, why can't I change between variants right here on this screen?






Of course, granted that you are actually carrying the equipment required for that variant and that you are willing to take the CR hit for making changes to a ship outside a station (thus the need for something that can lessen that impact, maybe a support ship/skill?). The idea for this came from a game I was running a Medusa tuned for killing destroyers and capitals, but every other bounty I had to fight a carrier fleet and bouncing back and forth between my two variants, one being a PD platform and the other being an assassin, was tiring as I kept making selection mistakes. I ended up buying a second Medusa instead of refitting my only one.

Anyway that is all I have to say. Please share your thoughts.

[Tartiflette]

For the first one, I think a simple line of colored dots could suffice: Red for mothballed, yellow for repairing, blue for regenerating CR, and green for combat ready. If you really need to know who is doing what, you can check the fleet screen but the real needed information here is the overall state of the fleet.

Agreed on the second, the change flagship would make much more sense in the deployment screen.

Not fond of the last one though, but that's also because I'm not fond of the ability to change your loadout out of a dock, even at a CR cost.

The one UI change I would like to see however is this:



Because it is confusing at first when you don't notice you can switch bar, and you never know on which you are then.

[Gothars]

I don't think showing the status of individual ships would help much. It's a) too much information to be processed at a glance and b) doesn't clearly tell you how long the ships will be in their present status, which is the most important thing to determine their total supply consumtion.
I'm still a fan of a timer that considers all predictable changes in consumtion, telling you precisely how long your supplies will last (operation time). That's one number telling you the important thing, can you keep flying or do you have to return to a base.


About choosing your flagshih, IIRC everyone agrees that the deployment dialog would be the optimal time to change flag ship, the present solution is just much simpler technically.


Changing loadout works as intended I believe, you're supposed to be discouraged from changing it around too much. If it would be required for optimal play that would be annoying really fast.

[VuNut]

Mocked a graphical prediction of your supply use. That section blinks red if you will run out of supplies before finishing CR recovery, and blinks yellow if you will run out within 10 days.

[Histidine]

I'd be happy with it being written somewhere:
X supplies needed for repairs/recovery (Y supplies remaining when done)

[Serenitis]

I'd be happy with it being written somewhere:
X supplies needed for repairs/recovery (Y supplies remaining when done)

That could be done in the tooltip for CR, along with a breakdown below of which ships are currently consuming the most supplies and how long that ship will take to reach its maximum readiness (similar to how the fuel/crew/cargo tooltips work).

Spoiler

Code

Fleet Readiness: 72%
Est. Recovery Time: 4 Days
Est. Recovery Cost: 48 
---------------------------
CGR Seraph      -11  4 Days
ISA Heracles    -8   2 Days
Prophet Motive  -6   1 Day
ISS Big Stick   -2   n/a

From top to bottom; a moderately damaged ship, a lightly damaged ship, a ship just about to finish recovering CR, and a ship already at max CR.
Adding the colours mentioned above would make this even clearer. Either coloured text or a small coloured block preceding each ship entry.

[close]

The per-ship data isn't stricly nescessary, just nice-to-have so you can see which ships are eating all your stuff without going to the fleet screen (and gives consistent functionality with the other tooltips). The top part with the estimated time and cost would be the most useful part though, as that data is something you do want but isn't currently available.

The key numbers on the ability bar are nice.

[Gothars]

I'd be happy with it being written somewhere:
X supplies needed for repairs/recovery (Y supplies remaining when done)

That would be an improvement, but still not be perfect.

Imagine you had a battle somewhere far off, and now there are repairs to be done. Now the UI tells you "100 supplies needed for repairs/recovery (10 supplies remaining when done)". But now there are different possibilities which you can't discern without going to the fleet menu.
Maybe all of your ships suffered light damage, and it will take 100 supplies but just two days to repair them, and then only two days more to use up the remaining ten supplies. So four days until you run out.
Or maybe only a few ships were very heavily damaged, it will take 100 supplies and 20 days to repair them, giving your fleet enough supplies for 22 days.

So, only with these supply information you're unable to decide if you have to quickly get to the next port or if you can continue the journey to your original destination.