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Author Topic: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes  (Read 1012 times)

Sinosauropteryx

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List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« on: August 21, 2019, 02:45:09 PM »

Stop me if you've heard these ones.

- Free pan camera during battle. I would pay for this. I would put an extra ship in my fleet like a tug just to do this, or spend skill points on it.
- Ability to see opposing fleet while choosing ships for deployment.
- Ability to pin/highlight/label points of interest on the map.
- A way to quickly move dozens of weapons between cargo and storage/market.
- A way to mark for sale weapons in excess of X owned. For example, after owning 200 vulcans, all additional vulcans are sold/scrapped automatically, or designated to be sold at the next market.
- A way to consolidate weapons easily into one location, or at least complete inventory listings of remote colonies.
- A way to auto-sort your fleet. The order the buy listings use is just fine.
- Recovered ships returning to the same spot in the fleet instead of the bottom, reassigning officers automatically.
- When your flagship dies, move your character to an unoccupied ship instead of ejecting an officer.
- Ability to repair at a dock from the refit screen.
- Ability to reorder ships from the refit screen.
- Access to the codex from the refit screen.
- Access to the ship purchase screen from both the refit and market screens. In general this screen is important and should be easier to find, I want to be browsing every colony's ships but often forget because the listings are tucked away in an inconvenient place. Just a button in the market that says "BUY SHIPS" and saves me 2 clicks would be so nice.
- A way to "test drive" and "test outfit" ships before purchase.
- Ability to click and drag to rearrange the order of fighter wings in bays. I keep thinking I can do this for some reason.
- When fitting weapons, ability to sort weapons by type rather than listing inventory -> market -> black market. If I'm fitting a large mount, I want to see all the large weapons listed first, then everything else.
- On missions screen, ability to remove/hide exploration points of interest from your feed, and to generally "de-clutter" the feed.
- Ability to tag missions so that a clickable pop-up describing it is visible on the overworld screen, like the popups from your news feed, but it doesn't vanish.
- Ability to see crew level and skeleton crew required on overworld screen. The resource bars on the fleet screen are easy to read, I would love to see that whole block of info displayed on the overworld UI. But I guess that would be an overhaul.
- In combat, when selecting targets with R, the first check should be for ships, and fighters only targeted when there is no ship underneath it. Currently, a ship swarming with fighters is very hard to target.
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RedHellion

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Re: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« Reply #1 on: August 21, 2019, 03:53:49 PM »

Some agreement, some suggestions, some mentions of things which I'm pretty sure have already been mentioned before.

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Free pan camera during battle
Potentially nice to have, but could mess up all kinds of assumptions regarding fog of war, view distance, enemy ships, etc. As it is, you can change which friendly ship your camera is focused on from the tactical screen - not sure what extra useful functionality a free pan camera would offer?

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Ability to see opposing fleet while choosing ships for deployment
Would be nice, since you can see it before combat but not after you start combat and go to the deployment screen.

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Ability to pin/highlight/label points of interest on the map
Would love this. Has been requested multiple times I believe, to add notes to points of interest (note which systems have areas/items of interest which aren't readily viewable from the galaxy map or system info screen, notes attached to markets/planets, etc)

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A way to quickly move dozens of weapons between cargo and storage/market
Ctrl-click moves an entire stack (buy/sell/transfer), shift-click will let you rapidly select a specific quantity of the item to pick up. Ctrl-click will also transfer only enough of a stack to fill up your available capacity (or to bring you down from being over-capacity to the max) the first time you click.

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A way to mark for sale weapons in excess of X owned
Could be useful, but generally at the point where you own so much of a weapon that you need to sell off the excess, the amount of money you make by selling the excess is barely worth it. At best this would just cut down on hoarding 500+ of common/small weapons by endgame and earn a few extra credits a month on top of the hundreds of thousands you'd already be making.

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A way to consolidate weapons easily into one location
Could be interesting to have personal AI convoys be generated to move your personal goods between your colonies if you're moving your main base of operations. However colonies also already transfer anything they generate automatically to a designated primary colony, so the only way this would happen is if you manually stashed weapons at a bunch of different colonies.

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A way to auto-sort your fleet
Never really thought about this, since fleet order these days is purely aesthetic. I generally already manually order mine by size and D-mods and combat vs civilian duty. Might be nice to have an auto-sort which does that, but then of course everyone has different preferences since there's no real gameplay reason for ordering your fleet.

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Recovered ships returning to the same spot in the fleet instead of the bottom, reassigning officers automatically
Would definitely be nice.

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When your flagship dies, move your character to an unoccupied ship instead of ejecting an officer
What if you have a small fleet your next unoccupied ship is a civilian ship and you forget and end up flying into battle in a Prometheus? I think it's better to just move to the new first ship in your fleet order, whether it ejects an officer or not. Or remove you entirely from the fleet and warn you to pick a ship to command at the start of the next combat if you haven't already.

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Ability to repair at a dock from the refit screen
Repair individual ships you mean? There's already a "repair all ships" button when you first dock at a colony, and it will ignore ships in your fleet which you have turned off repairs for in the fleet screen.

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Ability to reorder ships from the refit screen
Could be nice, but why not use the fleet screen? Maybe instead, the screens could be further combined so that the refit screen is just a part of the fleet screen or a popup screen when you choose to refit a ship...

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Access to the codex from the refit screen
I think Codex accessibility and content is one which has been brought up before, although the weapon and ship info cards are already readily available in Refit by mousing over a given weapon or the "?" next to the ship's OP bar respectively.

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Access to the ship purchase screen from both the refit and market screens
The "F" shortcut for the Fleet screen (which doubles as the ship buy/sell screen at colonies) is useful. It should also have a button on the bottom bar at almost all times.

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A way to "test drive" and "test outfit" ships before purchase
Maybe nice, for new players. But test-driving items before you buy them isn't very common in many games in the first place because it can lead to eliminating any risk and most sense of discovery. The Codex and ship info cards already have all the pertinent information, and the one-shot missions from the game title screen can be used to test-drive ships if you want to just have fun outside the campaign with ships you haven't purchased or manufactured yourself.

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Ability to click and drag to rearrange the order of fighter wings in bays
The same reason you can't click and drag weapons between weapon mounts, most likely. Though in this case all fighter bays are the same in all ways, so it could make sense to treat them like a list rather than unique slots. Probably done the current way for Alex's convenience.

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When fitting weapons, ability to sort weapons by type rather than listing
Would be nice if the sorting method was customizable. Personally I like it being sorted by source -> size -> OP, since at the stage of game when I don't readily have access to all sizes of weapons already I'm usually also on a shoestring budget and can't afford to buy a bunch of Large weapons to fully outfit a capital ship.

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On missions screen, ability to remove/hide exploration points of interest from your feed
Definitely already been mentioned, and I know Alex is adding a "remove" button for intel which doesn't already automatically expire.

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Ability to tag missions so that a clickable pop-up describing it is visible on the overworld screen
Could be useful, could maybe be tied to the "Important" list (since you can already mark intel items as important).

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Ability to see crew level and skeleton crew required on overworld screen
Not really sure what benefits would be gained vs the extra real-estate. Crew level doesn't dynamically change while you're flying around, unlike fuel or supplies. Maybe a bar for supply level to go with the fuel level one could replace the existing numerical supply ticker.

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In combat, when selecting targets with R, the first check should be for ships
This would be nice if it's an issue, though I can't say I've had an issue where there are so many fighters overlaid on a ship that this has been an issue. Generally fighters seem to try not to hover on top of ships. Only issue I've had with targeting is selecting ships in the tactical overlay which are all right next to each other.
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Alex

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Re: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« Reply #2 on: August 21, 2019, 05:46:49 PM »

Just wanted to say thank you for your suggestions! Read through and made a couple of notes.
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Semondice

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Re: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« Reply #3 on: August 22, 2019, 04:35:03 AM »

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but for the context of suggestion I'll put the question out, since I've seen Alex posting here.

Here it is: keeping in mind the final idea you have in mind for the game, are "4x"/quality of life/campaign/managment/fluff suggestion of use or you mind much more on the combat?

I'm one of the many newbs that came with the Sseth wave, but I'm very intrested in the product; actually, I really love the game and the idea that evolved through the years (took a look at the updates, the various forums and even downloaded some modding tools for the first time in ever). So I'm asking for having a better idea to what put on the table and what not.

Ah, sorry for the messed up english, trying my best with the second language  ;D
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TaLaR

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Re: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« Reply #4 on: August 22, 2019, 04:43:17 AM »

- Free pan camera during battle. I would pay for this. I would put an extra ship in my fleet like a tug just to do this, or spend skill points on it.

Well, high enough resolution monitor kind of gets you there. At 3440x1440 I can scroll significantly farther than radar coverage on minimap. So you can pay, but it takes real money :) .
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RedHellion

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Re: List of QOL / "would be nice" changes
« Reply #5 on: August 22, 2019, 11:19:27 AM »

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but for the context of suggestion I'll put the question out, since I've seen Alex posting here.

Here it is: keeping in mind the final idea you have in mind for the game, are "4x"/quality of life/campaign/managment/fluff suggestion of use or you mind much more on the combat?

I'm one of the many newbs that came with the Sseth wave, but I'm very intrested in the product; actually, I really love the game and the idea that evolved through the years (took a look at the updates, the various forums and even downloaded some modding tools for the first time in ever). So I'm asking for having a better idea to what put on the table and what not.

Ah, sorry for the messed up english, trying my best with the second language  ;D

Welcome to the forums! Also I didn't even notice any problems with your English, it's quite good for being your second language!

With regards to 4x development, I believe Alex has previously said that SS is going to primarily be an RPG and he's going to be avoiding too much 4x-style complexity. So developing any 4x aspects further beyond maybe being able to give basic orders to the player faction to do things with player fleets is probably out.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=15161.msg245604#msg245604
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=13445.msg236431#msg236431
However, there are mods which add more 4x aspects for people who like t delve deeper into that potential:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=9175.0

As for QoL/campaign/management/fluff suggestions, I'm sure they're all welcome :) You can get a good idea of the usual sort of stuff that comes up from other posts here in the Suggestions forum, and checking out what the current features are and what may be planned for the future by looking through some of Alex's various posts/comments.

However, I believe SS is always going to be primarily combat-focused with the goal of all game systems being to drive the player towards combat and improving the combat-related systems. That has been confirmed by Alex - at least I'm 90% sure it has been, I swear I remember a post from him on the subject but can't find that specific one for reference right now.
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