Just that.

Would be nice if the buildings that won't give net bonus in a system would be marked as such.



I think careful sweeping or something (the one that gives +2 dust per explored moon) would only be marked as valid if there are more than two moons in the system.

It gives +2 dust per moon, costs 4 dust maintenance, so it only becomes valid if there are 3+ moons in the system.

I think it would be better if the player had to make the decision, as it penalizes people bad at the game (which is a good thing!)

Good and bad decisions can still be made, even without offering completly unnecassary ones.

IMO the system build screen needs a drastic overhaul, it's the one truly bad piece of UI in the game, which is extra annoying because i seem to spend most of my time there.



At the very least give us the ability to defer improvements from the available list on a system by system basis. Deferred items are hidden from the list (although obviously have a toggle to show/hide deferred items, and the ability to restore a deferred item to the list). In addition to making it easier for players to pick from the items they actually want to build in that system, hidden improvements should be blocked from being built by AI managers, in turn giving us more confidence in using them to manage our systems, since we know they wont go off building useless crap everywhere the second our backs are turned.



Ideally we would also have a button to expand the improvements into a full screen list which gives expected improvements in Research/Industry/Happiness etc for each category, both for current system population and max population, sortable in the same way the system list view is. If i need to, say, improve food production on a system, i can easily find which improvements will give that to me, instead of reading tooltips on a huge selection of tiny icons in a miniscule scrollable window, which is what i have to do now .

I support the core idea of this thread, in that the computer should be able to analyze a system and determine which improvements are useful and which are not.



The reason I say this is because the AI constantly builds ALL improvements, and if we can get the computer to determine that Clean Sweeping is of no benefit, then the AI will stop building them in inappropriate systems.

I like the screen layout so far, just miss some information I need to calculate. I posted a possible solution in another thread, so that is there.



@Daveybaby:

I like the additional thought of being able to purge buildings from the list yourself. It may be possible to combine it, providing several sub lists to the little building window, like "All" "Useful" "Hidden" and "Own". All and Useful are kinda self explaining. "Hidden" would be the list of the ones you hid and "Own" would be the list without the ones you purged from it.



Thinking of these things I feel like really giving feedback in detail on many screens might overwhelm someone new to the game. I remember a marvelous little button from Age of Empires 2. You could switch between a standart and advanced set of commands for your units.

Something like that might be the thing to make management of this game really outstanding. You have the normal setting, which would be mostly like the things we see now (with some little tweaks here and there) and an advanced setting, providing additional buttons and filters whereever an advanced player could wish for them.



So, in conclusions, I also want a "give me more buttons"-button

If you buy an unproductive building... that's kind of on you.

Please don't encourage them to make a game that holds your hand the whole way through.



It would be a good behind the scenes thing for the AI as has been mentioned.

But for the player, if you build a building that is unproductive, purely because you didn't think about it and just spammed all the buildings you saw without a care...

Then well done dips##t, you reap what you sow. :P

Social-Pariah wrote:
If you buy an unproductive building... that's kind of on you.



It would be a good behind the scenes thing for the AI as has been mentioned.

Precisely.

Draco18s wrote:
Precisely.

I see the point. Being able to do it myself would still be more than sufficiant. I just don't want to check the system screen every time if I should build it or not. Let me do it once and then hide it.

The AI part is necessary nevertheless