UI problem: Sprite stacking

[Malevolence]

Stacked sprites and the poorly designed command system make it difficult or sometimes impossible to issue orders to fleets/ships. If sprites are stacked, particularly over top planets and starports/bases, it makes the command context menu unusable in terms of issuing an order by right-clicking on a sprite at the bottom or farther down the stack.

For example, if you need to issue an order for a ship to go to a specific starport and refuel (not that such an important command actually exists), you can't because any number of freighter sprites and others are sitting on top of the starport sprite. Same would be true when trying to issue a patrol order, etc.

[Joram]

Agreed, I run across this all the time. To be clear, it's not about picking the ship, it's about placing the order.

[sbach2o]

It is possible to multi-select ships. Maybe I used shift-click to reach this, although it can be very fiddly, and in a stack of ships it doesn't seem to work. Are there alternative ways, like dragging a selection rectangle? Should be easy to test, but I think I'd have noticed by now, if that worked.

But I couldn't issue orders to such a selection of ships. Were I imagining this or can someone confirm this?

If that is true, control over fleet combat is hit very hard. I am constantly pulling my hair over this. My typical way of initiating fleet combat would be to pick a priority-target for my entire fleet. Ganging up on them is required when you want to get kills on ships with that repair bot, early game. Once that priority-target is destroyed or has fled, all the ships are sitting idle for whoever knows how long, so I want to assign new targets manually.

It is sort of okay when this is about one fleet against a handful of enemy ships, when sending your whole fleet against one single target at a time is a good idea. But trying to get parts of a fleet to target ships near them focusing fire sensibly is a huge pita, and the UI isn't very helpful.

Maybe I wasn't patient enough to see how a battle unfolds when I leave it to the AI? Does the AI kick in eventually? Was I imagining the lack of opportunity fire, or is that a real problem?

[Arnir]

I have the same issue with trying to give orders to a ship hidden under other ship sprites. It would be helpful if we could simply right click the ship's info box in the lower left corner and issue commands from there like we can by right clicking on the ship's icon.

[Malevolence]

ORIGINAL: Arnir

I have the same issue with trying to give orders to a ship hidden under other ship sprites. It would be helpful if we could simply right click the ship's info box in the lower left corner and issue commands from there like we can by right clicking on the ship's icon.

I was trying to do that for 15 minutes assuming it was already part of the UI design... it wasn't. I think that is a good idea as well.