Matrix Games Forums

Playing again a large 1500 stars with max empires game, went up to some 60 colonies in a slow 15+ hours game but not really enjoying much of it.
I noticed after the last update fleet behavior is much better, freighters are no longer bugging out and idling in space forever and generally fleets being much more responsive and organized so I had lots of fun up to a point.
Interface feels like it's mostly getting in your way but not really doing much to help.

The biggest drawback is colony development. When you're up to 60 so colonies, what you care most is terraforming them and population policies.
I can't fathom why there is no separate menu in it's own to deal with colony policies and construction on a general level instead of having to continuously check them one by one again and again in a very clunky huge and annoying menu.
Since colony revenue is severely handicapped by the wrong species colonizing it , there should be a general menu where you can select say type of planet and only allow species with suitability above x or resettle all others or anything in one chunk that is available for future colonies too. This should be available for buildings too. You should be able to select-all your planets and order x building at once for all of them.

The construction tab is more like a placeholder so far, you either set all of it on automatic and bankrupt yourself or turn it off completely otherwise you'll get spammed every second to build military barracks and academies on backwater worlds forever. Same with troop recruitment, it's a disaster.

The second biggest drawback is the ship designer. Either I am missing something but apparently you can only have one type of design for each ship tier active since even if you go out of your way to make 3 separate cruiser designs and build a mix of them, retrofit will simply use the "active design" and replace everything back unless you manually upgrade each of your ships. Also there's no means to control the flow of your upgrade path. You make some beam frigates then decide to research missiles then you get some random new engine upgrade. You'll hit retrofit if it's not already on automated. All your ships will be retrofitted with missiles because the game sees it as a more powerful weapon even though you want beams. This is preposterous.
Anyway , have a good one!

Colony management is a problem if you want to fully manage them. I also think that the AI does a pretty terrible job on colony management on colonies, certainly agree with you there. I hope we will see more and better tools for this, but also better AI that does not just build everything and as you said ruin your economy. I actually modded my game for that very reason to reduce the cost and maintenance of many colony buildings so the AI don't ruin their economy this way as much.

When it comes to ships... they have said that there will be better support of multiple ships in the same role, they just have to implement it.
In the mean time you can use fleet templates to manage more than one ship of each role, you just can't have multiple ones of the same type in the same fleet template but you can in different fleets.
You also can potentially update and retrofit ships with multiple types by manipulating the Obsolete/Active and Manual/Automatic retrofit settings in the ship designer... it is certainly not optimal but possible.

In the latest patch they have included better tools for population policies and also enhanced the way that population migrate to be allot better. You now can change the policy of a planet and then automatically apply that to all worlds of the same type of planet.

As a fan of DW series I'll try to be as constructive as possible, in format of: outlining issue, expected behavior and possible solution to the problem...

I also think colony management interface is insufficient and difficult to navigate once it contains a lot of colonies.

Issue:
On large galaxies once you research colonization techs having 100+ colonies is a common appearance especially if you play slow paced game and focus on colonization which results in longer timespan of management of a large empire.

Problem arises of course with UI because it seems it's not designed in mind to manage large amounts of colonies.

UI can list approx 8 colonies at once which regardless of how one sorts colonies requires frequent scrolling and eye strain to find group of colonies of interest.
Filter options are lacking since one can filter only on a small subset of criteria of interest which further demands scrolling and eye strain to find colonies of interest because if there is no filter option you need you need to scroll trough all 100+ colonies.
Due to lacking filter things get even worse when you need to click on each colony to learn it stats which are not subject to filter, this means if you have ie. 100 colonies you need click each of them in addition to scrolling which is very time consuming for single pass trough colonies, not to mention when you need do it multiple times since memorizing stats and colony names might not be possible since there are other things during gameplay which player whishes to memorize or focus on.

Manual army management rework, this is related to colonies since armies are essential part of colonies and if defense armies are managed manually the same applies since one has to click on each colony to recruit\garisson armies.

Expected behavior:
Larger colony management UI which covers\displays more colonies at once.
To be able sort colonies by all colony stats, colony type, facility type, army amount and similar factors.
Army management interface where one can manually manage armies on group of planets of interest.

Possible solution:
If larger or dedicated colony UI may not be possible to implement, one solution is to implement expandable UI which on user demand expands interface to displays more colonies at once.

More filters, more filters, more filters.

Sadly I don't know how army management interface could be designed but current army management UI is the least useful among UI tabs, currently it's just too cluttered with army items difficult to navigate.

UI related:

Carrying on those thoughts, ... the data management and presentation administration requires a snap of what is known at a time. It is a temporal complexity between attempting to dynamically render new information while managing, monitoring, planning, etc...

What is missing in the promotion of what can be gleaned by the player is when to plan (in their ability to perceive time), and when to monitor and manage the project of running an empire.

The volume of information is a data management issue, attempting to present a player with dynamic data that is running in 4x time where each second is a day, seems futile and ridiculous to me.

So, my recommendation is to be able to allow for the player to set in sync time with their ability to manage dynamics, placing less burden on the system and relieving stress upon it in order for it to survive.