FreeOrion

Could it be made, that if only one colony ship is present in the system, the colonize button appears right away? Only once more than one colony ships are present at the system would the prompt appear and would it be necessary to select one ship.

I'd like to eventually be able to use the colonize button for colony ships that aren't currently at a system, once the ability to enqueue orders is available.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

You still can. Select a ship at system A, select system B, colony button appears, hit it - movement and colonize orders are queued.

In a situation were a colony ship is already present in system B, you can just select the system and hit the colonize button... -> what we had before.

In a situation were more then one colony ship is present in system B, after selecting the system the prompt appears to select a ship, etc... -> what we have now.

OK. This behaviour can easily be explained with tooltips.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Some first-timer thoughts of the most frustrating part of trying FO out -- I ended up flying the starter colony ship system to system trying to figure out what could be colonized even after the systems had been scouted

1) Remove "select colony ship to colonize" text. Instead, use the ship stacking symbols to indicate if a colony ship is present in the system. Further develop these symbols if needed (they were quite useful). The text itself was itself somewhat misleading in that often the planets so labeled were not even colonizable anyway.
2) Find a better way to indicate if planets are colonizable on the main screen, only having scouted/scanned/whatever the system. Most obviously in the planetary information as is done with th e text now. If colonizable then give parameters (maxpop etc) of interest. If not colonizable say why. Provide this for each species as needed. It might be messy but I think is necessary, especially for those only casually familiar with the rules. Reasons why not colonizable are quite important in that this influences tech decisions etc. In particular, as perhaps a more limited amount of information, I would like to know simply(ie no reasons) which planets can/cannot be colonized remotely without having to fly a colony ship there...

Anyway the above was the most obvious thing to me that could use tweaking. I'm sure there are many higher priority things to do!

Thanks.

I'd do it like this:

1) Show habitability for whichever available species is best suited for a plant. A tag would be added to specify the species for instance: "adequate for Gyisache"

2) Mousing over this would brings up a tooltip that shows habitability for all other species in the empire-- sorted from best to worst.


I think this would provide the answer the player wants at first glance 80-90% of the time. The rest of the time the answer can be found by checking a tooltip. No need to bother with selecting colony ships to see the info.

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Perhaps colored species icons would work?
Green, yellow, red depending on planet quality.
Slightly larger icons for species the player currently can use.

@ bigjoe5 - it doesn't work.

I like pb's ideas on the earlier page. And the above post too.