FreeOrion

Scenario: I have 3 species of different habitability preferences. I have a colony ship of each. There are 14 uninhabited planets in 9 systems within my sensor range. I need to match up the colony ship with a system that contains a planet that it can successfully colonize, so that I may give it orders to fly there.

Problem: Matching the colony ship with the system with a viably colonizable planet involves lots of clicking around the map checking habitability reports and then finding the species' colony ship that matches the best species. As the number of species and systems/planets in sensor range increase, this becomes more difficult and time consuming. Both sensor range and species diversity give benefits to the player, so these are naturally expected to grow as the game progresses.

Suggestion: As finding a colony ship is easy (it has an icon in the main map), one idea would be to highlight, on the main map, systems that contain viable colonizable planets from the perspective of a currently selected colony ship/fleet. By clicking on one colony ship, then another, and another, the main map would inform the player of viable colonization targets such that the player would have to click through all of the systems to find them.

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There are a variety of situations in which highlighting systems / planets / objects / etc. on the map would be helpful. Planets / systems that would be affected by a building if produced, that are affected by a focus change, that are valid locations where a building type or ship design can be produced, that are where a building type / ship design are located already, that are were an event has occurred in the previous turn / where a sitrep message refers to.

How do you define "viable" in a way that isn't too restrictive at the beginning of the game when you may have no great candidates, and too broad later on when you have dozens of better candidates?

My preferred more general solution for finding things on the galaxy map is to give the player a set of icons that he can arbitrarily use to flag/mark systems on the galaxy map whenever he wants to remember something.

Not that i'm against highlighting in situations where it is effective.

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If the highlighting had an intensity that scaled with projected target population (relative to the max target pop of any of the current candidates), that might let it serve well at all stages.

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Something user settable? Highlight all systems suitable for colonization by this species? Maybe option to include or not include all that are already colonized. Color could indicate how suitable.

I would also wish for some way of making it easier to find systems with a matching planet for a specific colony ship.

Highlighting systems sounds like a great idea. Perhaps in three different colors for poor/adequate/good.
Whether the colony will be sustainable will still need to be decided by the player (techs, specials).

I think there would be some utility in automatically highlighting planets where a selected colony ship could colonize and produce a target population greater than 0, even if players can manually place notes on the map, or if there are lots of such planets for any given colony ship later in the game.