Dev Journal #39 - Fleet Management Tools
In last week’s dev-journal #38, Frogboy touched on an important change to the way Fleets are handled that we’ve implemented in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova’s v2.2 “Ethnology” update. Today we’re going to take a closer look at the new Fleet Management user-interface.
v2.2 was an update largely driven by player feedback and managing large fleets, often comprising of dozens of individual ships, wasn’t always the smoothest experience, particularly in the late game when a GalCiv game typically features a map full of units to move and fight with.
Although we do provide a set of Automation tools and Rally Points to allow much of the legwork of building and moving fleets to critical location to be automated, there was still some awkwardness in having to individually select and consolidate groups of ships that weren’t intended for an automated destination. For example, if the player broke down a Fleet into individual ships, they then had to individually select them all one by one in order to move them or reconsolidate them elsewhere into smaller groups, and was a laborious task to say the least.
Now we’ve improved the way that ships can be selected, consolidated and moved with a simple drag and select system akin to those used in modern RTS games.
Hold Shift and drag and drop the green box around the ships or fleets you want to grab, leaving them selected and ready for commands.
These ships or fleets can then be moved as a group towards a destination hex.
In the screenshot above, you’ll see the first three ships that could make it to the destination hex this turn, with the final ship, with no remaining Move points left, set to automatically arrive and join the rest next turn.
Next, we’ve added the Fleet Manager screen itself. Here you’ll be able to select a fleet and then more easily add and remove individual ships located the same hex. Essential information is displayed on the right of the screen, including Logistics allowance, the number of ships and any Abilities that member brings along to affect the fleet as a whole.
And that’s not all: the Fleet UI itself is now organised horizontally and shows more information at a glance, while existing data is better organised and easier to parse.
Firstly, the Class and number of each ships in a class is now visible on the Fleet info box as a series of nifty icons, as shown above in this rather large Drengin battlegroup. Fleet composition becomes increasingly more important as the game progresses and the various Galactic Civilizations begin to field ships with more advanced technology, often requiring a Class-based counter, and players shouldn’t have to dig for this information. So, now you don’t have to!
Next, while we’ve kept a ship and fleet’s Combat Rating score for an at-a-glance overview of how well it is likely to perform in combat, we’ve now separated out its Attack and Defense values into separate indicators, the tooltips for which show a detailed breakdown of what individual ships, components and other modifiers are contributing towards those specific values. These are handled slightly differently for ships and fleets respectively, where ships will show components and with fleets showing individual contributing ship values instead. This was a much requested feature, particular from veterans of the series, who felt these two Attack and Defense values should be available without having to dig for it within existing tooltips.
We hope these new features make conducting fleet operations a lot more fun for you all. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
v2.2 was an update largely driven by player feedback and managing large fleets, often comprising of dozens of individual ships, wasn’t always the smoothest experience, particularly in the late game when a GalCiv game typically features a map full of units to move and fight with.
Although we do provide a set of Automation tools and Rally Points to allow much of the legwork of building and moving fleets to critical location to be automated, there was still some awkwardness in having to individually select and consolidate groups of ships that weren’t intended for an automated destination. For example, if the player broke down a Fleet into individual ships, they then had to individually select them all one by one in order to move them or reconsolidate them elsewhere into smaller groups, and was a laborious task to say the least.
Now we’ve improved the way that ships can be selected, consolidated and moved with a simple drag and select system akin to those used in modern RTS games.
Hold Shift and drag and drop the green box around the ships or fleets you want to grab, leaving them selected and ready for commands.
These ships or fleets can then be moved as a group towards a destination hex.
In the screenshot above, you’ll see the first three ships that could make it to the destination hex this turn, with the final ship, with no remaining Move points left, set to automatically arrive and join the rest next turn.
Next, we’ve added the Fleet Manager screen itself. Here you’ll be able to select a fleet and then more easily add and remove individual ships located the same hex. Essential information is displayed on the right of the screen, including Logistics allowance, the number of ships and any Abilities that member brings along to affect the fleet as a whole.
And that’s not all: the Fleet UI itself is now organised horizontally and shows more information at a glance, while existing data is better organised and easier to parse.
Firstly, the Class and number of each ships in a class is now visible on the Fleet info box as a series of nifty icons, as shown above in this rather large Drengin battlegroup. Fleet composition becomes increasingly more important as the game progresses and the various Galactic Civilizations begin to field ships with more advanced technology, often requiring a Class-based counter, and players shouldn’t have to dig for this information. So, now you don’t have to!
Next, while we’ve kept a ship and fleet’s Combat Rating score for an at-a-glance overview of how well it is likely to perform in combat, we’ve now separated out its Attack and Defense values into separate indicators, the tooltips for which show a detailed breakdown of what individual ships, components and other modifiers are contributing towards those specific values. These are handled slightly differently for ships and fleets respectively, where ships will show components and with fleets showing individual contributing ship values instead. This was a much requested feature, particular from veterans of the series, who felt these two Attack and Defense values should be available without having to dig for it within existing tooltips.
We hope these new features make conducting fleet operations a lot more fun for you all. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
