Curttasker, I agree with most of the issues you point out. Thanks for saving me some typing.


ANNOYANCES and SUGGESTIONS
======================================

- tooltips not showing unless you move the mouse pointer slightly while hovering over an item
The tool tips are awful looking and hard to read.

- Sliders are very hard to use.
There is only one slider feature I use a lot currently. I get in the ballpark, click on the slider thumb and then use the right/left arrow keys.

- When trading the AI money for their techs, you have to drag the slider back and forth until you find a spot near the number they like. Then you have to click the left/right buttons a few dozen times to find the exact price they want. There should be a button somewhere to ask the AI "how much money do you want to make this a fair trade"
I think I have a better suggestion. The diplomacy window should calculate and show the money difference for a trade. There are two trade buttons. A "even trade" and a "trade". When you click the "even trade", you automatically have the calculated money difference added into the trade. If you don't want the extra money or are giving a gift, then you use the "trade" button instead.

- Entering text into text entry boxes in the game is just plain awkward.
All the text entry boxes are awful. Follow standard UI design please.

- The number Eight (8) looks like a Two (2).
No the Three (3) looks like a Two (2)! There are a few places where this small font is used to show numbers and it is awful. I'm running at 1600x1200 and this font is using one pixel width lines!

- Consider showing ship autopilot routes on the main map, something similar to trade routes, but perhaps thinner and dotted. Make it optional.
Very good suggestion here. Also on the main map. the grid and border showing how far a ship can travel are sometimes hard to see.


Shipbuilder-specific
-----------------------------------------------

- when an item is selected on a ship, you should be able to use a keyboard shortcut (delete key) to delete it.
Yes, please use standard UI design. Delete or backspace. Control Z for undo.


Ship Management
-----------------------------------------------
- If you have more than one ship/fleet/starbase on the same tile, you cannot access the menus per ship (upgrade, construct, sentry, guard, destroy) or the fleet information window. This gets super awkward when you want to upgrade every ship in your fleet from 'Defender Mark 1' to 'Defender Mark 2'. You have to disband the fleet, then move each ship in the fleet into an empty tile. Only then can you access each ship's upgrade button.
Upgrading a ship in a fleet or re-organizing ships in multiple fleets is such a pain currently. I'd suggest looking at how some other games do this kind of thing.


- selecting a single ship from a stack of ships is awkward. I do not expect that if i have one ship selected, and i click on another, it will select BOTH ships. I expect it to do what a standard OS does, it selects the second ship i click on, and deselects the first. If i want to select both, i have to hold down the SHIFT or CTRL key as per standard UI design.
See directly above.

- The tech tree needs to allow you to delve deeper. When I select 'Harpoon III', It lists a new ship component. Clicking on this should pop up a little info view of the item and what it has to offer.

This one MUST be implemented.

Very good thread!!!! Thanks for you time writing all you thoughts down. I had 95% of those, but forget about them when posting in this forum.

Common Bug:

Sometimes after loading a saved game Ship-Traveling-Distances were wrong. E.g. I could not move my Scout any further away because it would tell me something along the line, that my max. distance was reached and I needed to be closer to a planet/base. Next turn (and before loading) it would work properly.

Let's get this sticked....very well put together. Be nice if we could comple this into a maintaned list to make it easier for us to prevent redundancy and easier to follow.

-On the tiny ship body, second type - the front left hardpoint is backwards
Made the same mistake. What race? Truth be told more than one and most often the tiny ships. Noticed one on the back of a cargo...ALT race I think. Fairly easy to check up on in Battle of the Gods gametype.

- Currently upon completion of a research tech, it selects the next tech in that tree...
Have to dissagree there. I personally prefer it as is. I focus most of the time. HOWEVER. I do have some trouble with the organization when I want to leave a branch and say work on diplomacy...I believe there is a sort option missing....even though there are like 10 Needs looking at more in a less stressful game. Just FEELS like there is an easier way. Possibly even a zoom on the full view of the tree to get a mental picture where you're at.

-Sleep mode for ships. I'm not sure but I think Guard was waking up when the Yor who I was fighting but then had a peace treaty with. Had a scout out in their territory and cursor focus would go back every turn. Be nice to have an option for a sleeping sensor....much like Homeworld probes.

-Minor race info. This I feel could not be appropriate because maybe I'm not 'getting' it. But I played a map where I formed an alliance with a fairly powerful minor race. They were very good to me and I needed it. Everyone else let them be and essentially they became my finacial fallback. But they feel too much like ghosts. Influnce means nothing I assume and as far as I can tell there is no way to spy on them and use them better. They don't figure into the won scenarios but they also are almost intangable when I want to use them...I don't know if I want to send theminto war if I don't have an idea how they'd fare. They truely were allies since converting them or destroying them was no real benefit to me. Someone else may be able to understand what I'm trying to say....yeah I understand they aren't the major races but I really wish I had a better idea WHAT they were.

-Starbases / bonuses confuse me. I noticed that the bonus for building on a bonus tile doesn't show up where I'd expect.
Examples. New world no racial / tech bonuses to effect moral or manufacturing +20% military manufacturing (from 2 techs). I only place a basic factory 8mp on a 100% manuf. tile. I have 24mp for capital and social prod is at 100% Grand total is 44mp in social on the top. To me it should be 8+100% (16) + 24 = 40mp. And to top it off the tile says 8 and the summary lists 8 and 24 for a total of 32. Way too hard for me to understand where the numbers are coming from. Ok I then switch over to 100% military production and the total comes to 52mp...which is 44+20% (rounded down) that makes sense if I knew where the 44mp was from. Testing shows there is a constant 10% invisible bonus...but it's not listed.

Now approval -
63% listed
tooltip shows 61%( -23% population -40% taxes +6% innate +19% buildings) which = 62%
Only buildings are Capital and dock. Capital provides listed 25%. Innate comes from starbase on a morale resource listed 5% everywhere else. So what IS the approval?

Starbase...tech....racial bonuses would be nice if they were listed in the summary.


-Clicking on a tile then double clicking on the building you want to change it too doesn't work very often...seems to faill the second change you make on the planet.

-In the planet tile screen, clicking build for ships - clicking the ship from the list you want to build - return to planet, does not que the ship like it would seem to. Return to planet seems like a cancel when it's not clear that it would be. Done should return you back where you were not to the main map.

-Influence too I just don't understand how to track it. How do I know how much influence my planet is receiving from another race...the specific numbers seem mostly useless. Trading influence, what does that do is it permanent? For example lets say that starbases are the only source of influence placing one puts out 10k and my enemy has 3 bases...if I 'buy' 3k ip's do the 3 starbases now put out only 9k each....will a new starbase put out 10k...essentialy meaning the first 3 are essentially damaged or will the ip damage be mitigated between the 4? Does his race essentially always have 3k less than it would and me 3k more or does it repair?

- The lower left hand of the main interface. Clicking on the 'now researching' area opens up the Research window, as it should. However, clicking on the 'approval' part of this screen opens up Research, when it should instead open up Economy.
Along this line....more hotspots. More more. Minimise the paths to specific screens to the point of sillyness. Possibly more summary tooltips. One click for tooltip summary, double click for opening specifc menu. Not very keen on the hovering tooltips.

-Arrow keys for map scroll, does anyone use them for moving ships?

-Load Save menus and buttons scary. Too close together and double click funtion would be nice. Too often almost overwrote my quicksave even with the warning. Or maybe worse since there is no warning....accidentally loading when I wanted to save. Separate menus for loading and saving would be nice and I think safer and would allow double clicking for saving / loading depending on the menu. If nothing else put some space between save and load.

Update:
I added several new annoyances/issues and clarified a few existing ones. There are a handful of bugs that I've noticed on the forums, but I'm hesitant to add them to my list until I've experienced them firsthand. If I get some time later, I'll try to reproduce a few.

If the thread gets long enough, I'll consider combining all of the issues into a single list in the main post. For the moment, I think its fine as is.

Yes, I am loving the game so far, but the UI just is a little awkward at times; although truth be told, I COULD be a little spoiled, coming from Civ4 land like I do!

Ease of understanding for the tech tree is *crucial* I think. It's extremely difficult to browse around the tech tree as it is, and impossible to see what a particular tech does if it is not on your "can research" list. I sometimes want to browse through the tree and see the descriptions for each tech, so I can choose what to beeline, for instance.

In addition, I don't know if this is a design feature or a bug, but it is possible to trade for techs that you do not have the pre-requisites for; i.e. I could trade for Harpoons without having researched missile theory. Is this hos it is supposed to be? It doesn't make much sense to me that you could be able to do that...

Later today perhaps I will type up my full list of impressions and thoughts for improvement.

That being said - great game - I'm really enjoying it! I'll be playing GalCiv II until the next civ IV patch comes out... then I don't know WHAT I'll do!

The original post covered every issue I am having with the game. All the rest that came after are gameplay preferences and I disagree with them. Like multiple transports invasion. I dont want to be able to do that because then I would and it would make it way to easy to invade a planet. The attacker already gets mad bonuses and I havent lost an invasion yet. Anyway I hope stardock makes every change that curttasker asked for in the original post. I am thankful to curttasker for saving me from having to type up my list.

Tackling the terrible tool tips (TTTTT ).

ANNOYANCES and SUGGESTIONS
======================================

- tooltips not showing unless you move the mouse pointer slightly while hovering over an item
The tool tips are awful looking and the font is just plain bad. Also I'm getting some kinda bug occasionally where I'll have a tool tip show up in odd places.

I'd suggest removing all the tool tips from the game. First, if there is enough space on screen, simply show that additional info in that location. Second, let us right click to pull up additional info on things. You already have "right click for info" in parts of the game, it would be nice to have it consistently provided everywhere.

This list covers most of my observations, so I thought I'd add to it. I'll try not to add things that seem to be covered elsewhere in the forum such as upgrading stacks, resource disappearances, troopships not always fleeting correctly, mouse pointers, etc.

- In the shipbuilder, you can't remove a component by clicking its icon on the current ship parts and hitting 'remove'. As far as I can tell it will temporarily remove it until you click on another part (presumably the one I'm adding to take its place). It took a while to realize I had to click the part on the ship itself to permanently remove it.

- With respect to making fair trades easier to figure out, another method to suggest would be that used in that "other" Civ game, dialog options for 'what do you want for XXX?' and 'what would you give me for YYY?'. The color feedback makes it easy right now if you're just trading for money, but often I have to sit and permute a whole lot of technology combinations to find a tech trade that works.

- When minor races appear later in the game, it might make sense to give them more starting defensive ships / infrastructure. Otherwise I show up two turns after they've been founded and take their small population out with a single transport ship, and get a free 15 qual world. This may just be because I was playing on normal, I'll play on a harder difficulty next time.

- When spying with a high infiltration level, is there a way to look at another race's tech tree? Or see a rundown of their colonies? Basically, it would be great if many of the tabs/charts/graphs I use to understand my own empire could also cycle to display stats on my rivals. Maybe this is already the case, I'll look next time.

- When in the large research screen ('>>more'), it would be nice if there is any information about the technologies. Right-clicking doesn't tell me about a technology, and selecting one that's next on the tree will tell me how long, but not what it does. When in the reduced mode, all that information is there, but it would be nice if I could learn what, say, a disruptor's stats were before I researched it. Further, there's no way to learn what a technology does until it's available for research. After I've played long enough it won't matter, but in the meanwhile a richer research interface would have helped me learn the ropes.

- There are a few grammatical errors in the game, and it's hard to remember to write them down for submission. Have you considered leveraging the rabid userbase you seem to have and maybe using a moderated wiki or the like to post all of the game text for peer review?

I hope most of these sound like minor nitpicks, because that's what they are. Otherwise the game is very good, and has so much depth and variability that it's going to take years to really play the entire experience. Even if I never saw a single update to the game I'd say I got a great deal.

Bug: free techs in trade if you build the Temple of Righteousness. Apparently the AI thinks the improvement is a valuable trade item. Sometimes a Neutral race will attempt to trade the Neutral improvement for it, more often they'll trade something else.

In the first case, the alien conversation mentions trading the Neutral improvement for the Temple of Righteousness but neither show up in the trading windows. I can accept, it says "Thanks", but nothing transfers. In the more common second case the alien will offer something tradeable for the Temple of Rigtheousness, like ECM III, and it'll show up in the trade window and transfer upon acceptance (but of course the Temple will not).

One alien has already traded good techs four or five times, getting nothing in return. (I've been accepting because I'm not sure if refusal pisses them off a little -- it should.)

Edit to add some info that may or may not help: I'm using a custom race, Beginner level. Diplomacy is very high (the game comments that my "incredible" diplomacy aids me on the trade window for most races except Humans, where it says something less than "incredible"). Research is also way ahead of every other race. And as far as I remember all the aliens that attempted the invalid trades were Allies.

Hope that helps. Other than this, and the points mentioned by the OP (which I agree with), I'm enjoying my first GalCiv game.

- With respect to making fair trades easier to figure out, another method to suggest would be that used in that "other" Civ game, dialog options for 'what do you want for XXX?' and 'what would you give me for YYY?'. The color feedback makes it easy right now if you're just trading for money, but often I have to sit and permute a whole lot of technology combinations to find a tech trade that works.

Very good point, I think more information about the value of techs planets and ships should be visible on the trade menu.
I used to think it shouldn't be obvious what the values are but the fact is that you can figure it out pretty easy by putting up a tech or ship then ask for cash and see how much is too much. Just a long way of finding out information. In truth the trade between two races would not be so initially empty. I think a generic value system would be good to put with all availible trade items. Maybe a color coding system or 1-10 scale [eg Earth (3) ]. This would make trades go smoother and it would be more like a trade talk seeing what the race values highly of its stock and what the race desires. This would make trade more 'interesting'. Higher espionage would possibly lead to more information.

Wanted to edit my post but can't

I started a list earlier but it seems like only a handful of people saw it.. One of the major exploit I found was not addressed by a dev either. Anyway, adding the things I found onto this list.

Bugs:
1) While pressing space and click the change of perspective button in planetary invasion mode, it will quit the invasion. (While in windowed mode on 1024x768)
2) Star-base can be set to auto-retreat.
3) regenerated anomaly show up on the map even if it is located somewhere covered by the fog of war.
4) hit point bonus from xinathium hull plating only show up on the planet that it is built
(this is probably due to the fact that global bonous don't show up.)
5) Starbases aren't supposed to be built 3 parasec within each other. Yet in different sector you can build it side by side, shown below.
A | B
------
C | D
Perhaps this is how the designers intended?

Text fix:
1) Population is displayed in terms of (15.00) b. Yet the food production tell you it can feed 4 million people.
Shouldn't the food production be able to feed 4 billion people?
[edit:] Avatar Frogboy: That said, food = population cap. 10mt - 10 billion not million. If it's saying million, it's a typo (we decided later on in dev to make populatoins measured in billions).



Suggestions:
1) allow the survey ship to stay in search for anomaly mode (so it can grab new anomalies)
2) an auto-launch option and allow the ship to be launched through right click on GNN reports.
When launching a ship from orbit, allow the player to choose where the ship will appear (might be the difference between life and death in early games) 3) show how developed a mine starbase is
4) Instead of showing the next technology when the previous research is completed, show the technology on the top of the list depending on the classification.
5) Display the population growth right after the population (You can tell whether you need extra farms at a glance)
6) Be able to mark certain technology as 'obsolete' or hidden so that you won't have to deal with it. (Stellar cartography on tiny maps *cough*)


Nit-picks (pretty minor, can ignore this)
1)"This Galactic Achievement doubles the odds that alien civilizations will surrender to you when they decide to surrender."
if they are already DECIDED to surrender...
2) When a race is defeated, there's a "speak to" button.





By the way, is anyone going to make a comprehensive list?
On a lot of the bugs/problems issue, I see the Dev saying that it's on their 'list.'
It's rather frustrating that we don't get to see the list, resulting in people posting the same problem over and over.

It would be nice if the Dev can show us the list of changes to be made and then the players making a list of changes that is needed..

After just finishing a seven hour game, I just have to re-interate how BAD the text entry boxes and ship selection is.

- I ended up creating dozens of ship designs, and had to deal with the awful text entry boxes each time. Make them work like they do in windows, please. Waypoint naming is just as bad. I had to give up on naming fleets, it was just too annoying to deal with any more text boxes than absolutely necessary.

- The ship selection silliness caused me to leave my starbases undefended and lose a few billion assault troops, among other silly things that would never have happened if the ship selection worked in an intuitive manner. Often I would select a tile (starbase, troop transport, 1 fleet on it) and select the fleet to move a couple of spaces, attack a dreadlord fleet, then move the fleet back to the starbase. However, if i had been looking at another ship/fleet just before this, it would remember that i had the previous ship/fleet selected. When I select the starbase fleet and give it a waypoint, suddenly *both* fleets would start moving, the fleet I wanted to move, and the fleet i just happened to be looking at right before.

I can't stress how highly annoying this is when you're struggling to keep the dreadlords from sneaking past you to blow up your squishy ships and assault your planets. By the end of the game I was forcing myself to click on a planet before trying to move *any* of my ships, to ensure that it deselected any ships I was looking at. Just make ship selection not 'sticky'. If the player wants to select multiple ships, make them hold down CTRL. For a bonus, allow them to select a range of ships using SHIFT.



Also, here's some minor bugs and annoyances I picked up:

Bugs
=============================
- Scanner Modules in starbases: Do they work? I constructed a military starbase a parsec away from a dreadlord homeworld. The fog of war was so bad that the dreadlord ships would be almost past the starbase before I saw them. To counter this, i researched and built several scanner modules (Up to Sector Surveillance Scanner). I think for the first turn after building each new scanner, it worked. However, the very next turn the fog of war came right back in. I ended up building a small ship loaded up with scanners and parked it on the starbase. That seems to defeat the purpose.

Annoyances
=============================
- Right-clicking on a green notification (social project complete) does nothing but clear the notification. Once you get used to right-clicking the blue ones to autolaunch ships, you tend to get lazy and just right-click all of the notifications. Make right-click on green notifications do the same thing as left clicks.

- There is really no need for the little blue notification for ship complete when you have it set up so that the ship is autolaunched and sent to a rally point. Once you get several planets producing ships to send to a waypoint, you end up having so many little notification boxes that you just start ignoring them. This is problematic if you have one planet building a special ship and you actually want to be notified when its done.

- When you move the mouse over the notification boxes to click/right-click them, you invariably end up mashing the cursor against the side of the screen. This triggers the edge scrolling, which ends up defeating the purpose of clicking on the notification in the first place (jumping to the planet), as edge scroll will send the map view a distance to the right of the planet.

- Military Starbases: There needs to be more information presented to the user as to how ship assist modules work. I've figured out through trial and error that defense assist modules do not do anything unless the ship has at least one point in the defense type that corresponds with the assist module. However, it seems that the attack assist modules work fine. My ships gain all 3 types of attack from the assist modules, dispite only having missiles installed. Again, just let the player know before they build an assist module. They shouldn't have to figure this out on their own.

- Constructors should allow you to preview the radius of a starbase before you build it. There's nothing more annoying than building a starbase one square out of position, or having to find that magic spot by trial and error (or counting tiles on screen).

- The quick build list for a planet (accessed from the main menu) should show the number of troops a troop transport can hold.

- When playing a game with a lot of opponents, it becomes cumbersome to initiate a conversaion with each one to see what techs they have to offer. You obviously want to check back with each and every friendly (and nonfriendly) race from time to time to see what new techs they have for trade. Since this information is avaliable through the trade interface, why not make it avaliable through a tab in the foreign stats window as well? Something where you could instantly see a list of techs for all opponents all on one screen.

- Civilization Manager / Stats and Graphs tab: The abilities window needs tooltips for every item showing where that bonus is coming from.

- Ship Design: When selecting items to place, the weapons are sorted in order of damage, defenses in order of defense, etc. If you select a filter for a specific type (Missile, Point Defense), the list reverts to an unsorted form.

- There really needs to be an option for the ship design window to only show designs created this session. Currently I'm showing 60 or so custom designed ships, of which only 3 are being used in my game. I don't want to have to select the other 57 and obsolete them for every single game. Just don't show them! Instead of auto loading all custom designs, consider having a 'load' button to load custom designs from file.

- When starting a campaign mission when several civs are allready built up a bit, is it really necessary to spam the player on the first turn with multiple "XXX has built an economic capital" messages?