Suggestion: Ship icons showing damage

A small interface tweak.

from GalCiv2 Forums
First of all big thanks to Stardock, I've not seen this kind of quantity of developer-player interaction before, truely impressive

I have a very small suggestion. Maybe it's just me, but it would be really nice if a ship's icon showed it's damage, i.e. if the "icon filling up with red" that happens during combat remained visible out of combat. The icon I'm talking about is the one that appears in the window with the stats or the icon that appears in the "fleet grouping/stacked ships" panel.

This would make it much easier to tell at a glance what ships in a fleet were damaged and should be sent back for repairs, etc.

It would also make it easier to stop doing stupid things like accidentally sending damaged ships as reinforcements instead of healthy ones, etc. and I'm guessing it wouldn't be hugely difficult to implement

Thoughts? Comments?
ideas
5,540 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
That's a great idea, it gives you relevant information at a glance, and you can dig deeper by looking at it's fleet info (or the fleet manager in 1.1). It would have to be a suitable color to see through all the race colors. Also, they probably need to make the fill color more transparent (when you click on it to move / launch / join a fleet).
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It should only show up on mouse over.
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
maybe it can be done with a small bar at the side of ithe icon, changing it's color when the ship is damaged
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Another problem I've noticed with this that when ships gain hit points after battles they update the numbers fine... but when you see the ship picture during battle I get rather annoyed by the fact that the damage indicator doesn't take these increased hitpoints into effect.

ala when you have a ship with 26 hp and it takes 13 damage during a battle you see half of the icon covered in red... but later on, when the ship has say 76 hp, the icon in battle will still be half covered in red when the ship takes 13 damage...

it's more of an annoyance than anything, but it can cause problems with large fleets when you're trying to save a heavily damaged ship from in between battles...