quick question

...I can't seem to find this in the manual

Many times I find that I have a ship or planet selected, but I have scrolled around and it is now somewhere off the screen. Is there a hoykey to center my view on my current selection?

Thanks.
5,622 views 10 replies
Reply #1 Top
"C" maybe? dunno for sure.

Cheers,
Reaver
Reply #2 Top
Not that I know of...there should really be a button for "next ship/planet" in the main info area. I have a problem with this also. You should see what happens when you have 100 ships out there and the only way you can be SURE you hit every one for a move is to click the ship/planet button and scroll through each one. It is also horrible in that every time you slect a ship...even if you are half way down the list...it will close the window, let you move the ship, then upon reopening the list, you are back at the top. Keep a pen handy or have a razor mind to remember the # of said ships...especially when you get to, oh...#80 or so out of a hundred. That issue needs some serious work.

Correct me if there is some easier way to do this, that is staring me in the face, and simply un-noticed.
Reply #3 Top

C will center on the selected ship.

TAB will take you to the next available ship with moves. 

Z and X will cycle through your planets.

Reply #4 Top
and space bar will take you to the next ship with moves
Reply #5 Top
Thanks Cari and Dani...why though is there not a simple "next" button on screen? There seems to be buttons for almost everything else eh?
Reply #6 Top
Actually, space bar tells the ship to use up all it's movement without actually moving, thus you move on to the next ship and won't go back to it until the next turn when it gets it's movement points back. Tab works better if you want to go back to the ship later on in the turn (like whether you want to move that transport in to take the world or not depends on whether you can kill all the defenders first). Use spacebar to skip whatever moves that ship has this turn. Use S or G to put the ship to sleep and not go back to it until you select it manually or until an enemy moves within it's sensor range.

As for the lack of buttons on these....um. Adding in a definition for a hotkey is somewhat easier than redesigning the ui for an added feature, so it might be a time/project issue. Something that was added later and not included in the original UI design. I'm guessing that it's moddable though.
Reply #7 Top
Good Lo'd. No "next" buton seems such an undersight in this type of game. Somehow I think that "find" was the one that should do the trick -- and oddly enough it does so much of the time. Just not consistently. What's up with "find"?
Reply #8 Top
one way to find ships to move is to sort your ship list by moves lefts. I usually do this early in a game so I can effeicently explore and seelct anomly for my survey ships.

However once fleets come into the picture it messes up this system since the individual fleet ships and the fleet show up in the list and the individual ships in the fleet may not move to the bottom of the list when the fleet had moved
Reply #9 Top
btw...the Tab button is VERY inconsistent for switching between ships. Works one turn, then not the next. Also for me, the Sentry and Guard options don't work whatsoever. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but they are also not consistently putting a ship to sleep. I had gotten in the habit of clicking both options to try to sleep my ships but they just keep popping up ready to move next turn (That is -- when the Auto-Pilot decides to make itself useful). Again...I'd like to think I'm doing something wrong, but so far on this forum, no one has been able to tell me how to activate/deactivate the Auto-Pilot besides the little icon over the mini-map. And that doesn't do the trick. Any suggestions or insight?
Reply #10 Top
I've had the same issue with the Find button. It seems that if the selected ship/planet is in the field of view somewhere then Find doesn't move the screen to center on the object. It usually (not always) helps to zoom way in before pressing the Find button. The same may apply to the Tab.

As far as selecting ships and the auto-pilot, left click on the ship or fleet to select it and right click on where you want to go to set an auto pilot destination. If you right click on the ship/fleet itself it sets the auto pilot destination to the ship/fleets current location which effectively turns off the auto pilot.

A couple of issues still occur. The first one is that sometimes (not always) when you select a ship/fleet the screen jumps to center on the ship/fleet, usually after a slight delay. If you're in the act of right clicking the destination when this jump occurs then the ship/fleet is generally sent off auto piloting in some unwanted direction. You can correct this in real time if you're quick enough by right clicking in the general direction of where you really wanted to go, but in any case movement is lost.

The second issue is sometimes there's a discrepency in what's really selected. For example, when you select a stack of ships and form a fleet out of them it looks as if the fleet you formed is the currently selected item, however when you try to set a destination it goes nowhere. In this case you need to select another ship/fleet then when you go back and select the fleet you just formed it'll work normally. A similar situation can occur after launching a ship from orbit where it appears that both the ship and the planet are currently selected.

Hope this helps.