How do I turn off unit icons

from Sins Forums
How do I turn off unit icons so I can watch the special effects during battles without them in the way? Toggling cinematic mode turns off the fleet icon, gravity well circle and phase lanes, but the ship icons stay and with a large fleet get quite distracting.

I couldn't find a hotkey or control to allow me to temporarily turn them off.
technical
11,412 views 10 replies
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Assuming you're talking about the icons running down the left hand side of the screen you can try to unpin everything. I haven't tried it but, according to the manual, you can "unpin" all of your objects (ships, planets, etc) at once by pressing Ctrl-`. That's either an apostrophe or the little accent mark next to the "1" key, I'm not sure which.

It's probably not a toggle though so you'll have to pin everything back on your list. Just select the object and then click the little thumb tack looking icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
No, I'm not talking about the icons on the left side of the screen. I'm talking about the little icons that hover above each ship's graphic. Nothing seems to remove them.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
There's a checkbox in the interface menu that removes unit icons. Note that this will remove zoomed out bars around planets, and ships in phase space also. But it'll let you watch all the pretty pew pews :P
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Hm. I guess I'll take a look at that. I'm a bit surprised cinematic mode toggle doesn't get rid of the unit icons when zoomed in. I do want to see the icons most of the time and when zoomed out. However, I just want the ability to easily toggle the icons on and off so I can watch the battle.

Guess the game doesn't have this option.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Have you tried ctrl+shift+z?
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Are you deselecting the ships in question? I noticed that even under scenematic mode, if you have a ship selected, it's icon still remains on the screen. Click off of the ships and the icons should dissappear. They do for me, at least.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
That was the problem. I still had my fleet selected so when I went into cinematic mode all the ship icons were still visible. Unselecting the fleet solved this.

Thanks for the help everyone.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
Something similiar, but not quite the same is I don't quite get the whole pinned/unpinned thing... What is it pinning objects is supposed to accomplish? Whenever I press the toggle, I see little pins on the icons on ships in the empire tree, but I don't see anything else different, and it doesn't appear to behave any differently...
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
I don't know for sure, since I'm new, but I believe pinned ships will only matter if you unpin the planets that the ships are orbiting. By default, all planets are pinned when you colonize them. If you select the planet on the tree and click the pin button, the planet will then dissappear from the tree unless it's selected in the main window. I think the same goes for ships, as well.

I'm going to try plying with only a handful of my planets pinned, and fleets only. It seems like it might streamline things a bit.