Empire Tree - Still Unusable?

omg empire tree jumping is SO ANNOYING.

Yes, yessssss, of cooooursseee.

Empire Tree jumping up and down is uber annoying and a usability-destroying nightmare.

And has been complained about since the beta of the original Sins, if i recall. So, i'm not exactly holding my breath here

What you talking about? I use the empire tree all the time. Helps with micro.

I think what they are referring to is how while ships are arriving at or leaving a battle it is difficult to issue orders targeting ships in the empire tree as the influx of ships entering/leaving causes the ship they are trying to target to jump up or down in the empire tree relative to the screen.

Unfortunately though, while annoying as all hell, there isn't much of a practical solution for it if you want the empire tree to organize ships by ship type in the empire tree(which we do).  Well for new ships entering anyway. 

It can always default toward locking around the ship/structure/planet at the top of your selection, or if nothing is selected, the gravwell you are zoomed in on (and just avoid locking if you're in system view with nothing selected).  Would save a lot of trouble, and seems like it would produce the least amount of problems.

One problem is that it has an absolute point-of-reference.

So, when there are ships jumping, an extra group is created, offsetting everything downwards. When the group arrives, everything shifts upwards, and sometimes downwards agains when ships are (re)grouped inside the arrival planet.

If the point-of-reference were to be made relative to the player's view, specifically the planet vertical span where the mouse lies in, it would stop bobbing up and down and let the player point and click where (s)he|it wants to.

It could also be a circular list instead of a pillar with top and bottom. Then going after the last planet would show the first again.

Yes. freezing the line where the mouse is, and adding and subtracting new lines in such a way that the line the mouse is over does not move would be the best option.

Stardock, you've got the source code.  How hard to split empire tree into "Player" on left and enemies on right?  Stacking sucks for reasons all it's own, but game is impossible to micromanage abilities.

The only thing I can think is; there must be something so challenging to it, that it would break the game if they fixed it.  Either that, or they just don't have the resources to devote it, otherwise, such a glaring defect to the game interface would have been remedied long ago.

doesnt help that if I open a battle group's tab, then click a planet, the empire tree scrolls all the way to bottom, making me for te scroll back the top

and if I have alt of jumps all jumping around..forget about it

Oh you can whine about this and you'll get the good ole' response of: "I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ALL THE MONEY IM MAKING!" This is just one of the more annoying pimples that have inhabited the backside of sins for ages, but never was so much as a concern given to it.  Notice how there is still no option to disable auto-pinning of star bases, or is there? I have not bought Rebellion.

Even though it obviously has its drawbacks you should buy it Astax. I am quite sure you will like it a lot!

I would give you my copy if I could sometimes, empire tree truly makes the game unplayable at times for me. 

I love what the devs have accomplished with SINS, ok 99.994321% of it, but, this is the most needless shot in the foot to an otherwise "stellar" game.

I can't imagine that people prefer to zoom into individual ships to target units in a grav well instead of using the empire tree; Idk, but I guess there is some secret to mitigating the jumping tree that everyone else is up on.

Just once, I mean once in the nearly 3 years of inquiries, it would be nice to have some kind of acknowledgement that this is a problem, or oversight, or whatever, but just some kind of response from the devs would be nice.  My fear is they know they can't reasonably defend it by saying "it's not that bad" or justifying it in some way,but maybe because the fix is worse than the problem.

Like I say, hard to imagine why this hasn't been addressed in all this time.

buy it for the mods that will come out. 

Empire Tree is a mess like the rest of the game, but many of THOSE other issues might get fixed.

I'm one of the devs for 7 Deadly Sins, not Stardock which is why I put "might" in there.

Proto, enjoy this https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/428086 it will make you feel better.  Try Quickstart.

I've gotta say, damn that some Eraserhead there.

You know?

I've never once used the empire tree and i've been playing Sins since 2007-2008 (whenever the first one was released). So maybe the secret is that people don't use it as much as you'd think, or they have just learned to live with it. Or maybe they just gave up on asking for a fix.

This used to bother me a bit too. Then I figured out that there is no way you want to pay for a starbase and not queue up a trade port. So now I select SB, queue trade port (also colony pods), and unpin. For other upgrades you'll have a reason to visit the planet, so no more clicking through planets to optimize your economy.

As far as the tree shifting up and down, the reason to select units in the first place is to activate abilities. What I would really like to see is being able to bind an ability to a key, so that anytime I hit the key it would activate that ability for all selected ships. After that, I would never bother to select less than one control group at a time.

WORK AROUND!

Go to Options, Video, enable window mode.  When prompted to keep, select cancel.  When you play game, cursor will stay in game monitor!

Workaround: Update the game to version 1.04 and enjoy an ampire tree that doesn't jump...

If you are going to necro at least make sure you do it right!

I really wished there was a way to turn it off completely, I rarely use it. >_>