4 UI improvements to SE IV I would like to see

[aapomeranz]

I sent the following mail to Malfador. Thought I'd post it here to see what comments the rest of you have:

---

I've been playing your Space Empires IV demo and I really like it. I do, however, have four UI suggestions that would be VERY useful to the common player.

1) Whenever doing anything that involves picking a star system (eg. in
diplomacy, telling the enemy to get all their ships out of a particular
sector), being able to see the sector map with names would be very useful.
There have been several times I've gone into diplomacy to tell the enemy
to get their butts out of my system, only to realize I have no idea what
the system is called (or even worse, I've remembered wrong).

2) A "summarize system/sector" icon that would give a quick rundown on
what planets exist in a system, their mineral/organic/radioactives
resources, atmosphere and type (gas/ice/rock) (both of which could be
abbreviated by single letters), colonizability status (red or green star),
special (ruins or whatever), and what any colonies on that planet are
producing.

3) If you've been to a star system, but don't currently have any ships in
the system, you should be able to still view the planets as you Last saw
them. Just because I don't have a ship in a sector doesn't mean my
computer isn't storing all the information I previously saw for easy
recall. It's irritating to have to send a ship back into a system I've
previous visited so I can see the attributes on a particular planet I'm
possibly interested in building a colony on.

4) I often use the colony view (f4 I think?) to make sure my colonies are
busy building things. However, after clicking on a colony, being taken
there, and assigning something to the build queue, there is no way to get
back to where I was in the colony view. That means if I've had to drag
the slider to get to a particular colony I want to change the build queue
for, next time I have to redrag the slider down that far again to continue
with the remaining colonies. It would be nice if the state of the slider
would "stick" so I could just continue browsing without having to reslide
down to where I left off.

You might also think about making a flag that lets the log tell you that a
particular colony has finished everything in it's build queue. MOO2 did
this, and I found it very useful.