Please have a prompt to finish a ship's movement before the end of the turn

This is a common and welcome feature in similar games

Many times a unit ends a turn with movement points left. In other games, either you are asked at the end of the turn if you want to go back and use up the rest of their movement. Other games do the pre-determined movement first, but that is terrible too, because you cannot react to what happened on your opponent's turn, you have to wait for the ship to go completely the wrong way, then bring it back again.

So, it would be nice if the game prompted you to finish fleet movements before the end of the turn.

12,733 views 17 replies
Reply #1 Top

I would want this toggelable as most of the time I would not want this extra set of clicks.

Reply #2 Top

In GC2, it was an option you could enable.

Reply #3 Top

Yea, its half assed as it is.... you cannot easily find ships with some movement left but at the same token you cannot end turn if there are any ships with full movement left - which is something i would love to be able to do!

Reply #4 Top

Quoting Mystikmind, reply 3

Yea, its half assed as it is.... you cannot easily find ships with some movement left but at the same token you cannot end turn if there are any ships with full movement left - which is something i would love to be able to do!

 

If you hit "pass," you can end your turn without issuing orders. If you set the fleet on "guard," they will not pop up in the task queue at all until you take them off guard or they are attacked. If you put them on "Sentry" (I think that is the name), they will not show up in your task queue until a non-friendly ship enters their sensor range.

 

Also, I believe you can sort the ship list by "movement," which should give you the ships that still have movement points left. I think...

Reply #5 Top

Quoting General, reply 4


Quoting Mystikmind,

Yea, its half assed as it is.... you cannot easily find ships with some movement left but at the same token you cannot end turn if there are any ships with full movement left - which is something i would love to be able to do!



 

If you hit "pass," you can end your turn without issuing orders. If you set the fleet on "guard," they will not pop up in the task queue at all until you take them off guard or they are attacked. If you put them on "Sentry" (I think that is the name), they will not show up in your task queue until a non-friendly ship enters their sensor range.

 

Also, I believe you can sort the ship list by "movement," which should give you the ships that still have movement points left. I think...

 

Guard is no good, because you can forget.

sentry is no good because of AI your not at war with constantly activate.

Pass is no good because you still need to give each unit or fleet attention every turn.

being able to END TURN however will leave all ships active and ready and you will not have to give them 'any' attention, ever, until you are finally ready to go through the list.

In Galciv2 it was common practice for me to end turn five or even ten times before bothering to go through my ships, that was wonderful to be able to do that.

 

Edit: actually what would solve both problems with guard and sentry..... having an option for sentry to only activate for enemy, not neutral.

Then when the sentry ship activates, you can look and see what fleets in that area are on guard and then use them how you see fit.

 

But the way sentry is now, i am absolutely certain it is absolutely USELESS activating for neutral units = UNUSABLE.

Reply #6 Top

Ok, that makes sense. A skip-to-next-turn feature would help you a lot, as would a modification of the sentry function (call it "reserve" or something like that).

 

As for forgetting where your units are: I have this problem too. The only solution I have found is to establish depot areas close to potential adversaries where keep your inactive ships. When a war starts, you deploy from the depot. It is NOT a perfect solution, especially since it leaves swaths of your border without immediate protection, increases response time vs. invasions, and may not work as well on some size maps or with some strategies. I always play the largest maps, where defending your whole border at once is impossible anyway, and ships need to be fast already, so it suits my play style.

Reply #7 Top

Yeah, having two sentry settings, one for any ship (other than your own) passing through ZOV would activate it, and a second that only enemy ships.

 

I would want the first set near boarders where I an not Friendly with faction, but still not at war. 

Reply #8 Top

As far as sentry is concerned.... honestly, its almost as if neutral ships actively seek out your units on sentry just to annoy the player!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

There is no reason for this crap, its an obvious thing, even a 20 year old game like Alpha Centauri can manage to understand having an option to only activate sentry units when they spot enemy, not neutral.

 

 

No excuse.

Reply #9 Top

What would be nice if when prompted one option was to "complete" this turn's move because I believe right now it completes other factions turns, THEN moves your ships their remaining moves (this often gets my ships killed)...

Reply #10 Top

Quoting Syrkres, reply 9

What would be nice if when prompted one option was to "complete" this turn's move because I believe right now it completes other factions turns, THEN moves your ships their remaining moves (this often gets my ships killed)...

 

I think when you hit "turn." the first thing it does is finish out your ships' movement. That is why you will get colonization notifications and anomaly reports after you hit next turn.

I wholeheartedly agree, not helping the player take advantage of all of their movement options is a disservice to the player on the part of the interface.

Reply #11 Top

while i haven't played in a while one annoyance i have with the moves is if a ship has orders but moves that exceed those orders, you can end the turn potentially wasting a vast number of moves,

hey check out this anomaly that's 2 spaces away, ok but we have 20 moves, we were only ordered to go this far and thats it.

Reply #12 Top

I find that I MUST micro-manage some of my ships because of the inability of the game to manage ship movement at least as well as GC1 and GC2 did. Two ship modes are of particular concern: 1) Ships in the "auto-pilot" mode; 2) Survey ships auto-surveying anomalies. When ships in auto-pilot mode complete their journey, any movement points left get discarded. When survey ships in auto-survey mode survey an anomaly any movement points are discarded AND the ship continues its auto-surveying in the next point. Hence a survey ship with 26 movement points will take more than one turn to survey several anomalies that could be surveyed in a single turn.

BTW, I reported this problem during EA and was told it would be corrected by release. I guess I should have been more pro-active about getting this problem solved.

Reply #13 Top

What would be nice is a button the allows me to find any ship that has yet to move this turn. That way when I want to micro manage my ships I can.

Reply #14 Top

If I recall correctly, during the alpha and/or beta they had a two stage end turn.  You moved your ships, tended to your planets, etc, and then hit end turn for stage one.  All ships on auto pilot then moved, and if any finished their movement and had moves left over, you then had stage two, where you moved them and hit end turn again.  (Note: Sorcerer King still has this same mechanism).

Again, if I recall correctly, there were many complaints (not from me) about how confusing this was, and it was removed and the present single stage end turn implemented.

Reply #15 Top

Quoting Publius, reply 14

If I recall correctly, during the alpha and/or beta they had a two stage end turn.  You moved your ships, tended to your planets, etc, and then hit end turn for stage one.  All ships on auto pilot then moved, and if any finished their movement and had moves left over, you then had stage two, where you moved them and hit end turn again.  (Note: Sorcerer King still has this same mechanism).

Again, if I recall correctly, there were many complaints (not from me) about how confusing this was, and it was removed and the present single stage end turn implemented.

It does sound confusing. which is why I would suggest a button - "Ships with movement left" or something to that extent.

Reply #16 Top

Publius of NV -- You remember correctly. That was a carry-over from GC1 and GC2. It is also a rather common way of handling the problem. BTW, I like that way better than what we have now.

Reply #17 Top

Another nice feature, on a ships menu (window lower left corner) if we could add option "move" which processes it's current move path without having to click on it's destination.

 

Often as I am cycling through my ships (using those which still have movement left) I have to basically "re-target" a ships destination to make during my turn. It would be nice to just select the ship and with a hot-key (or button) say complete move for this turn cycle.