14-04-2003 21:25									#1
	Tactical Map Heaven! Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Imagine this:

You open the Tactical Map screen to study the situation on your 'western front'. You click on a Drengin fleet symbol and the stack info pops up: two Dreadnaughts have just come in range of your sensors. You click on the nearest of your fleet symbols: a Constructor, this won't help. You click around some more: ah, here's a fleet of two Batteships plus a Dreadnaught. You right click to vector them towards the Drengin fleet. You also click on a nearby starbase, bringing up the starbase management screen and seeing what kinds of military improvements are built there. You decide to move a newly built Constructor to this starbase to improve it's military rating: close the starbase management screen (the Tactical map is still open after this), hit F3 to bring up the ships list, select each Constructor until you find the one orbiting a nearby star system and right click on the starbase to send the Constructor there.

The Drengin military presence is growing is this area. You decide to pick up your military production a notch. You click on a nearby star system (you're still using the Tactical Map). The planet list pops up on the right hand panel. You check the defensive fleet strength. You select one of the planets (opens the planet management screen) and change the military production from Constructor to Dreadnaught. You close the planet screen; you're back to the tactical map and the right hand panel still has the planet list for the star system! You can now modify the build list for any other planet in that system.

The current implementation of the Tactical Map is very close to achieving the above capabilities. What is needed to reach the above capabilities?

1) Left click on a fleet symbol brings up the fleet list in the right hand panel. Same as selecting a fleet symbol in the Normal map.

2) Left clicking a fleet symbol selects the fleet, but does not delete it's current destination, if any. Right clicking on the map does change the destination of that fleet.

3) Left clicking on a star system brings up the Planet list for the star system. Just as it does in the Normal map.

4) If you open a planet management screen or a starbase management screen on top of the Tactical map, closing the screen does not close the Tactical map nor does it change the right hand panel info.

The one problem I can see with this capability is the difficulty in accurately pointing at the tiny symbols in the Tactical map. I've tried this on a huge galaxy size and it seems like it would work. I have not experienced a gigantic galaxy size yet, so I don't know if the symbols get too tiny in that case.

Does this seem like a worthwhile upgrade to the Tactical map capabilities? Is Stardock already planning these kinds of upgrades? Your comments, please!

	14-04-2003 23:43									#2
	Remove this text

Great post I suggest you post this over on the GalCiv forums too, they will take note of it then

	15-04-2003 06:34									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

Yeah, I just did that. I posted it here first because I know that Draginol passes by occasionally and I figured that the topic would be hanging around awhile. Plus, the members here tend to be 4x veterans and I kinda wanted their opinions...

Me, I've lurked on the CivII & CivIII boards here off and on for a long time now, but was a latecomer for CivII and didn't have much to contribute on CivIII (just didn't get into it as much as CivII).

This game, however, is reminding me of my first explorations in CivII . This is very, very encouraging...