I recently picked up GalCiv2 after a friend recommended it to me over my aging Master of Orion 2. I've been generally pleased with it (except the lack of multiplayer - still have 4-way Moo2 fights for that, and its been beat to death on the forums), there are a few things about the UI that are driving me insane and I'm wondering if I'm just not seeing options to fix them.
1) Ships move SLLLOOOOWWWW. I mean the animations do. When I click "Turn" and I have 60 ships when 100 or so moves on each, it takes bloody forever. Is there a way to speed up the animation delay?
2) When I alt-tab or click out of GalCiv2's window (I have two monitors), the game pauses. This is even more frustrating due to point #1 above - I have enough time to read all of Slashdot between turns, except the game pauses! Can this be turned off?
3) There seems no way to set waypoints based on the ship being built. For example, I'm looking for a way to tell the 30 planets building constructors to gather at Cons Gather rally point, the 15 building transports to go here, the 5 building warships to go here, etc. etc. I can specify it one colony at a time, but this takes a long time. I can set it for ALL colonies through the Governers, but I want it split up. Is there a way to do this?
4) Picking new ships if they come up after a turn is painful. The quickest way I've found is to double-click the blue icon on the right side, which gets me the PLANET for no easily explainable reason. Then I have to pick out which ship (if there's multiple orbitting) to launch, double click it. Then I STILL have to find where on the screen that planet is, and find the tiny icon to click the ship before I FINALLY have control of the ship that was just made! That's on average a good 10 seconds or so of wasted time... every... single... ship. Please tell me there's a faster way?
5) I've taken to having small worlds build my Transports (I need the bigger worlds for their higher production on other projects), then Launching them with 1 troop, sending them to the world with the lowest popularity due to overcrowding and launching from there with the full load (3000 with my normal transport design). I can find what world that easier from Civilization Manager's Colonies screen, but it seems I then have to MANUALLY find the planet (and I play on the largest galaxy size). If I click on it, I lose my selection of the transport. Is there something like a quick Find Planet that doesn't loose targetting on the ship? (something like Ctrl-F in browsers and put in the search string, or maybe a special click from Civ Manager?)
Thanks for any help anyone can offer!