lol just discovered the selection based empire bar

Yeah, me too a few days ago when the guys were talking about it in some other topic ^^

It should be checked by default!

i disagree on that. It was discussed back in beta 2 and most didnt seem to like it.

Why do you think its better? personally i find the defaut easier to work with as you always have control over your empire where ever your view is.

Because it has exactly what you want on it and nothing else, no useless clutter. The default just fills up with everything you discover, but most of the time you only really care about having quick access to a handful of things.

they did a major improvement between beta's two and three multi, you really need to check it out

I think that it should also list all planets with shipyards

And it should also list any planet attacked by pirates.

Then it will be the ultimate UI

if you dont know where the pirates are and when, you arent a very good player

but yes to the shipyard thing, that would be very helpful

I just number my planets, all planets with a shipyard have thier own hotkey.


I was so exited when I discoved I can put planets as numbers, and have ships automaticly join fleets.
I have never even heard of that done before in a game.

after I learnd those two things.


I can't stand to use the normal empire tree, I can only use the selection based one.
But I still think the normal one should be used by default, simply so noobs know what it is.

How do you have ships automatically join fleets?

I believe by setting the rally point to a ship belonging to a fleet. Then the newly produced ship will automatically join the fleet. Correct me if I'm wrong though, someone, as I don't really use this feature

Set the "rally point" for a planet to one of the fleets -- use the empire bar and "click" on the fleets -- and ships will automaticly be assigned to that fleet as they finish, and move to join one of the units in it. Note: This is pretty much equivalent to setting the rally point of the units to being one of the units in the fleet (usually it will pick a capitol, I don't know how the units are chosen), as such you will occasionally see units being added to two separate groups if, for example, you have your entire fleet hot-keyed to 1, with all your capitols separately hotkeyed.

This isnt a noob issue , or a "help me i suck , i need to know where the pirates are issue"

Its a matter of consistency in the game because the default empire bar detects pirate raids since you can see a hugh mass of gray pips at one of the planets in your list , but you wont see this in the selection bar.

How is that "Inconsistent"? The selection bar only displays the fleet numbers, and the units you select. It doesn't display a per-system->per-planet breakdown, which is why it doesn't show pirates.

You could always zoom out and look for the grey pips in the status bars to the right of any given planet! (Well the bars are to the left, bottom and right, but left shows friendly units, bottom shows buildings, and its right that shows hostile units)

I like the default better too, but maybe I need more time with the selection bar. I tend to juggle several fronts at the same time so being able to see more than the current selection is important.

I need to practice more with adding critical points to the selection bar I guess.

You misunderstand and to answer you question...

The inconsistancy is not in the the purpose or description of the bars like you have described . The inconsistancy is in how the game provides help to you, which in this case is making/forcing you to give up some forms of important help just because you selected a certain type of UI. If you still dont understand , pm me.

Thats not inconsistent, but it is -- from some perspectives -- unfortunate. You have the choice of information overload (with the standard bar), or being limited to information you have selected (selection based). A customizable bar, either going from "normal" and subtractive or being "Selection based" and additive, would work far better. (Of course, the devs could go whole-hog and provide both -- its easy enough by simply making "selection based" / "Normal" a macro, instead of a toggle, which set the various toggle options to be what the macro is set for. Have the "selection" part of the selection based macro be a toggle not normally selected for the full empire, since it wouldn't be needed.)

(Edit: Word choice is important, inconsistent was not the word you needed, even if it was, perhaps, the best available)

I find that after using the filters for the Empire Tree that it works fine as-is.   

... ./goes back into options to see if he might have missed something.

Let me know what you find, I'm just as confused as you are after reading that