Mecron wrote: ↑Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:17 pm
Its an idea that did not survive implementation. If we could have merged them we would have but the information needs of the 2 different screens always overwhelms screen real estate.
While I'm sure this will absolutely never happen, but honestly it would be amazing to see for once a game that actually supports two screens. Though it's obvious why smaller studios would not do it: you still have to design an interface for only one screen and as such, you're just doing more work for the convenience of a fairly small playerbase. But it does surprise me why larger studios have never considered the possibility, especially in non-competitive games.
Anyhoo, if it's of any relevancy anymore, the original hypothetical. If, hypothetically speaking, such a scenario were to occur, I'd be pleasantly surprised with graphics update and UI update. With these, I think I could get friends who have never played the series to give it a try as well.
For a more personal wishlist, I actually really liked the inactive ship & fleet management system of SotS2. While I suspect a lot of people didn't, I would suspect it had a lot to do with its potential to give you RSI on larger maps (similar theme existed with station management). At the core of it, it was still a great system due to how straightforwardly you could see the supply limitations and the actual fleet size you would have in combat. And fleets felt more personal, as you'd use different designs for different purposes.
I can't remember that well anymore whenever SotS Prime had a lot of repetitive tasks, but in general avoiding those would be awesome. For example, standard UI design stuff such as ctrl/shift + click to select multiple items and an action that concerns all of them. This has the potential to save so many unnecessary clicks which is important when you scale the size of the game (i.e. larger maps where you control ridiculous amount of ships).
Lastly, get rid of unnecessary micromanagement if any exists. If I remember correctly, SotS Prime didn't really have station modules for example. But station modules are the perfect example of unnecessary micromanagement: they added very little to the gameplay with the exception of mundane micromanagement. The only stations where modules made sense were research stations, because you could choose a path. But even in them, it would have been better to just dedicate the station to a path rather than deciding it through modules. Same issue is with trade: it's better to stick with the core idea of dedicating some resources of planets to trade and the piracy mechanism that you have to deal with or suffer loss in trade profits. Making it more complicated than that with actual trade ships, trade docks et cetera just doesn't really add all that much value to the gameplay. It's been now nearly 10 years since I've played actively SotS Prime, so I really can't remember enough how things were in there. But I think honestly these issues are present in almost any given 4X game.