First I’d like to start by congratulating Gwennaël, Frédéric, Daisy and Jérôme on creating what I found to be thmost engaging and enjoyable spaceship game of 2017. I’ve had tons of fun playing it, and I wish you all the best of luck in improving the game.

Having spent 14 hours so far and hitting Year 10 in game, I’d like to provide some feedback. I don’t want to add them to the Issue Tracker as many of them involve a substantial amount of behind the scenes work, and I doubt my suggestions are the best way at tackling what I personally see as problems.

The majority of my suggestions are Quality of Life improvements around the User Interface. The biggest problem I had in X³:AP was that the UI did not scale well into the mid- to end-game. You’d have endless lists of ships and stations that become tedious to scroll through.

I’d like to suggest both folders and grouping of list items. Almost all the listboxes throughout the menus would benefit from being able to view list items in a tree list instead of a flat list.

Examples:

• Being able to group active and paused Trade Routes, or profit making, profit losing, and zero profit routes.
  
  
• Being able to group NPC stations in Sector Info by the type of station they are (Steel Factory, Plastic Production, etc).
  
  
• Being able to collapse lists of ships into a single line item of their fleet: useful for removing the clutter when you have a dozen military ships patrolling a sector.

• Stations in Sector Info and Company should show Pause/Resume production buttons on the listbox entry, instead of having to navigate into each one.
  
  
• Trade Routes should also have Pause/Resume buttons as above. I’d also suggest a caution/alert icon next to them when they get stuck (ship damaged, or ship filled with previous unrelated cargo preventing them from completing their assigned trade route).
  
  
• For station listbox entries, I’d suggest that for the Input and Output good boxes, you display all the input boxes, followed by a blank spacer box, and then the output boxes. This makes it faster and easier to tell at a glance what a station is producing. (Some of them have the output box in the middle, some have multiple outputs).
  
  
• The “Trade on/off” checkmark above goods in player owned stations can be confusing, especially in complexes where goods are both inputs and outputs. I can’t think of a clear cut solution, but there should be a way to limit both whether you are willing to buy this good from others, and sell this good to others. Perhaps add a second line and have one check box for sell and one checkbox for buy?
  
  
• Stations related to Contracts should always appear on the top of the Sector Info list. Including Contracts that aren’t the actively tracked one.
  
  
• The notification balloon in the bottom right tends to cover the map icon for Tranquillity on a screen resolution of 1920x1080 borderless.
  
  
• Toggling Shipyards “External orders” on and off when there are already external orders in the queue seems to cause the queue to freeze up until you enable it and the order is completed. Suggest the ability to cancel external orders, perhaps with a penalty fee and reputation loss.
  
  
• For player stations, complexes and shipyards, it would be nice for the Upgrade/Buy Ship menus to show how many of the required goods you have next to the total required. e.g. “40000 credits (OK), 100/100 Steel, 50/100 Plastic, 0/100 Tools”.

• Currently it seems that corporations are either neutral to each other or at war. There is no way to be “friendly” or start an alliance with other corps, with the benefit of lower taxes or ability to donate cash, ships or unwanted stations. Nor is there are way to be “unfriendly” to a corporation and deny them trade, without resorting to full out war and combat.
  
  
• Corporations are perfectly happy to do business and build ships for pirates, only for the pirates to turn around and attack them. Shouldn’t the pirates have to rely on their own factories and shipyards, and only visit other sectors to raid ships and goods?
  
  
• In addition to the above two, there seems to be no law-abiding or illegal flag, where law-abiding militias will attack law breaking ships, regardless if their own particular corporation has been specifically attacked.

• There is currently no notification when a hauler gets stuck because it is trying to buy or sell goods, but its cargohold is already full with other goods. This usually happens when reassigning a hauler to a new trade route without manually emptying/selling off the cargohold.
  
  
• In addition to Dock/Trade/Fly etc. actions, a button for haulers to “Unload/Sell Cargo”: will pause any relevant trade routes, then manually trade with stations in system and attempt to unload or sell all cargo.
  
  
• For hauling ships, in their list box entries, show how much of their cargo is occupied (4000/16000) in the same way that military ships have the sword icon with their strength.
  
  
• When editing fleets, grey out or hide fleets that are in different systems and cannot be merged with the actively selected fleet. Or, split them into “Other fleets (in sector)” and “Other fleets (outside of sector)”. There is also no feedback/dialog prompt when trying to merge fleets and it fails.
  
  
• Different icons for fleets instead of just the current anchor, depending on whether they contain military, hauling ships, or both. To differentiate between military ships patrolling a sector, trading fleets without escorts, and trading fleets with escorts.
  
  
• In the end game, corporations tend to amass huge fleets that slow down the game simulation down to a crawl. In addition to having all ships require Fuel (Feature #839), ships should have some sort of upkeep cost instead of just the upfront once of cost. Crew need salaries and food, ships need maintenance just from day to day operation, and large battleships should burn through consumables just to keep the lights on and the engines running.

• Menu is currently only using a third of the available horizontal space. Company appearance gets used so infrequently it should be moved to its own submenu. This would enough space to consider having a three column layout like the Sector Info screen: One for trade, one for stations and complexes, and one for ships and fleets.
  
  
• Much needed Journal window showing cash flow so you can find out where all your money is disappearing to. Without turning the game into Spreadsheets in Space, I’d like to see a Line Chart with Data Table, showing expenses and revenue per day, separately for stations and ships. Bonus points if you have a list of all property and trade routes on the screen so you can view the chart one by one for each asset.