Every panel, redrawn

I redrew most of the game’s screens over the last two weeks, all to the same few rules: a picture before a sentence, help in tooltips rather than on the panel, and one large picture at the top of every tab.

Panels

Each redesigned panel has tabs, and pages that open inside it with a back arrow. Big panels take half the screen, with the map beside them.

• Government: laws, interest groups, movements, leaders with faces, sectors on a map, and faiths.
• Economy: budget, goods, needs, businesses, trade, credit and reports.
• Empire: a summary, Milestones, the ledger and a written history of your empire’s big moments.
• Colonies: worlds as cards or rows, peoples with age pyramids, stations by role, claims and settling.
• Research: what you’re researching now, what to pick next and why, goals and the big map.
• Military: fleets, ground forces, wars and threats, with admirals, morale and the odds of a fight.

Situations, Discovery, Projects, the Codex and the ship designer got the same treatment, and so did the station screen and the planet window.

Finding your way

The outliner sits at the top right and lists your colonies, fleets and stations in groups, each row with a picture and a bar. Click a colony to fly to it. Under the top bar, the alert bar lists what needs you, in four tiers from Urgent to Info. A snoozed alert stays quiet until things get worse, however long that takes.

Right-click anything on the map for a quick card of facts and actions, or rest the mouse on a star or world for a small preview. Event cards now open in the middle of the screen over a dimmed map.

Tooltips inside tooltips

Hovering a stat shows only what changes it directly, plus one line for what comes from other stats. Hover that line and the next card opens beside it, as deep as you want to go.

Menus

The main menu has a Continue card with a picture of your latest save, and saves are cards with pictures too. New game shows each galaxy type as a picture and keeps an empire card pinned beside every page with what you’ve chosen so far.

Spectate

You can also hand your seat to nobody and watch the AI play every empire. While you watch you get faster speeds and can skip ahead, the game can pause itself at moments you pick, and a panel follows every empire’s economy, diplomacy and military.