The "Ready" Checkbox has arrived

Friday, April 15, 2011
When you open your turns today you will find that you have two new elements in your user interface. A small checkbox next to the X on each of your planet, ship and starbase screens and also a button in the navigation which toggles between "all" and "idle". This is the new Mark Ready functionality. 

The purpose of this functionality is to give you another tool to help organize your empire and turn play and reduce the time spent going through ships, planets and starbases that you've already managed.  

So how does it work?  Basically as you play your turn you can optionally check off the planets, ships and starbases you have completed giving orders to. As you check them off they will not be included in your idle list. So, if you have 50 planets then normally your navigation bar says Planet x of 50. But if you show only idle planets and you have marked 3 of your planets as ready then the navigation bar will show Planet x of 47. Clicking Back or Next will only move you through the planets which have not been marked as ready.  When there are no more planets you will not be able to load the idle list.

The checkbox has three modes:
  • Not Ready (no checkmark) - Same as it is now.
  • Ready (single checkmark) - Don't show in the idle list, will be reset back to Not Ready after host runs.
  • Always Ready (double checkmark) - This will be left as always ready and not included in the idle list until an event occurs that will cause the planet, ship or starbase to "wake up" or you manually uncheck it.  
The following events will wake up planets:
  • A riot or civil war
  • A giant meteor impact
  • over population
  • new natives discovered
  • ground attack or direct attack
  • pillage planet
  • rebel ground attack
  • super spy changed friendly code
The following events will wake up ships:
  • arrival at waypoint if moving (so you can set your ship to fly to a far off planet and it will wake up when it arrives)
  • being attacked
  • it is robbed
  • an enemy ship is detected within 81 ly (162 if its Gravitonic)
  • cloak failure
  • moved through minefield (or hit mine)
  • inside ion storm
  • chunnelled
  • hit by glory device
  • loki decloak
The following events will wake up starbases:
  • ship built
  • planet attacked
Lastly you can toggle the ready checkbox using the hotkey: "r"   

UPDATE: The former tax rates hotkey "r" has been moved to "a"

If you think we missed anything important in this list please let us know. As always we're open to more suggestions on how to make this even better.

Have fun!