Planet Icons on Main System Map? |
I just got SE-V. I have played SEIV and Star Fury.
One little detail is driving me nuts. I have gone through every note in this forum, every page of the manual, and every button inside the game, and I can't figure it out.
Here's the question--the display the home planet has a flag at the top, then a line of four icons representing bases, ships, units, and population, and then a line of four more icons. What are those four icons at the bottom? They are not discussed in the manual at 130-131.
Are they what the manual calls "status icons" earlier on? Are they something added by one of the patches? What are they?
Related point: I'm in my 50s, and by now my eyes are pretty much shot. I have a REAL hard time reading those tiny icons on the planet flags. For instance, it might be obvious to you that those icons are some kind of status icon--but it's not obvious to me, because I can't see them clearly.
Moving the screen up and down with the arrow keys or the mousewheel doesn't do anything to zoom in on that. Moreover, my installation defaulted to 1024 x 758, and that's the lowest level. Is there ANY way to make the planet icons larger?
I got an eyestrain headache from a few hours of SE-V last night. Drat.
Thanks.
Cordelayne
sort of
The best way to do it is to create all the empires yourself and set some of them to AI control. You also have to turn off neutral and computer generated empires. You will then have total control of the starting number of empires. You will still get additional empires if your empire or one of the AI suffers a revolt, but you won’t get huge numbers of empires.
If you don’t want to do that just set the number of AI empires to low and you will get around five empires including neutrals. Neutrals are unable to expand beyond their home systems by the way
You probably should check
You probably should check out set of options related to "Empire Flag" and "Colony Status Icon" (e.g. set "Colony Status Icon Size" to "Large").
See Empire Options->System Display
And about number of empires: uncheck options
"Generate Random Computer Controlled Empires".
"Generate Random Computer Controlled Neutral Empires".
in the
good luck
Status Icons
In your SE5\Pictures\Effects folder this is a Icons_PlanetStatus.bmp file. This contains the images displayed for each planet in a much larger form. It's sad, really. These images are rather detailed but they're always rendered much smaller.
In order they are:
Idle
Constructing something
Has a spaceport
Has supplies/ordnance in cargo
Has a spaceyard
Repairing something (I haven't seen this used in game)
Domed colony
Has fighters in cargo
Has satellites in cargo
Has mines in cargo
Has troops in cargo
Has weapons platforms in cargo
I don't know of any way to make them bigger in game, but I hope this helps.
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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!