Suggestion: making combat range circles more useful

I love the combat range circles as an idea, and even as they are they are a vital tool for many space combats. But as they are implemented, they are not as good as they could be, and I suspect that making them much better would be relatively simple as a coding task.

(Note: my comments are purely from a single-player perspective. I presume that multiplayer players will rarely have a battle where they could use tactical combat and tweak their combatant's behaviors anyway.)

Observation #1: Most ground combats do not have fighters in them. By the time the troop transport has delivered its payload, any defending fighters have pretty much always been destroyed. It took me a while to figure out that weapons platforms were getting range circles because they could attack fighters.

Observation #2: Between bomblet missiles and some of the powerful/interesting short-range weapons, a single range circle for each combatant is often just not as useful as it should be.

Obviously it would be wonderful to have a fully-configurable range circle system, where I could say, for example, "red for weapons that can hit planets or ships, cyan for weapons that can hit fighters or satellites, green for weapons that can hit seekers". The available target types would come from the game type files, and if a combatant had weapons with the same range that fit multiple clauses, the order I listed circles in would show which was most important to me.

But I would suggest a couple options for vastly easier things that would still give a huge improvement.

The nicer idea would be to show two range circles for each combatant. In space combat the vehicle type "Ship" (or possibly the first one in the vehicle types file if that is "Ship" in the default data) would be special and only weapons that could target that type would be counted when determining the red circle; all weapons that can't target ships would be counted toward a second, cyan or green or something, circle. In ground combat, "Troop" would be the special type. This would do a lot to help judge ranges in complicated battles, but is still not too hard and doesn't require new UI to configure it.

The cheapest bang-for-buck suggestion would simply be to analyze all the combatants actually present on opposing sides in the battle, and only count weapons that could target one of those types for the range circle. Optionally include the cyan/green circle only for weapons that can target "seeker" in space combat. This will help some with the worst problems and take almost no work beyond the initial analysis before starting a battle to see what to include.