Hey, geggis. I apologize for the troubles you're having with AI War's interface. As a preface, let me say that I don't have AI War in front of me right now, so I can't reference it while writing this, but I will be looking at it later and searching for ways to improve usability for both new and advanced users, which is really important to me. I understand how absolutely frustrating fighting with an interface can be.
I admit that there are a lot of controls to keep in mind, which can be a bit complex, but on the other hand, many of them do exist to make controlling the game simpler for advanced users and aren't necessary for beginners. You do make a good point, though, that important hotkeys like v+ for FRD mode should be covered in the tutorial. I think that's probably just an oversight, and hopefully we can get the tutorial modified in the near future to cover that material. If there are any more controls you think are vital and aren't covered in the tutorial, please let us know (though I think we also need to keep the amount of hotkey information presented in the tutorials to a minimum, since there's already so much other new information in a game as different as AI War that they need to absorb).
Now, a lot of AI War hotkeys were added by player request in order to make controlling units better; they weren't originally in the game's design and they're there to make life easier for the advanced users. I don't think that mention of a lot of the hotkeys can just be thrown into tooltips without things getting further cluttered; the tooltips and such are already presenting a ton of information, and putting in more information on hotkeys to help beginning players will make it more of a mess and cover even more precious screen space. Adding in buttons everywhere for the various hotkeys would also be problematic; the interface is at a point where it's very usable and informative in the limited available space, which is designed to work on resolutions as small as 1024x768, and the added buttons would make it take up more space (screen real-estate is precious) and be more complex. In this area, I feel that buttons to aid in ease of use for new players only add to the initial complexity of an already complex game, which is a bit counterproductive.
I think it's to be expected that in an RTS of this complexity (this number of ships covering this amount of space with this much variety in ship function) can't be controlled just with the mouse, despite it being possible to control some other RTS games just with a mouse (such as Starcraft). In some cases, this is actually done just to help players; requiring the Ctrl modifier to make wormhole-related commands, for example, helps prevent wormhole commands from being made accidentally. The mouse is one of two tools for computer and game input, and it'd be difficult and often counter-productive to make it so that everything can be performed just with that one tool, much like making it so everything can be done just with the keyboard would be similarly unreasonable.
I'm unsure of how we can make it more clear in general that a hotkey exists for some function; we do have a really complete and well-organized list of game hotkeys available in-game and online, which users can (and should, in my opinion) read through to see what all is possible in controlling this game. Manuals and references exist much to keep the interface uncluttered, with only necessary information displayed there (I feel that AI War errs on the side of too much in the interface, which I feel is better for new players than being too cryptic).
Regarding ship modes and having the modifiers be buttons rather than movement modifier keys, I'll give that some thought. Revenantus had an idea where you could have a button indicating the state of ships in the group, where it'd be FRD if all are in FRD, or Mixed if they're mixed, etc, and you'd be able to click the button and select a mode from the list. That seems like a possibility. I'll see what we can come up with that fits in the available screen space, since you're right that there's lack of reasonable control in this regard if you want to set a new mode after putting ships into their various positions. Also, just changing the modifiers seems like something we should avoid, particularly with the possibility of a universal command queue system that would benefit significantly from movement modifiers so different legs of a journey could have different movement modes.
Regarding moving ships to specific locations on other planets, I agree that being unable to do that is irritating limitation to the interface. Being able to select a ship and give it specific orders on another world is unlikely to ever happen because it'd require a massive code overhaul that would probably break things and be a huge time sink, in addition to changing some implications of the current system (such as control groups across worlds). There's a ship that may be added to the game in the future called a Rally Post or something of that sort which ships arriving at a world would travel to, or a possible change to wormholes to allow wormholes to have gather points, which would achieve this goal without being such a development time sink. The latter, especially, would be a decent solution to this problem that wouldn't be an unrealistic task for Chris. Hopefully we can get a solution for this in before too long, but at the very least, being unable to issue specific commands on other worlds isn't often very limiting.
You wanted to be able to issue commands to ships galaxy-wide, which is supported in the game via the find tool on the galaxy map. Use the find tool, select the type of ship you want, and then follow the instructions at the bottom of the screen to move ships from several worlds to a specific one.
Regarding paths and ranges, there is currently no way to just toggle these on or off; this request hasn't come up before, and considering how much this can tax one's GPU (the game can slow down pretty badly when displaying ranges for a ton of ships), I see toggling as potentially problematic. Adding it as another hotkey strikes me as needless complexity for something you don't normally look at for very long, and having this be a settings menu setting similarly seems like clutter. Is this something you'd see yourself using for long enough stretches such that toggling rather than holding would be beneficial? If so, I can't guarantee it'd be added, but I can bring it up with Chris and get his thoughts on it. I suspect it'd be just a smallish nice-to-have, though, and with so many more important things to spend development time on, I can't really say when it'd even be added. The list of work to do on the game grows faster than it shrinks, unfortunately.
Regarding selection and deselection hotkeys, they function the way they do in order for things to happen reasonably when selecting groups of ships. If we were dealing with a few ships, then maybe it'd be reasonable, but unlike in the Windows environment, where toggling makes sense because it's a mostly-1D field of organized homogeneous items, here you're dealing with large, unorganized collections of differently sized ships across two tiers of selection priority (military, nonmilitary) in a 2D field. Selection and deselection of ships needs to be something that's fast and easy so it doesn't get you killed, and having it be toggle-based is going to be nothing but frustrating in situations where you have both selected and not selected ships in a single group, or especially when they're of different priority levels. By having different keys for these functions, partially-selected groups and mixed groups are easily manageable without any ambiguity about what happens in different cases. (also, just to clarify, it's alt+click to deselect, not ctrl+click)
That's really the gist about why a lot of things are done the way they are in the game; doing it the expected way winds up being problematic in this environment, so they have to be done differently than the same function in another environment. Granted, that may not always be the case; we're human and make mistakes, so things in the game might be redundant just because of a mistake or because a later change made it so. It's always good to check, though, so if you see things that look like they could be better, we'd love to hear about it (this post of yours is definitely a good one).
Also, regarding wormhole stuff, you and kjara are right that it's difficult to make wormhole commands while zoomed out. I believe this is going to be addressed soon by having wormhole areas not shrink significantly as you zoom out. Furthermore, losing ship selection when using ctrl+left click strikes me as unintended; it should maintain that selection. That might be something we can address soon. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!
RCIX: Sorry to hear the selection/deselection keys in AI War go against the conventions you've seen in other environments. Much of my experience with RTS games is Starcraft, where shift worked as in AI War. In this way, it's hard to please everyone when making controls for a game that are as detailed as those in AI War. Typically, having key configuration is a great feature and really important for usability, but when it's reaching the control complexity of something like AI War, that's significantly less feasible. I hope things like this aren't being too distracting and making the game too difficult for you to control, though.
Thanks for posting your thoughts on these issues. I apologize for the long delay in responding, but I wanted to discuss the issues with Revenantus and give some additional thought to it. I'll definitely give this all some consideration when I have the game in front of me and, where applicable, try to come up with reasonable solutions to suggest to Chris (the primary dev behind AI War) that will improve usability in the best way possible while also costing reasonable amounts of development time. We really appreciate people's suggestions for the game, so if you have more thoughts, complaints, or whatever, please feel free to post about them!
Some notes for myself so I can easily get some info out of these long blocks of text later, when looking at the game moreso:
-v+ FRD mode hotkey in tutorials
-Mention more hotkeys in tutorials (dividing fleet?)
-Changing ship mode without movement command
-Find feature in tutorials?
-Ctrl-path / Z-range toggle rather than holding?
-Ship selection when ctrl+left clicking through wormholes
-Hotkeys in tooltips?
