Hey there, sorry to hear of your frustrations, but looks like you have some good suggestions there.
Meanwhile I'm tempted to rename my AI:Wars link on the desktop to UI:Wars cause I feel I'm more fighting the UI then the AI
I'm surprised to hear that, given that the UI is one of the favorite things most players and reviewers have commented on as being exceptional.
1) I'm constantly zooming in and out. And out and in. The point of the 'Q' key escapes me. With 'W' I can halfways reliably select units, but I have no clue *where* I've selected those units cause the white rectangle on the mini map is usually hidden by an unit blob. 'E' solves this problem but now I can't select units. And so on. I.e finding the right engineer when I have 4 on the planet is an excercise in patience.
Yes, there is a lot of zooming in and out with this game, but no more so than other very large-scale games such as Supreme Commander. It's simply part of the nature of having such a vast scale.
3) When I right-click an icon on the right panel the view is selected on that unit. Great. This also works if there's more than one unit *and* all those units fit on the screen. If this isn't the case the view is simply centered in nowhere land. Granted I can hit i.e '.' {Space} various times but it feels somewhat clumpy.
The view is always centered on the very center of all of those units. If you are wanting to just select them but not move the screen, such as if you are going to give them a movement order, then just left-clicking will suffice.
4) Good luck pulling of the 1.009 A+Z key combo on a non-US keyboard. And where might be the '/' key located on a german keyboard? To be honest, it isn't a big deal for me thanks to a G15 keyboard && autohotkey. Development time is a finite resource and certainly better spend on other things than configurable key bindings, but still.
I am not familiar with many other kinds of keyboards (it's been 13 years now since I was last in Germany), so I'm not too sure about a lot of that. Normally I include configurable key bindings with my games, but with an RTS game all of the keys are used, and even have multiple functions, which can be quite problematic for that sort of purpose. I'm not aware of many (I can't think of any, personally) RTS games that have configurable keybindings, just because of this reason.
1) Draw the white rectangle on the minimap on top of unit blobs
I've added this to my list as an option to add in the settings. As a default, I think it is more useful for most people to show this behind the unit dots, simply because otherwise you can't see the unit dots at certain zoom levels. But when you are very much zoomed in, you still won't be able to see the zoom window very well simply because it is a speck given the scale of the map versus the minimap. Anyway, I'll add this as an option, though.
2) Store unit selection, zoom amount and zoom position on a per planet basis. If someone wants the current behaviour bind the home key to 'jump to command centre'
Actually, the H key already will center on the command station, so that's good to know. It's funny, I think that this particular thing has actually been a minor annoyance for me, too, but it never really reached the level of conscious thought for me. Thanks for bringing it up -- this has been added to my list.
3) Make right-clicking the game panel cycle through the units as one would expect.
This one is more challenging, simply because these are really meant to be group-selection boxes. However, I think a good compromise would be to make the Ctrl+left/right click work as the current left/right click does, and then make left/right click cycle through these. I agree that this would be really handy for engineers in particular. So I think we can basically get the best of both worlds, this way. I think that will be a really solid improvement, actually. Added to my list!
Thanks for the suggestions!