I really wish they'd make enemy ships and friendly ships that have focus stand out on the map.

[stellargamer]

I spend far too much trying to locate ships on maps full of objects. I bet I could chop 25% or more off my turn times if enemy ships were more obvious and friendlies that are supposed to do something were easier to see on the map. Draw a big red circle around them, make them flash, anything please and make it optional for those that think it's not necessary.

[Illauna]

Thanks for your feedback. I add it to the list.

In the meantime there are a few options.

There is the hotkey C by default to center the map. However, it shares a hotkey with Auto Colonize so wont work. But if you change either of these hotkeys you have a way of centering the map on your selected ship.

There is also filters on the bottom right next to the next turn button to reduce clutter. You can select and deselect them or specify what zoom level appear. You can adjust the sliders until it appears or disappears. I like to set dead worlds to 0 when I'm not looking for gigamass. I also reduce many of the icons to not appear when I'm zoomed out to a long range view since I'm trying to track ships.

Also, some say it helps to set the Nebula Opacity in game options to something low or 0. It specifically effects the background nebula effect not the nebula map tiles.

[Gregorovitch]

I have this one on my whines/suggestions list too.

There are several levels of improvement that could be made to ship/fleet highlights each getting more time consuming and expensive to do of course but some relatively easy and quick changes that would make a big difference would be

1. Increase both the thickness and brightness of the highlight circles in proportion to zoom out level, i.e. higher zoom out, brighter highlight.

2. Always centre the map on your next idle ship automatically when you hit the prompt button regardless of the whether the ship/fleet in question is currently visible inside the viewport. At the moment it only does this if ship is outside the viewport and it can take a lot of effort to locate it. This is a big time waster and annoying.

3. I didn't even know 'C' centres map on currently selected ship/fleet. If 'C' is currently also assigned to autocolonise then I suggest changing that default designation and adding a loading screen tip to highlight 'C' = centre map on unit. I don't think anybody uses auto-colonize. Everybody would use 'C' for centre map on unit all the time if they knew about it and it actually worked.