Your fleet is enormous; I can only assume that you can tell what the hell everything's doing by the codes that make up their fleet names.
Indeed. Fleet names tell me exactly what each fleet is doing.
My spreadsheet also relies on the fleet naming convention to tally cargo movements.
I posted a bit about it a while back:
1) Naming conventions for fleets and colonies
I use a consistent naming convention for fleets and colonies.
Names of fleets indicate the fleet composition, as well as the location and/or task and/or capacity and/or needs of the fleet.
Example: FT ANT-A3 infra 245/yr Hlr x12 B
Interpretation:
- FT: Freighters. (Just the default hull abbreviation.)
- ANT-A3 infra 245/yr: Cycling orders to haul infrastructure to colony ANT-A3, with average throughput of 245 per year (varies somewhat by orbital positions of source and target colony).
- Hlr x12: Contains 12 ships of the Hauler class.
- B: Appending a unique letter per each fleet with the same hull abbreviation makes it easier to quickly find this fleet when a list contains several fleets with similar (or even otherwise identical) names.
I'm pretty sure that I'd go insane trying to find any given system with the name's you've used (although, again, it looks like you've got some code bytes at the end of some systems that I assume mark points of interest).
The system naming is straightforward.
The first three letters of each system name are unique.
New systems are named by incrementing the third letter from the previous system in the branch.
First system in a new branch gets a new ??A name.
This way, I can use three-letter abbreviations for system names. The abbreviations will be unique, and they will provide (some) information about where the system is.
And yes, some system names are appended with additional information, either via specific symbols or a short phrase.
This helps remind me of certain problems, like a hostile NPR planet lying directly in the path between JPs.
It also helps me set fleet orders for surveyors directly from the list, without needing to always refer back to the map to see which systems still need geo and/or grav survey work.
Also, by the time you get to this point in a game, your own mental model of the map is very robust. You don't exactly have it memorized, but you know the important places, the major routes, the new and interesting discoveries, etc.
Looking at it cold is far more difficult, since you have no mental model to rely on.
I'll hold to my position that your galaxy map is a total eyesore, though.
No argument here, but I hold to my position that any map of this 246-system galaxy is going to be an eyesore, no matter how the systems are arranged. There are just too many very long loops for a 2d representation to handle well.
I would love to see an arrangement that proves me wrong.
Very neat getting a look at how someone else plays this spreadsheet of a game.
Whenever I pick up a new game, my kids know I haven't seriously gotten into it until the second monitor contains a spreadsheet.
With Aurora, the second and third monitors contain spreadsheets.
The main one has a couple dozen tabs.
Eleven of those are just to hold the source data from the database (for the other tabs to refer to).
I have almost as much fun developing the spreadsheet as I do playing the game.
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