Specialist Skill Tree Viewing - what gives???

[TboneX]

It's increasingly annoying to me that I can't view the skill trees on explorers and geos while they are on a task.

Over time as I've increased the number of specialists that I own, the more annoying this has become. I can understand not allowing changes to a skill tree mid-task, but blocking the player from viewing the skills a specialist has seems, well, bad. It makes it harder to plan, to see what you already have, and decide where that next book is going to go, and even what kind of book you want to deploy next.

Why I should have to track my game assets outside the game in a spreadsheet is beyond me. It speaks to an inadequacy of the game in this aspect. I'd say it was just my poor memory, but I know several other players have to resort to outside tools for this exact same purpose. I believe that things like this detract from game immersion and increase the chances that a player will start doing something else at any given moment so it makes no sense to me on many levels.

Another annoying part of this is that it seems to me that it is actually more code work to create the screen one currently sees while the specialist is on task and have the game switch this in and out than it would be to simply gray out the skill tree and put a hover notification over books to indicate that books cannot be applied while the specialist is working.

So why does it work (or rather not work) this way and can't it be implemented better?

Insatiably curious minds who perhaps should have stopped one cup of coffee ago want to know.

[Ceruhe]

Ah yes, one of my gripes as well, though for anything "skill tree" I'd default to using a 3rd party tool for planning, not that it would show you what is currently in place...

Another favorite of mine is waiting for explorers to come back so that I can check, just to autopilot send them off right away again and then going "Uhm...yea".