When I want to select a ship in combat it usually takes 6 or 8 attempts to accomplish it. Single clicks sometimes work; double-clicks sometimes work. Usually neither works until I've clicked and clicked and clicked many times and finally something has worked. Also sometimes, instead of selecting the ship I want, a random selection of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 ships all get selected.

Another thing that happens rarely is that when I tell a ship to move, it changes facing at the end (so it can't get in the shots I wanted to make!).

I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. But right now, combat is so much work that I dread it. Anybody have any good tips to controlling combat?

I've got an out-of-the-box standard Dell desktop PC. Nothing funny about my mouse nor keyboard (mouse has a new battery, and I'm not using the keyboard to control the game). No controllers. No VR. I think if I had a shift key stuck, then my prose in this thread would look strange.

Here is a dxdiag if you want to pursue it (I've never used pastebin so I hope this works):

https://pastebin.com/1WStgMwr

I'm pretty good at single-clicking. I was able to open this reply box with a single-click on the first try. If you say that a single-click is supposed to select a ship, I believe you. This is not happening most of the time. Something is not working as intended (else, many would have responded to my post saying: "me too").

I wonder if the ships need to be clicked in a specific area and/or a smaller area than I expect. Is the click valid in any part of the square where a ship is located? Or must the click be on a part of the display that is actually "ship"? Or must the click be within a certain length of the center of that square? Or?

I haven't fired up the game in a couple weeks, now. I'm on jury duty and I don't have time for games right now, so I can't go back for more experiments. Maybe next week if the trial ends as it is supposed to by Tuesday.

First: everything I described in this thread, prior to this, was done using full-screen mode. Everything in this post was seen while using windowed mode. I don't recall any differences in behavior by switching the modes. (Only difference is that in windowed mode there's a risk of me x-ing out of the application by mistake.)

Mouse/cursor behaviour on the 4X/map screen: cursor is a spacy looking triangle pointed to the upper left, no matter what you hover over. When you click and hold on the map, cursor remains the space triangle... until you move the mouse. When you move the mouse while holding, then the cursor changes into a Windowsy-looking white hand pointing up. Is this behavior as designed? The reason I ask is because click-and-hold operations typically change the cursor when you click-and-hold, not when you move the mouse. Also, click-and-hold operations usually display a grabby hand cursor rather than a pointiy one. Also, the pointy hand cursor does not look like it belongs in this space game.

Mouse/cursor behaviour on the battle screen: Note that I experienced the following both a) zoomed all the way out (preferred method of playing), and b) zoomed all the way in (thought there might be a zooming scaling issue; there was not). On empty field, behavior is similar to that described on map screen. When you hover over any unit (yours or enemy) then the cursor does not change from triangle, but a box is drawn around the unit. I had the same issues with selecting as I described in prior posts. I noticed that a single click, instead of selecting the unit, often changes the cursor to the pointy finger, which goes back to spacy triangle when the mouse moves. I wonder if click-and-grab mouse behavior is competing with selection? Maybe a micro-move of the mouse is causing the application to confuse my intent? If that was the case you would expect to see the map move a little - which I do not (unless it is too micro to be seen?).

That's all I can think of to try... Okay, I see you want me to try switching between full-screen and windowed actually during the battle. I did not do this. I only used the windowed option in your options screen. I think that the options screen is not available from battle (from memory, excuse me if I got that wrong). You want me to try switching using alt/enter then?

I will try this later tonight after football.

OK. I tried flipping back and forth between full-screen and windowed and I could detect no difference. As it turns out, alt/enter does not work at all. But you can get to your options menu during combat by hitting ESC a couple times.

I have the same/similar problem. It seems the ships select, but as soon as I move the mouse off of them they deselect.

I've found that if I select a ship on the border of the lower frame of the window I can move into the lower frame while the ship is still selected, but then the commands (while clickable) don't seem to do anything.

It's really lame that I essentially have to use autocombat for everything.