Echoview

This is one of the most valued utilities available to the VGAP-player. It's a windows-based program, and will also run on windows 3.x. What it does is keep track of just about everything by using it's own database, updated from your RST and your messages each turn. It puts all this information together into a map of the Echo Cluster, where you can see everything at once, just like a true strategic like you needs.

You see the planets, you can see how many natives (if any) are on them, their happiness, the amount and density of minerals present, the amount of colonists - you name it, Echoview shows it. It also shows ships, ion storms, explosions, minefields and starbases. Ofcourse you'll have to go out and find those enemy ships, minefields and bases before Echoview can show them, but once you have them Echoview puts them into the map.

The new betaversion of Echoview has some very nice features: besides keeping track of the scores and the change in scores, number of planets, bases and ships per turn, it also keeps track of the number of priority build-points. This gives you the much needed information on who's fighting who and, in combination with the map and some proper thinking, who's where.

If for instance you get a message of an exploding ship -let's call it the Vengeance- eview marks that point on the map, so you can easily see where this ship was destroyed. In the scores you can see who's lost a ship and who's gained one or more PBPs. This tells you who lost a ship, who killed it (gained the PBPs) and where this happened. Ofcourse it might be a tad difficult to see who's blowing up who when several explosions occur in one turn and when lost ships are replaced by new ones, but valuable information can be gained from this must-have utility.

Update - Bitmask has written a tutorial for getting started with Echoview. You can view it here.