Been playing the game since GCI & really enjoy the changes made for GCII. Unfortunately the damn game has me completely sucked in for hours each night! In my latest game I noticed all kinds of things I thought might refine the game in a positive direction & thought I would point them out here along with everyone elses great suggestions:
(No particular order to anything)
Minor Races:
Currently do not seem to do much other than ask me for stuff every couple of turns (if not every turn in some years!). Would be nice if they did something (built a minor military - caused me some problems - who knows - anything other than beg for stuff & tell me that they are about to get wiped out by an opposing force yet they still seem to have the one & only planet they've always had.
Ships (Lots of stuff here):
1) Is there a way to have ships "auto-launch"? If not, please set up something to make this procedure easy
2) Ship Tracking: Is there an easy way to see what ships currently have movement available to them in a single screen? I know I can click the find button & work my way through all of them but sometimes I would like to just see what is available to move out there.
This becomes particularly an issue when ships somehow end up on a planet without ever launching. Seems whenever I reload a saved game I *always* have a bunch of ships suddenly parking on planets that simple were not there before. Sometimes 2-4 of them just hanging out. (When I know I launched every single ship before the saved game). In general it would be nice to see all of my ships which are currently "guarding" anything & pretty much doing anything at all in one easy to look at report.
3) Ship Builder: I once obsoleted a ship (at the time it was the core constructor as I had an improved model). Instead of obsoleting the core ship it decided to obsolete my new improved constructor ship. Two problems here: One I could not get back the ship I had obsoleted without rebuilding it (at least I could not see a way). In my mind those ships should go to an obsolete section to be marked for deletion when either you have no more of those ships or you delete it. Second problem is immediately upon this happening the game decided to clear every queue I had of that particularly ship & I had to restart every single one of them. This I do not like, only time something should be pulled out of a build queue is if I do so.
After all of this happened I tried to use the governer to auto-populate all of the stardocks with my ship. Unfortunately the governer at this point would only populate the top half of my queues & simply would not touch the rest. Not sure why that was.
4) Ship Queue system: I think it would be cool if you could place a handful of ships into the queue to be built in the order you placed them.
5) Ships & Automoving: Is there a way to have all of this ships currently with movement left move without ending your turn? At this point I may have missed it but I would like to have this happen at the start of my turn normally (not automated but simply by me pressing a key to have them all move).
6) Upgrades: This feature would be a whole lot better if it remembered more than just the base hull of the ship that started it. In my mind it should take every piece of equipment & "upgrade" it to the latest version of said equipment (so say lasers 3 jump to lasers 5 if you had it). Then you could adjust accordingly from there. Some people may not be into this based on the cost differences but I would like it.
Starbases:
By far one of my favorite features of the game. Absolutely love building them but have all sorts of ideas on how to get more use out of them:
1) When your playing a big map & have an army of starbases out there (lets say 15 or something), it gets to be quite a task managing them. Would be nice if we had some sort of report that should all of them & how upgraded they are based on each particular tree they can go down (AKA Resource, Military, Influence, Economy, Offense types, Defense types, etc).
Another thing that would be nice is if the map would move to where the upgrade is happening so I can get an idea of what I need most for that starbase. This probably would be easier to deal with if the starbase names were editable in a default file prior to starting a game so I could then just keep track of them like planets. Overall I think the names of starbases should be a bit more unique as a default.
2) Starbase Zone Of Influence/Control: In my mind starbases are something to be feared by my enemies. They should not be able to do a fly by one sector away when I have a fully decked out star base. It should be able to start pot shoting them the moment they enter its "air-space". Would make star bases more interesting in my mind (Even if their offensive defenses were only a couple of squares out). Makes more sense for me in the sense that if I have a starbase near one of my planets, it should in a sense be able to help defend it.
Planets:
1) Civilization Manager:
I use this particular screen pretty much every single turn to make sure my planets & stardocks are always doing something. For some reason I've noticed stardocks simply decide to stop building stuff at times. Not sure why that is but I always go here to correct the issue.
It would be very nice if on the planet side of the report instead of saying "nothing" on planets completely filled with facilities it should say something like filled or unavailable or some other creative thing so I do not think I am wasting precious building time on the planet.
A complete planet facility breakdown report would be very handy with a list of facilities & something like 12/15 used up on this planet. Also if a planet is specialized I wouldn't mind seeing that on a report like this as well. Maybe even adding a little note section at the end of each planet so you could tell yourself what you were going for on that particular planet overall (An hour later I forget all sorts of little details like this should have been my research heavy planet, etc).
One thing that really kills me currently is when you take over a planet & have to choose one of the three paths with some sort of bonus or minus applied based on the choice. I am never quite sure if this only affects that planet or my entire empire. Would be really nice to see what choices I made somewhere so I can see that I am getting a 20% research bonus from this planet (for either only that planet or the entire empire - no idea right now). If it is only for the planet then I would probably want to pump a lot of research facilities there. Unfortunately by the time my next ten turns have come around I never remember which planet gave me what.
2) Auto-Upgrades: Overall I can see the advantage of having the game "auto-upgrade" any improvements that are available. What I do not like is when I get a "soil improvement" or some such & it kicks in automatically. Sometimes I do not notice this & end up building that first before filling up the other 10 slots the planet had available (this is more a training issue for myself to pay attention but it still sucks for me
)
Trading:
1) When trading with another civilization for money or influence or anything period that has a slider you spend forever getting the number just right. This sucks - like really sucks. Would be nice if the game just auto told ya. Spend hella time getting this numbers to work out.
2) Sometimes it seems no matter WHAT I offer to the opposing empire they simply will not trade a tech to me. Instead of me wasting any time on this I think it would be nice to just shade those things red or something to show he/she simply will not trade it (similar to what civ4 does).
Technology Tree:
Really like the streamlined tech tree. Really do not like how improvements & the like show up on it. Just feel I could use more information. This really affects me when I have a lot of custom ships built & I learn a new tech. It says something like "New Ship - Widget" "Missing 4 techs to complete" yet I have no clue what those techs are. Would be nice to be able to double click the ship or something & get a complete breakdown of all the technology it needs & what all is on the ship based on components.
Starbase Techs:
Overall I love starbases but feel they could use a bit more in the tech department for military & economy. Currently the economy base makes me spend my money it seems by improving how much my planets can kick out. In my mind it should be helping me make more money but I may not understand all of this. The military base is nice & seems to have a few cool techs you can do but I feel there can be more added here (just not placing my finger on it currently - not nearly the warmonger I could be yet) - Maybe this type of base can be of the offense type where it DEFENDS its area with a passion. Influence seems to be my favorite by far. Seems like I have all sorts of things I can do to improve the base in terms of influence.
Various other stuff:
1) High Scores: Would be nice if the game kept track of scores locally as well as online. This way my non-metaverse games (from anything like a normal game or heavily modded one) could get their own scores & I could see how well I am doing. Could also show what games you won & loss etc.
2) Shortcut Keys: I realize that the manual has these but it would be REALLY nice to have a complete list on the menu screen so I can remember what everything does
.
3) Graphics: Really like them. Think it would be cool though to add in some space debris, asteriods, clouds, storms, etc on the map that people could use or have to deal with (maybe a storm slows down ship movement or disables shields - any number of things in that area).
4) Defaults: When playing with the races I changed around all kind of stuff trying out the various races. When playing against my computer opponents was I accidently setting what starting things they have? If so I need to know how to return them to default
. Seems like I could abuse that but I am not sure how it works exactly.
5) Mini-map: I pretty much always have this map zoomed into whereever I am working but it would be a thousand times more helpful if the mini-map could not only scroll around but if it changed to center the current ship I am working with on the mini-map.\
6) Alt-Tab: 50% of the time I exit out of the game to go online & check out the metaverse or pretty much do anything else that is not in the game while it is running - it completely crashes. Not sure why that is.
Overall love the new patch. Look forward to everything else your adding to the game.
Thanks for reading my excessively long post
Runemaster
