I would be happiest to pay more for a greater diversity of options within the already defined boundaries of the game:

* More races that played more uniquely (as in upcoming unique tech trees per race).

* More options for diplomacy (as in aforementioned suggestions).

* More options/ greater depth of details involving economics/trade (species-specific currencies with fluctuating comparative values or a galactic stock market).

* More technologies (especially unique technologies per race).

* Greater differentiation between weaponry.

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I AM NOT interested in anything that fundamentally redefines the game, as in adding tactical/rts combat, although a few tactical pre-battle multiple choice options might be nice. I am also NOT interested in playing this kind of game multi-player.

I think u shud be able to captur enemy ships insted of distroying them and u shud be able to revers enginear them so u can get some of the tech but u lose the ship and a lot of muney

EDIT:capturing shud be harder than destroying

amount revers enginearing costs depends on how gud the techs on the ship are

I wonder if anyone who can have an impact reads this... Whatever. If I were to get a 'wish' it would be fore more ship mods. Not just weapon upgrades but things like - targeting computers (increases weapons damage), innertial stabalizers (make targeting ship harder reducing all damage), structural integrity field (increases hit points), weapon blossom (doubles output of weapons on first shot but then weapons are inactive for rest of battle), stealth field (ships invisible or detectable only at random on main map), piercing weapons (halves the opponents defenses), entropy field projector (weapons, hp, defenses of opponent ship reduced 10% with each hit), etc. etc. etc. In otherwords - mods which can dynamically change the effectiveness of ship design beyond the rock-paper-scizzors (or; lasers, mass drivers, missiles) of the curent design options. Also fun would be more options with the spies. Things that could reduce a planets morale - flipping it to your side, or take over / destroy a starship or starbase, or instigate a war between other races, or sabotage research and construction, or worsen relations between two races, or steal credits, etc. etc. etc....

I'm going to hang a huge YES on that. Brad, the CEO of Stardock, is here quite frequently, as are many of the others working on the game. Quite a few ideas have been suggested on the boards and found their way into the game a few updates later - or are being worked into Twilight of the Arnor right now.

I would like to see an option to turn off Special atmosphere planets. They are the one feature of DA I really dislike.

If you've maxed out espionage against a civ, you should be able to tell before a vote what option they'll choose on a United Planets issue.

I think it would be neat to have the advanced diplomacy like several people have already mentioned, as well as the Gigantic hulled ships and carrier ships mentioned earlier. Also, maybe a new extreme colonization tech, like Extreme Temperature Colonization, which would let you colonize planets either very close or very far away from their host stars, etc. For the current TA expansion, I think the Dread Lords should also get a new tech tree (so they don't just sit at the end of it, waiting for you to catch up), more hull designs/sizes and a variety of extra parts so they don't always look so bland. As mentioned before, additional espionage tactics and abilities would be great.

Planetary invasion should be much slower, not the 'click to win' deal it is currently. I think you should have to conquer a planet one improvement at a time. This would make planetary invasion both expensive and time-consuming, and invading a class 30+ would make for some really epic battles. It would also make it more strategic, such as the enemy relocating troops to defend certain high priority areas like starports. Meanwhile, the invaders are also trying to conquer said starport, so that they can easily land reinforcements on the planet without worrying about orbiting ships. Farms could help by slowly rebuilding armies, factories could raise the invader's soldiering bonus by providing weapons, and research facilities could lower the enemy's soldiering bonus by rendering their tactics and weapons obsolete. Planetary defense stations would be far more valuable because they would be helping out in many battles, rather than just one. Farms would be immensely important, since without a large population, there would not be enough soldiers to effectively defend a planet. Planets would have to be built with more balanced improvements, since a technological capital with lots of research facilities and no starport would be very vulnerable.

Anyway, that's my two cents...

EDIT: I like NeuralTech's idea too, but I don't see how that would work with the turn based system. Maybe just a "Pilot's Eye" camera view?

Make PQ 0 planets more useful:

- Introduce a planetary exploration module. Ships equipped with such a module can explore planets for things hidden beneath the surface and such
- Things that can be discovered this way include:
- - A cache of small artifacts that con be sold for money
- - Some other artifact that helps research (current research if that is more easily, put preferably research in certain area dependent on the kind of artifact (weapon, space suit, antigrav belt, remains of a greenhouse etc.))
- - Some special artifact. If you find, say, five parts of a precursor space ship then you will be able to assemble the ship from the found parts. That ship will have some very advanced features and you cannot get it by other means. In the same way you may be able to build a certain kind of planetary improvement if you find asufficient number of an other kind of artifacts. Such special artifacts could even be tradeable.
- - A deposit of valuable ore that can be mined (by sending a space miner or another special ship to the planet to erect a mine) and gives money every round (perhaps the amount of minable ore is finite so the mine will be exhausted after a time)
- - The ruins of a Precursor city where you then can build a special research station that will contribute to your overall research (or again only to a special area)

... and much more ...

Even planets with PQ > 0 could be explorable this way so one has to decide whether to colonize the planet or build an ore mine and so on.

To be honest, Qui, the only thing that would make me buy an expansion to this game (admitably, at times, an extreamly fun game) would BE an improved AI. It barely uses what it has now, it mostly just throws ships at the player at random times.

Other then the AI using diplomacy, I'd like to see diplomacy allowing some real world acts, like embargos, blockaids (Manually shoting down trade vessels doesn't count), alliances and blocks (And don't tell me there are already alliances, I mean people whom stand by you while you deal diplomaticly with someone, as well as randomly hurling ships at them too.)

Oh, and trade, still in freights, that actually had some use other then being worth about 5 BCs a week?

The following would be good additions:
1. Spy on Minor Races.
2. Reusable Troop Ships.
3. Minor races able to become major races.
4. Instead of just being able to destroying solar systems, have the ablity to both build stars and planets. Also thae abilty to just destroy a planet instead of the whole system.
5. Have the planets rotate around their stars.
6. Able to give group tasks to planets like you can with ships.
7. Mass purchasing of ships or buildings.
8. Instead of teraforming only allowing you use of more squares, but the abilty to teraform a plant that would normally be uninhabitable so that you may colonize it.

Thats all I can think of for now.

First, the stuff that, while SD has done a great job with the entire concept of GC2, really should have been done long ago...
1. Bug fixes - hate to point it out, because admitedly SD support is mostly soooo good, but plenty reported that nothing has seemingly been done about in literally years?
2. Corrected and consistent descriptions of race characeristics, techs, weapons, buildings and effects.
3. Corrected and consistent displays of costs, incomes, etc.
4. The interaction of the three sliders (mil-soc-rsrch), when the numbers update from another slider moving also update the slider positions, you know, so you do not have a 50% slider on the far right etc. Just an annoyance but c'mon for goodness sake it ain't that difficult to code.

Then, okay, new stuff...
5. In general, add numeric entry options next to all the sliders and link them two-way to the slider positions.
6. Change galaxy setup nomenclature ie 'abundant' means how many, etc?
7. A relatively easy one to code - a new check box at game start (galaxy set-up screen) to have everyone start the game with no ships pre-built... no miner, no colony, and definately no flagship. Let the players get the techs first then build them themselves, or not. YOu could even extend this to adding rudimentary colonization and space mining techs to enable those modules but that would be essentially another seperate idea altogether.
8. Another easy one, easy to code, not easy to play - a new check box at game start (galaxy set-up screen) to have everyone start the game with no cash on hand (yeah, I know, tough), or better yet a numeric entry for how much.
9. On the combat movies, make the beam shots multiple shots that last as long as the missle and gun shots do, you could make this a selectable option (aside from also fixing the bug that the missile and gun shots cause leaving the ships circling forever).
10. On the combat resolution screen for each shot, show the attacking weapon type (cool name) and defense (cool name) used together with the factors and the math applied (show bonuses etc), so you can go back over it after the battle. If some, even most, folks do not really want this then you could make this a selectable option on the game play interface or video options screen.
11. More animated animations, with more movement. You can barely tell wether the negotiators are happy or angry.
12. 'Phasors', 'Photon Torpedos' ... c'mon guys, put some creativity into this instead of copying stuff made up in some 1960s low-budget TV series no matter how good (although keep the toungue-in-cheek comedy robot and the attitude to go with it, just be original - and yes I know phasors are a mathematical term but I think the derivation here is quite clear)
13. Finally, my pet idea and a bit more involved, a new check box at game start (galaxy set-up screen) to have everyone's ship damage as a percentage of hit points affect all the ships characteristics (attack, defense, speed, sensors, range, troop/colonist capacity), during battle so it affects even ship targeting in the middle of a combat round (meaning also damage will get spread around similar ships not just piled on one ship).

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Issue I see in #13 above is with the defender shoot-backs, so maybe only take effect when hit points actually take effect at end of each combat round, but have the combat resolover on both sides use the next round scores, ie adjusted for any hits, to determine targeting - although thinking about it I believe thecombat resolver already uses next-round scores for target selection since it accounts for ships being destroyed and targeting the next one even though the destroyed one can still shoot back. One (desirable to me) side effect of my suggestion would then be that even damaged ships would cause the target selector to find the next similar undamaged ship in the fleet, rather than the current pile-on (sometimes-over-)kill.

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I also really like the planet movement about stars idea, but I would never expect to see it - that would just be waay waay too big of a change and break probably all the code in the game and AI and require a whole new series of betas to test (heck, to read the posts there is apparently still an issue from years ago with fleet autopilot so I can not see fixing autopilot let alone all the rest of the stuff to work with moving planets). But an elegant, very nice, idea anyway.

Things I'd like to see... The more stars it has the more I like the idea.

On The Starmap:
-*Nebulas (slow shipspeed, block sensors)
-Black Holes (I have little idea of what these could be used for other than destroying ships with idiotic pilots, or exploring ships, possibly an increased research if you send a probe into it)
-**Sattelites (upgradeable with constructors, attach to planets)
-comets & Meteors (Fastmoving space takers, that can collide with ships or planets with varying effects)
-*Stellar Streams (a ship can move faster on it, either made when space is traveled often or it'd be natural and similar to an ocean current.)

In the Ship Editor:
-more bling for each race
-more of those fancy fleet boosters in TA
-*possibly extraship hulls (the probe idea someone had, as well as something larger than large   )
-*expand the weapons tree, or atleast edit it so that its not just smaller or stronger (add effects or bonuses) as said rock paper scissors is great and all, but its an overused way to do combat in videogames, why not spice things up abit   

In the Economy/Diplomacy:
-Each planet have a trade system similar to that of Civilization (supply and demand)
-**Special Race only trade goods
-**Taxing Traderoutes to increase profit (similar to morale for taxing your own citizens, the traderoute ends if you make them unhappy with your trading, or the profit goes down because less people buy)
-*Trading with yourself, so all you isolators can stay economically in shape. (probably at a fraction of the profit though)
-**Diplomatic Banter (Threats, Requests such as getting out of your land, more treaties)
-*Asset trading options (i.e. turn of military tech trading when setting the game standards, or something of the sort)

Misc:
-Governers, Heroes, Etc. (They train to get better at things and increase the effectiveness of planets and fleets, can be turned of in game start)
-**Espionage upgrades are more developed (Upgrading espionage gives your spys more options, like starting a revolt on a planet, propaganda to increase influence, setting explosives on buildings to destroy them at a high cost and danger, and depending on where you send the spy when Espionage is advanced, you get different bonuses like stealing techs from science buildings, or lowering the effectiveness of ships built at the factories/starport, or killing population by poisoning farms.)
-**More Races (of course) and more development within already existing races (to make them even more different, who gives a flying **** if it unbalances things, balanced games never were fun.)
-The AI should not only be upgraded in the new versions of the game but in patches of the old expansions. If they tell you its got great AI, it should have great AI no matter which expansion (or otherwise) you have.
-*On planets, when your not building an improvement instead of only having it go into ship building, you could possibly put it into upgrading a single improvement of your choice (not galactic wonders though) to slowly improve it (to a maximum point of course) the more its improved the longer it should take for less though. (as in starts out with like 5%+ with 200 social units then 3% with 300 then 2% with
400 then 1% with 500 and so on at some sort of exponential rate of increase.)

I probably forgot something, but this is what I can think of, sorry for the huge post I just love the game and would love to see it get even better.