Hi. No, I'm not going to read through the forums to see what issues here were already discussed. I don't have time to read other people's stuff, only my own stuff and responses to my own stuff. I'm not looking for comments from the peanut gallery, either. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. If you don't like what you see here, get over it. I'm only reading responses from Stardock personnell. All others will be ignored.

I'm not a sociable person. I'm also not a mean person, or even an unfairly rude person. I'm just blunt. If you don't like it, ban me from the forum. I'm not going to accept reprimand for what I'm about to say. I will resist and reject all critique. These are my opinions and they will not be swayed in any way.

My friend and I have this strategy.

It works every time.

Say the Altarians, Torians, and Iconians all have an alliance.

We coordinate the simultaneous take over of all their resource starbases. Then we make peace with everyone. No one stands a chance. There is no resistance. We're playing on tough, and no we're not raising the difficulty so the AI can cheat in order to make the game harder.

Another issue regarding AI.

My friend was playing Terran, evil. He was doing evil things. The drath had superior military technology and from everything we could discern, he could have beaten my friend if he had just taken the opportunity to attack him. However, my guess is the AI was comparing his 40 planets to my friend's 140 planets. My friend was really scared of the Drath. So, I guess it doesn't matter what your military technology is like as long as your production is higher and you have more planets. That's extremely homosexual. The Drath should have attacked my friend and stopped his advancing evils. They allowed my friend the time to catch up in military technology and then take all his (the Drath) resource starbases. They could have gotten their friends to gang up on my friend, or something. The Torians and Altarians were already defeated, but the Drath still could have teamed up with the Iconians and I'm sure they could have bought the help of the Thalans or something.

The other evil races were like nothing. That's another thing. In 1.0 the Drengin always ended up the most powerful. Now it seems like every map I make the evil races get the short end of the stick. And I've mad a LOT of maps. The Altarians or Torians usually end up having the most space available to them. I want to be able to make my own maps or to be able to set it up so that everyone has an equal amount of space available and habitable worlds available to them. I sit there and hit Ctrl-N over and over again waiting for the right map to come up and it's annoying. Even when I think I have a good map, there are always players that end up being much weaker than others, and it's always the evil races.

It's 2006. Where are the cordless vacuum cleaners? Where are the flying cars? It's supposed to be like the Jetsons or Star Trek by now. What I'm saying is, there is no amount of programming that is going to make an Artificial Intelligence that can challenge an actual person like myself. I don't believe it is possible because I don't see cordless vacuum cleaners. Okay, do you understand, the mayans didn't even have a wheel or iron weapons but they had a calendar more accurate than our own. So here we are trying to create 4X strategy games with AI's that can beat humans, but we don't have flying cars, free energy, or cordless vacuums.

Thanks for 1.4. At least it's a work in progress.

Anyway, the issues I would like addressed are (and hopefully most will be in the expansion):

#1 I would at least like an option to have a fair map, or even have the game distribute planets at the beginning, evenly. Control-L (cheat code) no longer works. (With 1.31, haven't tried it with 1.4) We can just pretend we all went through the colonization phase. Done it 100,000,000 times anyway and it would be nice to have games where you could skip that part.

#2 It would be neat if the AI could take assessments of the "Galactic Situation" and act accordingly. For example, evil terrans are conquering the galaxy. They are using stinger 4's and have only mass driver defense. We, the Drath, have Photon Torpedo III. We were just busy taking over the Drengin, and the Drengin surrended to the Terrans. Are ships are in place for invasion of the former Drengin planets. LET'S CONTINUE WITH THE INVASION AND FIGHT THE TERRANS WHILE WE HAVE THE ADVANTAGE BECAUSE IF WE DON'T FIGHT NOW THEY'RE GONNA KILL US EVENTUALLY ANYWAY SO WHAT IS THERE TO LOSE?!?!

#3 The AI shouldn't allow people to declare war, take over their resource starbases, and then accept peace the next (or even same) turn. The AI should be a little suspicious of amassing ships and CONSTRUCTORS around their resource starbases. Maybe a little line in the script like

IF ALIENCONSTRUCTORNEARSTARBASE > 2 AND ALIENWARSHIPNEARSTARBASE THEN INVASIONIMMINENTGETYERBUTTREADY

#4 Borders should be more sacred

#5 An option for randomized races. Qualities, abilities, and characterstics of opponnents could be randomized for every game.

#6 Evil races should be more evil. Make them suicidal if they aren't going to win. How about they crash their ships into mine? Or crash them into my planets, destroying improvements?

#7 Deathstars. At least have the option to turn it on or off before you start a game. Who cares about balance or gameplay or anything, if it's an option, people can turn it off. I'm sure that EVERYBODY would *love* to play at least one game of GalCiv2 with deathstars.

#8 Intergalactic wars. Okay, I complete a game. My friend completes a game on the same setting. We should be able to send ships back and forth to eachother's galaxies, through the center.

#9. Bigger than gigantic maps. If my computer can handle it, I want to have a map that is 4 times larger. I would say the present gigantic map might be a quadrant. Really the galaxy needs to be 16 times larger. There has to be way more than 250-500 inhabitable worlds in an actual galaxy. You don't have to make it all complicated. It's just pointless to have stars that don't have inhabitable worlds at all. There are 400 billion stars and you'll never represent that. What you can represent, however, is an accurate level of inhabitable worlds. What should the number be? 10,000. You might think oh that's absurd and insane and computers can't handle that and turns would take too long and wah wah wah. Options options and options we want more options! It wouldn't require so much effort to code it. I want a galaxy that is 64 sectors by 64 sectors, with thousands of inhabitable worlds. What's wrong with that? More opponents too. Yeah, I know, hardcoded for 10 players, right? I'm never, ever going to have a realistic strategy game, am I? I'm never gonna have a Civ with a real-sized world or a real-sized galaxy because it's just so "inconceivable". Am I wrong to want so much? What kind of computers do you guys create the game on? Probably the best money can buy, right? Assume I have the same thing, what is the biggest galaxy you can make?

#10. A map editor. Will that be in the expansion? Can I manually input the dimensions? So if I want to overload my computer and crash it with an enourmous galaxy, I can?

Looking for input from actual Stardock representatives, not user-feedback.