Where to start… Me and my dad used to have day-long slugmatches in turn-based strategy games going back as far as Conflict on the NES and I have been looking for a quality space conquest game for many years now. GC2 is very close to that game and with only a dozen or so additions it would be exactly the game I would design for myself to play. I’m going to try and detail all the things I think are missing from GC2 and hopefully a dev that reads this message will take the time to bring up some of these points at a future meeting.

Lets start with the fundamental changes that you wont do…

The game should be a played on a 2D map, just as it is. Ignore all the people asking for a 3D map, this is not homeworld and a level of abstraction for the sake of playability is required. The oversight is that the game needs a hex grid and not a square grid.

Planetary Conquest is too fast and too abstract. My 2b troops can take over and completely annihilate a planet with 15b people in a single week… What I propose is a system where planetary battles last multiple turns by attacking a number of developed squares per turn. You could attack a number of squares equal to (your army size/500m) in a single turn. When a planet is under attack by ground forces it should be considered neutral in terms of production and the build queues should be frozen.

We need some control over something during ship-ship combat. I like the idea that someone else posted where we can pick a paper/rock/scissors type strategy every turn during a fight. You could even make some kind of fast-paced thing, ever play Baten Kaitos on the GC? You guys put a lot of work into that system and I have it turned off because nothing I can do there will effect the outcome and watching the battles just slows down the game.

I want to add simple animation to my ships. You will need to add a play/pause button on the ship design screen. The interface could be as simple as selecting the part you want to animate and then right clicking on the dial for the axis you want to animate. Speed could be as simple as right clicking the dial to flip between slow/medium/fast animation. One simple rules ‘should’ be added ontop of the system, you cannot animate more than one axis on a single part at a time.

Now let me talk about options that I think you might consider… because options that allow a player to customize the gameplay are gold in this type of game.

I would like to specify target numbers of stuff distributed around a random map for a sandbox game, instead of specifying rare/common/etc, ie… I want to put in numbers or number ranges. I also want to specify stars/uninhabitable planets/inhabitable planets/anomalies/resources each separately.

I want to make the galaxy much larger than the current largest map to put more space between stars, not to add more stars. I don’t bother using life support modules on my warships late game cause planets are always close enough to hop from one to the next. The main reason for this is to slow down conquest, which makes you plan more and use more strategy because your response time is cut down severely.

I love being able to scale down the research speed to very low, because the default settings on these games are always much to fast for my taste. Just as my above point is all about slowing down the game, I also want to scale down military/social production the same as you currently can with research.

Can you please, PLEASE add an option in the interface menu to NOT select the next idle ship after your current ship reaches its destination. Late game my construction ships have more than 30 move points and I am constantly messing up because of this feature. Here’s what happens… I click to move the constructor and then go off and look at something else, I target another ship I want to move, and then my target changes because the construction reaches its destination, and then I try to move the ship I clicked on not realizing my target changed and I end up burning a whole turn on some random ship on the other side of the galaxy. This is the kind of thing that will bug me enough to make me stop playing a game.

I would really appreciate some non-symmetrical parts in the ship creator…. Why are there none again?

A small graphic tweak, add a 50% alpha value to the sector gridlines on the minimap, trade map, rally point map, etc…

I almost want a fuel system, but I can handle the abstraction of the life-support modules, if you could make the ship range border scalable too. I’d like to scale it back to make life-support more important.

The funky icons for resources are just… bad. It’s a galaxy afterall, where are they nebulas and pulsars and whatnot? Instead of having these wonky icons spread around the map there should be natural celestial phenomena that you mine. It’s really just a visual thing, but its one I would like to have.

Anomalies should either randomly respawn or be created by events in game. For example, 10-15 turns after a huge battle takes place there is a 50% chance that a "valuable wreckage" or "salvaged ship" type anomalie should spawn.

This one I really don’t understand, why can’t we use the moons that orbit planets? It would be relatively simple to put a tab row across the top of the planet screen and make a tab for each of the planets moons with the restriction that moons are only 4x6 grids.

We really need a pause button for the starport production that can also be operated from the colony summary screen.

Diplomacy really needs some more options, I can’t threaten the other races with stuff like "build one more influence starbase next to my homeworld and you die" or "my enemy just surrendered to you for some reason, give me these planets or I’ll take them by force."

And now I’m going to beat a dead horse with what I hope is a new implementation concept.

Carriers…. Every third person that posts asks for carries, don’t you think that maybe you should do something on that front? I realize and agree with your reasoning for not implementing them as ships that contain other ships, you don’t want to add complexity, and I don’t want any more complexity, but I do want carriers. There is a great deal of abstraction in the combat systems for these games, and I think this is another place where abstract concepts could make a feature simple, functional and desirable. Carriers should essentially be mobile military starbases that have auras, albeit smaller auras than starbases have, but auras that apply effects to any fleets or ships inside there area of effect. What I propose is a series of modules that can be attached to a ship. The base carrier module could not be placed on tiny,small or medium hulls and all the other modules would require the ship to have a base module.

The base module would give the carrier ship three specific functions. The first is an outer aura that functions to extend ship range, so if a fleet stays near the carrier it can fly past the normal range limit that is an extention of an uncontested base influence border, and if the carrier flies far enough out of range it becomes a ‘bubble’ or essentially a mobile, independent point for ship range. Second, an inner aura that increases a ships repair rate by something like 50%. Thirdly, a carrier would need to group multiple fleets and move them in unison so they remain inside the bubble during a turn, in other words, carriers can form battlegroups that are multiple fleets of ships that move as a single entity.

Implementing the battlegroup mechanic should be very simple for the player to make it usable. Whenever you fly a ship/fleet into the carriers inner aura you get a popup that asks if you would like for the ship/fleet to join the carriers battlegroup. Moving a ship/fleet out of the carriers inner aura would remove the ship/fleet from the battlegroup. Battlegroups are not like fleets in the sense that they do not restrict movement to the ship with the least moves remaining, this is an abstraction that takes into account that the carrier could refuel ships of any size during transit. There could also be a similar mechanic where ships that could physically dock with the carrier would not restrict the battlegroups maximum speed (tiny/small for the base carrier module).

I envision the carrier tech tree as having multiple sublines after the base carrier mobule tech. More modules could add attack/defense bonuses to fleets fighting inside the carriers inner border. There could be a repair line that increased the effectiveness of the repair aura, maybe another line that increased the size of the aura and the number of ships/fleets allowed inside the battlegroup. The difference here is that the bonuses are not static, but require the modules be installed on the ship after being researched.

Ideally, I want to make a sandbox game against 10+ other races on a map 4x bigger than the current largest map with only 200 stars, about 400 planets, and about 100 habitable planets. I want the starsystems grouped in strands and tight clusters and not evenly distrubited, and I want to cut down ship range to make choke points. I want about three of each resource spread around the map in the dead zones. I want to cut military production to 20% of normal so I build less ships and thereby make each of my ships more important and there strategic deployment far more important. I want to cut down research to about 20% of normal to make the choice of improvements more important and tp mitigate the outdating of old ships delima. If I can play 1000+ turn slow games with these kind of settings then I may just have a reason to cancel my World of Warcraft account.

Hopefully someone got something out of my ruminations.