Ability to rotate ship components in the Ship Designer

God, I hope this means you won't have to use those little attachment rotater chunks. the +90 only works back and forth so I always have to use -90, which means a ton of little pieces get stacked up, then when I want to redo the base piece that the rotators are in, they ALL have to be removed which is definitely the biggest PITA in ship building. Hopefully this fixes it; if not you should be allowed to disregard the "This piece has pieces attached to it" warning and just blow away the selected add-on and everything attached to it.

Thanks Frogboy - errr... Brad.

This game is developing nicely. When all is said and done I see a Stars!, MoO & Pax combo as the evolutionary direction of this title.

I have not played GC1 in a while but IF my memory doesnot betray me, I think we had the option to tell the AI to remove their starbases and ships from "OUR" territory or sphere of influence.

I think that was from Civ 3. (Which I liked much better than Civ 2, although it didn't have as much replay value.) I haven't played Civ 4, and I probably won't as I spent my money on this game instead. (I won't have time to play a second game, I have three children ages 4 or under, and they take up 98.5 percent of my "free" time.)

"No tech trading option" --- This is a nice option, but I see it as somewhat half measure - it gives you two options: play with AI 'cheating' or don't play with tech trading at all. My opinion is to 'simply' tweak the tech trade mechanism.

Tolorion [/ i will buy this game when you finally add a multiplayer option. and for those who don´t like multiplayer: use single player.

I completely agree and will do the same.

What about letting me remap a couple of keys to rotate the map? I know you're supposed to be able to do it with the middle mouse button, but my scroll wheel function gets in the way. I've heard other people have the same problem.

What about letting me remap a couple of keys to rotate the map? I know you're supposed to be able to do it with the middle mouse button, but my scroll wheel function gets in the way. I've heard other people have the same problem.

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

Nice list. Things Id like to see added later, if possible.

1: The ability to send warnings to enemy races. Such as the 'We see those massed troop transports hovering outside our planets. Do you think we're stupid or something?' they send me now and then.

2: The ability to make starbases mobile or have some form of attack rather then let its weapon systems be defensive only.

3: The AI seems to have a major hard on for Starbases, sending waves of ships to attack bases they really have no way to defeat. Tweak that a bit.

4: An 'Intercept' ability for ships. At the moment, if you right click on a target ship, it will go to that area of the map, even though the ship has moved. I'd like for your ship to go to the ship on autopilot, not the last place it was.

5: A trade route toggle for the main map. No trade routes, trade routes as they exist now, and BRIGHT LINES so I can see where the silly things are in my sensor range.

6: Cloak/Stealth/Jammer technology. Even if it's just something as simple as reducing sensor sight range when in range.

7: Planetary bombardment as a fleet option. Stealing this from MOO. It gives you added emphasis to have planetary defenses and gives you a way to damage the enemy infrastructure if you dont want to capture the planet.

8: Loans to/from other races rather then just giving money outright.

9: Minefields.

10: Racial based 'symbols' for the pulled back map, with a bit more variety so you have a better change of prioritizing when looking at the big picture.

11: A bit more detail on starbase modules, I'm still not clear as to when you gain more module space on the things.

12: A way to make class 0 planets a bit more useful then just decoration. Genesis device tech? Military bases or mining camps as composed to colonies and starbases?

13: A less linear government structure with pros and cons for each.

14: A slider for 'sandbox' games that lets you accelerate the start. Starting ships, starting colonies, amount of development on those colonies, starting funds.

15: A starship manager, if not editor. I'd like to have a quick way to take a look at the various ships and see what you need to get them without having to scroll through the tech tree.

Re: Starbases

I think Starbases should stay defensive.....or why would you bother making starships at all?

If Starbases had an 'attack range', it would be similar to the problem that Age of Kings had, where you could just up and build a Castle or Town Center right on top of you enemy and criple them, without even using a single offensive unit.

I haven't gotten to the end of page 5 of these comments, however as a suggestion for 1.2:

Allow Minor races to colonize any planets in their home solar system. For example there always seems to be one or two conolizable planets around the Snarathi homeworld...wouldn't the "evil squirrel" back story seem a little more realistic if they at least expanded to the other worlds in their home system.

(The evil squirrels by the way are GREAT )

Nice list of things, but would it be possible to add these:

1. Finish the Ethic bonuses, it seems that Evil gets alot of good buildings and the other not alot especially Neutral (only gets the Temple of Neutrality)

2. Put in an option so that there can't be any surrenders. Sometimes its annoyin when you're destorying someone and they just surrender to another enemy.

This happened to me today I was at war with the Altarian (11 planets) and took over only 4 colonies (not homeworld), and they just surrendered with 8 planets left, to another enemy of mine

1)Fix the Neutrality Learning Center!

2)Improve the Minor Race's AI. In GC1, minor races close to me were a threat early in the game. The suck now- Don't attack, don't colonize other planets, and only seem to build resource starbases and ask for tech trades.
The Dark Yor and Snathi should be threats matching their descriptions. I'd like to see the Snathi saying "For too long your race has horded all the best nuts. Surrender now or be gnawed to pieces!" and then invade your planets.
Espionage should be enabled on them as well.

3)In tech trading, there should a civ-esque option to ask what the AI is willing to trade for something.

4)A button in the "race picks" screen that resets the race stats to their defualts

5)The ability to put a fleet in "sentry" mode.

6)The ability to propose UP issues

7)Something to make use of class 0 planets. Mining, refueling station, sensor outpost, something.

8)Custom MP3 playlists!

I think the AI cheat/handicap level and the AI complexity level should be separate items. Maybe in some 'advance settings' perhaps but thats UI work. Space Empires has this 'dual' difficulty (Cheat, Intelligence).

I want to save my ships as standalone files! Space Empires allows this. I spent 2 hours designing a ship and an hour each on two others and they don't come up on a different game when I get the prequisite techs!.

I would also like to be able to save my favorite designs for use in other games. Possibly for exporting, sharing online, or just so I can use the same custom ships in multiple games would be cool.

Very nice update coming up, here's my suggestions (Boy, the guys are stardocks are going to be SWAMPED with 'em... )

1. Being able to load ships would be a major plus; nothing more irritating than accidentally obsoletting your fanciest colony ship and being forced to use a version that SOMEHOW ends up being able to pack up less stuff than the old one. (I think that's a miniaturization issue, btw)

2. A "Get away from my planets or we'll blow your ships out of space" ultimatum from the AIs would be great; as it is, I can pile up dozens of troop ships around the computer's best planets while preparing for war, and declare on my whim, thus capturing 5 or so planets the very turn I declare. (I play at normal (I'm still a newb, sue me ), might be why...)

3. The computer needs not be dumbed down at lower levels. A trisomic jellyfish is smarter than a computer at "beginner", never mind "fool". Hell "normal" is pretty dumb already

4. A message when an AI declares war on another, for great justice.

5. There is no fifth suggestion

6. Fixing ships being butchered when switching style; build a ship in the custom race as a human, then play a game using, say, Yor style, and... URGH. Eww.
My beautiful Dark Angels... butchered...
Better yet; make ships style-specific; you need to make new ones with the new styles. It's getting a bit irritating having to obsolete my dark angel versions every time I get a new laser tech

7: Laser colors. For the bling bling.

8. Cooler Mass Drivers: Not too sure if it's my crappy video card (GEFORCE 400 FTW! And I can still somehow play doom 3 with it O_o), but it looks like they're throwing fruit loops at each other. Come on, mass drivers and bullets being fired at extreme speeds, they should be little white lines fired in bursts or something!

9. Make minor races an actual threat please.

10. Barbs! (pirates, actually, but using Civ terminology) Or better yet, minor race!Barbs

11. The option to make starts fair or unfair, to rack up the difficulty; you give yourself crappy planets to start with, and give the computers gold mines (like that Class 23 planet I ended up at 3 parsecs from in my last game... ) for a challenge

12. Fix the upgrade thing. Also for great justice.

13. The AI begging for peace instead of surrendering to another race; "We offer you our best planet, Scantly V, in exchange for peace! What you say, Captain CATS?"
"You have no chance to survive. Make your time."

14. Patch ME to make me stop using Allyourbase quotes.

15. ...hm... nitpicking, but the "appearance" interface could use a little tweak; it remembers the last color you used, not the last color in the category. Having to look around for the exact shade of gray I made my hulls to give it that tiny reddish tint I love so much is only a minor annoyance, but it's an anoyance. A better thing, though, would be to allow Right-click color-capture; say you want to make your ship hull color to be your map color, a right click and a click, and you're set.

16. Carrier modules. Having a large and fast ship ferrying a large fleet of slow but powerful tiny fighters would be great; making the carrier grant a small area of support would be a good way of helping making tiny fighters really useful; you can focus the rest of its "size" for weapons and armor, but if the carrier goes boom, your slow fighters have to return home the slow way and are easy picking. It would be strategically interesting, I think
(A programming nightmare to make the AI to use and counter them right, though...)

x. And finally, thought it probably can't be done by THIS point without a total overhaul of the battle engine, but small suggestion for GalCiv3, actual DOGFIGHT combat; seeing a horde of tiny ships that you built yourself in the editor moving around, avoiding point defense and taking potshots at a large ship until it goes kablooie would be worth the game's price on its own, methinks

Originally posted by CKayote 1)Fix the Neutrality Learning Center! 2)Improve the Minor Race's AI. In GC1, minor races close to me were a threat early in the game. The suck now- Don't attack, don't colonize other planets, and only seem to build resource starbases and ask for tech trades. The Dark Yor and Snathi should be threats matching their descriptions. I'd like to see the Snathi saying "For too long your race has horded all the best nuts. Surrender now or be gnawed to pieces!" and then invade your planets. Espionage should be enabled on them as well. 3)In tech trading, there should a civ-esque option to ask what the AI is willing to trade for something. 4)A button in the "race picks" screen that resets the race stats to their defualts 5)The ability to put a fleet in "sentry" mode. 6)The ability to propose UP issues 7)Something to make use of class 0 planets. Mining, refueling station, sensor outpost, something. 8)Custom MP3 playlists!

This man knows what he is talking about. I suggest you all reread what he's said and make love to his brain, which overflows with brilliant goodness and little debbie cakes.

As was mentioned the Ethic Alignment bonuses need to be tweaked. I was culturally dominating a gigantic galaxy where every single enemy planet within my sphere (more than half the planets in that sphere) was on the verge of insurection. I was Evil and bought the Mind Control Center, waiting for all of them to fall to me... and nothing happened. Very disappointing. And the way the frequency of revolts is calculated should be explained or something somewhere.

PS: Insignia = t3h 4w350m3. tee hee

So you didn't notice that the Mind Control Center gave you a galaxy-wide 100% economy bonus, nearly doubling your taxes?
It's kinda hard to miss.

It's probably the single most overpowered building in the game right now. Should either be doing what the description says or get a new description and a nerfed percentage.

Grats on this excellent game!!

I've read some nice things here, that I would like too;

-The ability to put a fleet in "sentry" mode.

-Slightly more control over the battle sequence. Which ship to target first, different ship formations with bonuses or maybe even kamikaze/running away options.

-the '4 starbase per sector 'rule

-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.

-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.

-The ability to send warnings to enemy races. Such as the 'We see those massed troop transports hovering outside our planets. Do you think we're stupid or something?' they send me now and then.

-A message when an AI declares war on another, for great justice.

-Custom MP3 playlists!

-not being able to see your opponents territory at the start of the game

I fully agree with first poster Tothless. It is the basic way nearly all RTS and turn-based games work, and we (avid strategy gamers) are used to it. As to the person that said dragging is faster: no it is not. Besides, it is counter-intuitive to what we are used to. Then I go back to civ4 and try to click drag like an idiot because I've been doing it for hours on GalCiv2.

Anyway, enough "wishlisting". The game kicks all kinds of ass, I love it, and this update looks absolutely aamazing. Talk about giving us our money's worth! Thank you Stardock.

All I want is simply this: to be able to play the game -even just once- without it completely locking up my computer, forcing me to do a hard reboot. Just that, and I would be happy.

You know what i would love? Defensive anti-invasion modules for a starbase!

Have the starbase able to repel invasions for surrounding planets, but limit that starbase to a few upgrades. That would have the need for an enemy to take out the starbase BEFORE able to capture the planet. Very hard if the starbase is maxed out, so limit the number of additional modules (module "size" points?) or lessen its ability to defend itself. (eg, defensive -30% if installed)

I can't count how many times I walk right by a maxed out fortified starbase of an enemy, and capture a planet thats one tick away without any problems.

Don't forget we need to be able to cancel alliances with minors.... Ran into that problem last night.