new intermediate map sizes would be nice too

Large and Huge would be nice

Yeah that would be nice would like a 10x10 map myself.

The OP had great ideas and so did the rest of the posters too. Devs please check this one carefully! My additions:

- Option to choose rally points for planets in civilization manager/colonies screen.

- Yes the constructor star base influence zone could be tad brighter

Please do consider all the ship yard improvement suggestions. When choosing a component, tell us what it is. Option to remove older techs in ship yard would be nice too. I mean, how often you do install old tech on your ships?

On that note, one could *consider* an "auto-upgrade" function for ship parts much like the auto-upgrade function in the planet building screen. WarpII becomes WarpIII if turned on, and the ship is saved under a new numeral. (Eg Armored Fist I becomes Armored Fist II.)
If implemented, this could HUGELY improve the AI's shipbuilding, which, as we now know, is currently done only once per year. If the auto-upgrade algorithms can be modest, this might help both human players and AI.

AI: The AI doesnt use its military resources well enough. Playing against Gifted or Genius AI, hence those that have more resources in general than I, I am usually behind in tech and producing power. The AI's military is almost always better, and when, for example, the Drengi inevitably declare war on me, they fall, although they really COULD "crush me like a bug". Concrete suggestions include:
- Make the AI value invading planets more
- Make the AI get short- or mid-term plans to do so; that is, pick an enemy planet, get an armed escort to guide a troop transport to that planet *behind* a conquering fleet of butch ships.
- Make the AI be more aggressive in attacking my ships within its range. (I OFTEN see one of my undefended constructors, which I now simply set to autopilot without worry, pass within 2 or 3 squares of an enemy ship or even planet with enemy ships on them, but I have yet to be attacked.)

AI: The AI still builds planets horribly. There is, unfortunately, no way to attach screenshots to this forum that I can see (am I missing something?), but I have screenshots of truly sad, sad planetary improvement placement. I have no concrete suggestions to improving this, but if you can, please try.

I: The AI still builds planets horribly. There is, unfortunately, no way to attach screenshots to this forum that I can see (am I missing something?), but I have screenshots of truly sad, sad planetary improvement placement. I have no concrete suggestions to improving this, but if you can, please try.

just upload your images to a hosting site like Imageshack or Photobucket and then click the Image button at the top of the posting box and put the link of your picture in it.

even though I only have the demo atm and going to get the full game on my B-Day on June 2nd, I do have one gripe I'd like to put here.

the turn button is TOO close to the minimap because if you try to click the bottom corner area of the minimap you can very easily accidentially hit the turn button. so, I dunno, move the turn button over a little bit on the interface? moving it a quarter inch or something won't affect gameplay since its easier to press enter anyway and it will ease that tendency.

A few tidbits:

1> A way to launch multiple ships from the ship yard. EX: click on ship and it highlights, click another ship and now there are 2 ships highlighted... hit launch and all highlighted ships launch. This is similar to how ships in a stack behave. Best of all the bug with 2 lines of ships in the shipyard wouldn't have to be fixed: click a ship in the top row and then click a ship in the bottom row, the ship in the top row remains highlighted (works the other way too).

2> not sure how this would work in gameplay (as in not sure if it would be fun or anoying, your call) but sometimes I wish I could choose to watch a fleet battle when my fleet engages a nonfleet (set to only show fleet battles when both sides are fleets) as well as choose to not watch a fleet battle if my fleet engages another fleet. This wouldn't be as much of a deal though if it didn't take FOREVER to load the fleet battle screen sometimes ( P2 2.66 GHZ, 1 gig ram, plenty of swapspace).

3> ability to customize hotkeys (maybe in an xml file?) This mostly comes from the fact that I have yet to figure out how to rotate the map (or is it even possible, could have swore I saw it done in the tutorial movie). I think it's 'cause the middle mouse button on my mouse has never quite worked right (some games responded to it, most don't).

In order to make the "survey" module more valuable (currently, there is a wonder which allows you to get them for free, but this isnt much use once one gets the tech), Anomolies should be objects which appear randomly in the galaxy during the course of the game (instead of at the beginning). Perhaps there are two or three only in a medium sized galaxy at game's begin if they are set to fairly frequent, but at that setting, one could appear in a random empty parsec once every second or third week.

alrighty i'll place my thingy's in here than.

1: being able to call in allies during war, same way we do right at the start of a war were your ally automaticly declares on your enemy. (enemy should also be able to ask my during a war, if i ignore he'll break the alliance).

2: don't have allies automaticly declare on your enemy's in your defens at the start of the war, i want to have the choice of having allies help me or crush the enemy myself.

3: being able to create teams to have custom situtations like 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 5 or whatever you want. or 2 vs 2 vs 3 vs 2.
were you cannot ally with people from another team, everything is done by your team. so in this mode the research victory should be off (unless the techtree is somewhat modified that it takes 3 alliances to research 1 tech and still takes 50 weeks to research so that its still a team victory).
influence victory should be off and diplomatic victory to.

4: one thing, but it might not be possible, is that the game will continou after you win.
so that people that were your ally, will also be your ally in the next game and your enemy's still don't like you if you declared war on them.
if you defeated somebody that declared on you relations shouldn't be hurt to much.
so if you were very strong in the first game but are weak in the second you better watch out and hope you didn't abuse your power in the first game to much.
kinda like a custom campain but with no preset scenario's.
this can be combined with option 3, cause this could result in having to fight several coalition battles over and over again .
oh yea, being able to form coalitions would be nice, ofcourse the IA should counter this and form its own coalition

what do you all think, and what are the changes mods will even see this post and the changes that it might actually implented?

thank you

What if you could simply pay some money to upgrade a starbase without having to senda new constructor every time you want a new module?
I dont like that unnecassary micro if i want to upgrade my 5+ bases with a new module after i reearched the tech for it.

Why not make it like one of the folowing ideas:
1) you have to pay 150 bc for a new module
then a little freighter would start from the nearest planet
once it reaches the base, it will get upgraded


2) You pay the money and the starbase will be upgraded like a ship
set to 1hp and after 1-4 weeks the new module will be functional

3) you can add more than one constructor module on a ship

4) constructors are no more "shoot and forget".
constructors work like in space empires 4
so they work like a moveable spaceyard.
they can use lets say 10bc/ round/ number of constructors to build new bases ( a bases would then cost lets say 200bc)

I m sure there are many other intersting ways make uprgading many bases more comfortable.
When reponding to this thread plz keep in mind that these numbers are numbers i just came up with and would mostly likly have to be changed

I'd like to see the teams feature be improved, so that you can set up two or more permanent teams. You can have the player's team, and then any number of ai teams, and the player can put in however many ai races he wants into his team, as well as the other teams.

Perhaps even set it so that all the races in each team are close or allied to all the other races in their team, and perhaps even have an option to have all races in a team permanently allied and where no race can attack another race that is on the same team as it is.

@Chip56: Although the idea might be nice, there is no way such things can be implemented in a next patch. Let's try to keep things realistic!

@ onomastikon

yeah i know it is not realistic for the next patch.
However it would be very nice for 1.3 or if thats not possible either I would like in 1.4.

One more: I've noticed that with tech trading off, the game is more challenging for me. While I can beat "genius" AI fairly smoothly with tech trading, I find "gifted" difficult with it disabled.
Perhaps it would be possible for the higher AI levels (gifted and above) to treat HUMAN PLAYER tech deals as increasingly smaller increments -- e.g., gifted might see a human deal at (default) 3/5's of its actual value, and an impossible AI at 1/7th of its actual value, or something like that. This could be more interesting for those of us who would like to play with tech trading on now and then.

I have posted this elsewhere but I guess this would be the best place for it to be added.
What about changing the metaverse. If you eliminate saving then everyone has to play all their games through. Example you login and start a game it sends an autosave to the metaverse, every 10 turns it chagnes the autosave, then when you logoff it changes the autosave (keeping the game current). The idea is you start a game you have to finish it. Everytime you go to the metaverse and click play it starts your last game until you finish it.

Perhaps it might be prudent to either remove or have a check-box option to remove "precursor"-level planet bonuses on planets. When I get a planet with a 700% bonus to anything, I almost feel like it is cheating. It is just too random.

1) When you sort your colonies by which ever criteria you want and go to a particulary planet, the next/previous button should cycle through the colonies the way you have sorted them. For example if I have sorted the colonies by population size then this selecting 'next' should give me the planet with the next highest pop and 'previous' give the next lowest pop.

2) An ability to remove an individual upgrade for all colonies, via a global screen. This will also stop all upgrades of that particular facilty currently in production on all colonies. For example if I have researched Manufacturing Factories (so I can upgrade starbases further) and I dont want the colonies to upgrade, a click in a check box for all colonies and should stop future and current upgrades of this facility. Currently you can stop ALL upgrades by instructing each planets governor. Very time consuming if you have over 100 planets.

Random anamolies are a great idea onomastikon! In my opinion, anamolies should be a continuous occurance and should appear throughout the duration of gameplay, never allowing a loss in that element of fun because you run out of static anamolies to find. In fact it could be a game option: Static anamolies vs. continuous occurance anamolies. Also: Wormhole Levels: Tons, Many, Moderate, Light, Rare

Here's my 1.2 cents (maybe some good ideas for 1.3-4):

The Nature of Wormholes: Wormholes by nature and in my humble opinion should appear and disappear randomly and shift end locations constantly. There should not naturally be stable wormholes. Wormholes are also two way road (allowing enemy civs to instantly gain access to you just as you have access to them) unless technology specifically dictates otherwise.

Wormhole Tech Research
------------------------------------

1.) Wormhole Probes- Off of the "Sensor" tech tree. With the ability to be built into a ship design, A menu will pop-up when a player directs a ship equipped with these probes into a wormhole; the menu will ask the player whether they want to launch a wormhole probe, or enter the wormhole (with the ship). If they choose the "Launch A Probe" option, the Wormhole probe will go through the wormhole and relay back map data about the immediate area on the other side. Great for scouts that you are not looking to dispose of to an enemy civ.

2.) Wormhole Braces- A very high technology that allows a player to "lock down" the location of a wormhole. Since there are two ends to every tunnel, to "lock down" a wormhole with a set start and finish location will require two specialized constructor class ships with "braces" built into the design. Consider that having a wormhole locked down on your end, but without a brace on the other end will allow the other end to "flux" to different locations on the map--allowing you to explore random distance parts of the galaxy, but leaving you vulnerable to attack if the wormhole fluxes into enemy territory.

3.) Tacheyon Flow Control Modules (TFCMs)- Like starbases, braces can be updated with certain techs by (ordinary) constructors. Tacheyon Flow Modules allow you to control the direction of traffic in your braced wormhole. You need one on either end of the hole in order to gain complete directional control. You can even toll alien ships to use your wormhole.

4.) Wormhole Brace Defenses- Braces can be destroyed by enemy ships, so braces need defenses (similar to starbases). A unique defense: if the TFCMs are installed could be "Hypersuck" where entire fleets could be sucked in from beyond the ordinary event horizon through some wierd scientific terminology involving a massive concentration of inverse tacheyons or whatever. These fleets could then be crushed against the tube wall or something. Yeah I'm tired--the Trekkie part of my brain just fell asleep.

If this is too much for 1.2, then perhaps you guys can remember this post in this thread and refer the devs back to it later. I think these ideas would rock the boat later as they add a whole new element of strategy to the game.

>Still need to fix the turn after loading the game bug, it seems as though planets still do not produce anything the turn after you load a saved game.

Please, please, PLEASE, yes. I'm certain I run into this bug during my gameplay, and since I both play in 30 minute sessions and like using the biggest maps possible, it's not uncommon for me to get through 1-3 turns before doing a save/quit. Losing all research and production the next turn is a serious pain in the rear.

1) When you sort your colonies by which ever criteria you want and go to a particulary planet, the next/previous button should cycle through the colonies the way you have sorted them. For example if I have sorted the colonies by population size then this selecting 'next' should give me the planet with the next highest pop and 'previous' give the next lowest pop.

Oh, yes, brilliant. Why didnt I think of that?

I think this is a great game; however ...

I would like to see the Fleet Combat changed to allow me to choose the order in which my ships fire, and the order in which I attack the enemy ships. I don't like the AI deciding how I attack.

Display two lists (mine and enemy) of the ships with their attack, defense, hit points, etc. and allow me to select the order in which my ships fire upon the enemy. Also, allow me to select the order of enemy ships to attack (which one to attack first, second, third, etc.).

I would make this optional with a button within the Fleet Combat screen to select whether the AI should control my ships, or whether I will control my ships so I can go either way for each battle. That is, do not make it one way or the other for the entire game. Some battles are more important or critical than others, and it is the critical ones I really want to control.

1)
a second quick save slot.
There is nothing more annoying than this:
strg-s crash to desktop a corrupted quicksave last autosave 45min ago

2)
a button to hide obsolute weapons/ engines/ defenses in the shipbuilder