WARNING: you opened pandora's box. you may just want to print this and set it aside. then again, maybe not.
expanded espionage and united planet options! expanded espionage and united planet options!
heh, but yeah, a galactic encylopedea would be nice. a word of caution though: i've seen you good folks get lightly flamed (seared) over the manual being out of date. if you put the effort into making a galacticopedea, i think it's going to be something you also need to keep up to date.
i have a hard time knowing what things i'd like in the game are realistic and what are pipedreams, since i'm not a programmer, let alone aware of how you programmed GC2. i'm guessing there isn't much chance of ever seeing tactical combat until GC3, so i'll put that one on the shelf. i might not be a programmer, but i'm not an idiot: i'm guessing the largest challenge about adding new features to the gameplay is programming AI to support it. i'm not a fascist: these are ideas. i think you've made a real gem of a game, and heck, personally i'd probably be willing to pay a monthly membership fee to help insure this game turns into everything it can be, not to mention balancing and QA. that said, i've put my major ideas in front, and in the miscelleneous section you'll find things that i think are probably easier to address.
ship design UI: i think you could add a few things to the ship designer to make it a lot easier to get more out of it. i haven't tried moving some designs into a sub-folder and seeing how the game handles it because i'm assuming it'd "lose" those designs. however,
i think it'd be cool if you could organize ship designs into different folders it would streamline managing them. maybe nothing built-in, but just the ability for the player to do this. i also think
it'd be nice to "shave off" the technology associated with a ship design (including requisite miniturization) in order to create a 'base design' (hull + jewelry). i usually don't sit down to spend 2 hours building a new ship until later in the game, but then i'm really depressed next game when i want to build it again but have chosen different weapons.
combat: would it be too difficult to add a few more options to combat? i'm thinking targetting options, at least. i'd like to be able to tell some of my ships to prioritize targetting certain enemies. i don't need my capital ships wasting their firepower to take out fighters (not necessarily anyway) - my fighters' relatively modest firepower should be spent taking out enemy fighters.
i'd like it if there were a second tab in the ship design window allowing you to manage your ships' behavior in combat (but something you can change after the ship has been built rather than having to decide when you design the ship). you select your ship design and order it to prefer targetting enemy ships with the most or least: hit points, total defense, shileds, armor, point defense, total offense, beams, drivers or missiles. if you wanted to get really complex, you could even do a primary and secondary priority and check boxes to include different types of non-combat vessels (transports being top of the list in my mind).
with these changes, i think you could also further refine the "who fires when" paradigm. someone else suggested initiative, but i think an opening "initiative roll" would be better: 1d20 + ship speed - logistical value determines firing order (ties are broken by re-rolls). further refine the system by accounting for damage delay: beams always damage same turn; drivers always have a 1 turn delay (i.e., the next ship fires, and then the bullet does its damage); missiles have a 1-3 turn delay. now that would be a combat system i could get into! maybe make "enable advanced combat" an option so people who don't want to deal with the extra dimension and system resource burden don't have to.
minor civs: it kind bugs me that i can't spy on minor civs. it also bugs me that they're basically fodder for the take-over. sometimes i'd prefer to keep them around. they can boost trade significantly. why not just bring them more fully into the fold, so the speak? allow them in the UP, allow them to forge alliances, etc. some of the suggestions i make in further sections have to do with more fully bringing in and balancing minor civs.
espionage: for as much as i love GC2, i have to say that i've never played a TBS with such a simplistic espionage model. don't get me wrong, i like simplicity when it comes to being able to understand what's going on and decide what to do. but "dump X billion credits into it and forget about it" seems, well, almost like a cop-out. i definately feel
espionage should be an aspect of the game that requires continual expense to remain useful. i think it'd be a lot better if, once you reached the advanced level, a number or espionage projects became available: steal tech, steal military designs (allowing you to build the ships they've designed w/o needing the techs required), incite dissent (decreases morale and loyalty), terror tactics (destroys random structures), and counter-espionage (your spending on this is subtracted against their overall spending on espionage against you - and yes, if it goes high enough, their levels of espionage on you will go down).you could check boxes for the projects that'd activate sliders for how much of your spending on that empire goes toward what projects. that all falls under "dagger"; if you really wanted to be stellar (bad pun, sorry), you could even throw in a "cloak" section, affecting how willing you are to have your agents' activities be tracable back to you and modifying the "cost" of the project. if you get caught too often, it dings your diplomatic relations.
united planets, diplomatic relations, and ethical AI behavior: what i said about espionage being overly simplistic also applies to the united planets. i'd really just like a couple changes here though. a couple votes might work better as two-stage: whether to make a change, and how much of a change to make. i'd really like to be able to contact civs and influence their vote before casting the final vote. i'd also like some mechanism in place that actually affects what options are voted on. for one, it kind of bugs me that the "volcanic activity" thing comes up as a regular vote option; it seems like that should be a random event that calls for an emergency vote. this is one thing i think MOO3 actually did better, but so did Alpha Centaurai.
from start to end, here's what i'd like. when the 'coucil meets next week' popup comes, the game determines who's turn it is to make a proposal, which rotatese between all members. different proposals are available depending on different technologies, including ethcially specific ones that only good, neutral and evil civs can propose. the civ who's turn it is picks the week before, giving everyone a chance to try and influence each other's votes.
to distance this model from other, similar ones, there is also a security council consisting of the three good, neutral and evil civs with the most votes (which could be, if it isn't all ready, a product of population and diplomatic bonus). members of the security council have the option to veto any proposal, but they can be bribed just like any one else (though, it should be harder to bribe good civs, and evil civs should be more prone to breaking UP laws which results in negatives on their diplomatic relations with neutral and good civs).
i'd also like to see good civs be less likely to go to war and more likely to pursue alternative methods, like sanctions. i think the good civs should also be more likely to defend minor civs from being crushed. overall i think you could do more with the ethical alignment as it relates to AI. for one thing, i miss the old ethical slider from GC1, but given how the AI works in 2, i can see why you don't have it. i think you could do more than just good/neutral/evil.
again, i think you could do it D&D style, adding a second dimension to ethical behavior that addresses how strictly the AI follows its dogma (though unlike D&D, this is strictly related to behavior, not an alignment unto itself... though, i don't see why it shouldn't affect diplomatic relations as well... i know i'd be at least a little more willing to deal with an 'honorable' evil civ). i think it could do a lot to enhance different races' personalities. it's not a measure of how good or evil a civ is. all good civs should want to protect the weak and promote peace, evil civs should want to conquor and destroy, and neutral civs should probably be giving in return what they get. warmongering should always have a negative impact in your relations with good civs, and they should never go to war with you simply for having a weak military (though, if you're evil yourself, they won't come to your defense). however, a 'choatic' good civ will be more likey to jump to war to achieve its ends, whereas a 'lawful' good civ will use diplolmacy and economic sanctions first; and some civs are more pragmatic. with up to 9 opponents, it works out perfectly....
the pragmatic (PN) terrans and areans, who whole generally honorable, understand the reality of 'action and consequence';
the centrist (LN) thalans, who adhere to a strict philosophy of moderation and non-partisanship;
the opportunistic (CN) iconians, whose reality dictates ultimate flexibility;
the philanthropic (PG) torians, who care more about being good and their own spiritual development than necessarily enacting good in the universe;
the idealistic (LG) drath, who adhere to a strict moral code constantly, making them defenders of the weak, but also more reactionary in military nature;
the zealous (CG) altarians, who missing the forrest for the trees, are more likely to punish you for a few evil deeds while taking up "necessary" evils like war;
the tyrannical (LE) drengin, doing everything in their power to sew destruction and oppression, including forge alliances with other evil civs;
the genocidal (PE) yor, who want nothing more than their own domination, even if it means allying with you in the short term to helping to take down another evil civ;
and the criminal (CE) korx, who'll offer to help you fend off any enemy, but only so they can extort more cash and a couple worlds from you afterwards since all their ships are in the area.
...well, it'd be perfect except for the fact that as it is the 'consistency' of your choices affects your G/N/E aligntment, not your L/P/C. so here's an interesting way to reinvent ethics in other respects. the ethical issue events could now affect both. the decision itself as G/N/E will still affect your G/N/E rating. but the decision is also made in relation to your current ethical alignment. it's either consistent (L), irregular (P) which for a neutral civ includes both good and evil choices, or it's opposed (C). this expanded ethical system would mostly influence AI, and you might not feel that my particular choices for each race are appropriate for the alignments. i guess that'd be the advantage of sliders.
but along those lines, i'd think a bit more scaling in the +/- system for diplomatic relations. i definately don't know how it's calculated now. but for going bigger, my intuition would tell me a factorial curve would be easiest. in other words, if it takes x trade or military weakness or whatever to get one + or -, it would take a total value of 3x for 2 +/-'s (2x more to get the second plus), a total 6x for 3 +/-'s, and 10x if you wanted to go all the way up/down to 4. that means it'd not be too difficult to do a lot of small things to improve relations or fall behind overall, but you'd have to put massive resources into a single player to max out. in certain sets of relations, i think the multipliers need to be reversed. when a good civ considers an evil civ's military, strength should hurt relations, whereas weakness might improve it overall.
you've all ready done amazing things with the AI. this i guess is food for thought to make it seem and play like it's more insightful, for lack of a better term.
high end beam weapons: okay, unless there's a need to take two steps back in beam weapon research to take the final step forward to the plasma canon,
fix the subspace blaste and annihilator! the art and all the programming values make me thing they should come before disruptors, which also makes some sense given how damaging they are against federation, i mean terran aliance ships. but they come after disruptors in the tech tree. so i moved them, and adjusted the numbers accordingly. i also renamed and moved the ship component to annihilator, and moved the starbase component's requsite tech to blasters. indicentally, the lack of art for the doom ray kinda bugs me. i rewrote my file for laser 5 - at least that one's haughty enough to pass as a doom ray in my mind. yes, the game is mod-able enough that i've fixed that stuff to my liking myself. i just don't want to have to re-fix it every time the game patches.
miscelleneous stuff
i'd like you to program a 'scale' into the functional ship components that would allow you to determine how many actual functional components are in there, including zero. in other words, it'd allow you to control the number of components appearing on your ship without influencing more than appearance (including the number of shots fired). finding space for 13 death rays can be tedious, and kind of sad when i only want 2-4 beams to show up in combat.
i'd like it if sensors played a bigger role in combat. off the top of my head, and in lieu of the coming changes to combat, i think it'd be cool if an attacking fleet got a free round of attacks if and only if was not visible to the attacked player and the end if her/his/its turn. that'd pave the way for cloaking and line of sight as an issue with sensor radius...
and why are sensors scaled to ship size? i guess there's something to be said for their strategic value, and that you should have to pay more to have them on big ships. but weapon scaling too. i understand why engines, defenses and life support should need to be scaled to hull size. but why weapons? or put it this way, if they scale, why doesn't the damage scale alongside size requirement? and cost for that matter. there are good reasons to keep things the way they are for balancing, but i'm hoping you're familiar with the term 'meta-gaming' because i think this is similar. scaling damage to size makes fictional sense, and to offset the advantage potential offered with large hulls, introduce "to-hit" modifiers based on size a-la D&D.
that also opens up the door for an expanded series of components. a series of components to boost a ship's HP would ROCK. i'd see it tied to the 'gateway' technologies needed to build new hull sizes. rename the ECM part of the missile defense tree, and make ECM a comp purley used to dodge. targeting computers boost to-hit. multiplex tracking computers allows the ship multiple targets, estimating how many volleys to fire at enemies when using drivers and missiles (which as mentioned have a delay in my imaginary universe). if scaling for weapons on hull size is to be kept, add auxillary mount options so appropriately outfitted capital ships can defend againt fighters and still assault larger enemies ships at once.
there's also a smallish issue i have with scaling and logistics. the logicistic issue is simple enough: i'd like a capital ship with an odd-numbered logistical value. if you have an odd logisitcal bonus, it's currently impossible to build fleets using your full value without using at least one small sized ship or cargo ship. if the capital ships logistical and appropriate HP and space were {medium, 4; large, 7; huge, 10} i'd be happier. it's just a pet peev, i don't know why. yes i do: i don't like having my options that limited; in some games i'd prefer fleets composed of only capital ships.
but you could also get a lot more elaborate. during the early testing i read something asking for fighters in this game. well, the tiny hulls are basically fighters. i'd really love figher bays. here's how i'd imagine it (i'm thinking of it as it the suggested changes to combat i made above were also implemented). to start, reduce tiny and small logistic/HP/space to 1 and 2 respectively, and add a fighter bay component or series of components. this is intended to make it hard to build tiny ships that can go very fast or do very much, though you should still be able to fit a component or two on early in the game. the fighter bay adds the carrier ability to ships, which creates a logistical pokcet, like the once for ships in orbit around a planet (which, by the way, i don't think should have a limit). players could load tiny (i don't know about small) ships in these pockets, and they would not count against fleet logistical value. the tradeoff of course is space for weapons, defenses and other components.
so, is that enough for two expansions?
i almost thought that was it, but i remembered,
streamline starbase construction. honestly, i don't even really care how you do it. it's just a huge pain, and a huge delay in military production for something so important.
if i had unlimited time, money, energy and knowledge, i'd do all of this and give it to the world on a silver platter. actually, i'd probably wait until i was bored playing the game as it is. well, if i had unlimited money i'd probably just buy stardock and assume partial creative control of GalCiv, not to mention drop wads of cash into its development. not that i'd be a hard@$$ boss or anything
but at least i can give my ideas for free.
think of my mind as a buffet: take what you want, and don't ask about what happens to the rest.
