I like the lawful/neutral/chaotic alignment aspect

-one thing I'd like to see more of- though it's more of an expansion thing, is political events- EU2-style...

It's the one thing this game is sorely lacking flavorwise.

i knew i'd have a couple more things before i got backing into actually playing.

tourism: i think it's really cool that tourism brings you income, and i totally like not having to micromanage it. i think you could enhance it as a dimension of gameplay. some of what i'm thinking of could also require changes to the way starports work, so i'll start there. starports are all ready obviously very useful, however i've noticed after many conquests i tend to use them less frequently than the AI. the starport isn't where you build your ship, it's where you launch it. in fact. in my mind, it's a structure you'd need to launch or land any ship, including trade vessels. so to start, i don't think you should be able to trade with a planet that doesn't have a starport (or the starport should provide a bonus), and until a planet has a starport i think it shouldn't extend your ships' range.
if you wanted to opt for a bonus, you could also introduce upgrades to the starport that: enable you to build large and huge hull sizes, and turns the hyperion shipyard into a regular upgrade. okay another pet peev, and it might even be unfounded. when i first started playing, you couldn't group ships with different movement values. so i just standardized my ship speeds and haven't checked to see in a while if it's changed. but maybe the hyperion shipyard could be the ultimate starport. or another option, that shipyards should be a separate series of three structures needed to build each capital ship, structures tied to the gateway technologies in the hull size branch of the tech tree. this idea seems most logical and believable to me on that blased level of fictionality. after all, some advanced warp field technology is needed to create capital ships of a military nature, the infrastructural facilities for which have no place in an all-purpose starport (which i suggest you think of as a bay - military shipyards can often be farther inland).
anyway, getting back to tourism, it's something else that should be boosted on each planet by a starport. small vessels should be able to take off and land on a dirt runway or open field, but true commercial liners would need a starport in my mind. tourism for a planet (if it's even on a per planet basis as it is) is based on its cultural IP, which is tied to population. population also affects tax income. lowering taxes should boose tourism, since your population will have more spending money.
i like that i don't have to micromanage my tourism at all, but i'd still like to be able to distrupt it in an enemy by shooting down commericial liners. i don't believe that everyone is doing their tourism on trade lines. so if occassionally private liners left planets and went to other planets, that'd be cool. something extra to shoot down

i think as a matter of strategic depth, you should incorporate the annum into the budget. here's what i mean. in an autocratic government, you can do what you want, when you want. but in any kind of democratic government, you can't. making changes to your spending and tax rate (but not industrial output) should be designated to take place after each election. if you make changes to taxes at another time during the year, it might affect morale differently, say, a 50% detriment to your morale until the next election (of course it'll piss people off if you raise them, but lowering them mid-year would also seem like a cheap and superficial gesture to raise morale, and so only go half-way what it's normally worth until next year).

and my last thing is regarding the art and jewelry expansion that was dicussed. if it's still in the works or even hypothetical, i'd like to add something else: additional planet and star art.
more variety with zero PQ planets would be fun.
solar flares and sunspots would be nice.
more detailed nebulae (think hubble space telescope) would be cool too.
i like that you can customize your engine color, but it's kind of sad that the texture is so simple. i'd love some enhancement (and even some comps that use an inverse color).
if you added the option to set one or both of your hull colors to 'reflective', or a reflectivity slider even, you'd give me problems with my body i haven't had since early puberty.

oh, since we're talking about star art, i don't know about others, but it bugs me that in standard sandbox games, the only stars with habitable planets are yellow except for the occasional purple. i enjoy variety, and i'd like my people to as well. if you might like some tips... off the top of my head i don't know a whole lot about what it means when stars are differnt colors in terms of how they'll affect the planets that orbit them. but i do know about how light affects plants (i'll let you speculate on why), which after micro-organisims have the largest impact on our climate.
-i don't remember exactly why, but green light is least helpful to a planet's growth, which makes sense since they reflect it rather than obsorbing it. green stars should be least likley to have habitable planets at all, and if so only very barren rock planets.
-red light is of marginal use to plants. higher amounts of red light cause most plants to release a hormone that promotes growth of the stalk rather than leaves (get the leaves you do have higher into the air to maximize the amount of light they get). red and orange stars should lend to lower PQ planets.
blue light is most beneficial to plants, i'm guessing because it is higher in energy. it causes them to release a hormone that promotes leaf and flower growth. i'm guessing purple light does even better. purple stars are the "gold", so maybe blue stars could be programmed to have planets PQ 21-25 or so.
-yellow light occurs between red and green. white light is perceived when the light is evenly distributed across the visible spectrum, which means white stars produce more blue light: so while yellow stars can have planets up to PQ15, white stars might go all the way up to 20.
but it's not exactly a life or death issue.

lastly, SETP OPTIONS. i can't believe i forgot this until now. i'm (finally) getting tired of writing though. i'll have to make another post later. i'm gonna play now (imagine that!)

I like the idea of the new combat rules but it will make the DL campaign even harder as your maxed out frieght hull with engines and weapons will be a one shot device now when the DL fires back (actually any hull will be I suppose). The mission where you are restricted to beam weapons only will be next to impossible (as though it's not already) because of the DL getting high shielding reasonably quickly.

I'd like to see an escape opportunity each combat turn based on speed difference. If I have an unarmed scout with 10HP or 1HP it makes no difference at present. If I had an escape opportunnity I could take some damage and run away next combat turn or put defences on my scouts. If my scout has speed 9 and defences why shouldn't it be able to disengage from a light fighter with attack 1 and speed 1? Give it a luck roll that gets higher with difference in speed for instance.

Isn't taking away the first shot advantage going to completely nullify the use of speed though? Sure, you can still make ships fast, but to what purpose? So they can intercept attacking fleets? Why bother? Just put all your ships at home, and put extra armor/shields on them. No need to bother with speed anymore.

I think the first shot advantage is cool, but it's biggest problem is that it's aggregate. You attack, you fire first. Damage is done to your enemy, and he potentially loses ships because of it. Then he gets to fire back, already with lessened firepower. Less damage is done to you, then you get to fire again. By the end of your second set of shots, the enemy is practically helpless.

I think a far better solution would be to to still grant the attacker a bonus, but just a one time bonus. So the first attack could come at a +20% damage, but the enemy can immediately fire back. It's still worth it to attack first, but the aggregate effect is removed, and battles won't be so one sided.

Btw, one feature that I REALLY want to see is orbital defenses. It doesn't really make much sense to me that you can build starbases and outfit them with weapons, but if you want to defend your planet, you have to put ships in orbit. Why can't we have orbital defense platforms? If a civ has the tech to make a starbase, it would have the tech to make an ODP. the ODP could have more weaponry and defenses, be appropriately more expensive, but can ofcourse never move anywhere. It's strictly a defensive base for that planet.

This would also help with the ease of conquest that currently exists. Most attacks on a planet wind up in the attacker taking over the planet, which to me seems a bit spurious. Taking over a planet should be a massive undertaking requiring multiple fleets to be sent in rapid succession. Not five frigates plus one transport et voila, 9 billion people have been subjugated.

Just an idea.

I wanted to just add that I crash on saving sometimes in massive scale games. As I play, after so long an auto or quick save will eventually do me in. However, I am not using a small swap file as mentioned. I have 2GB of physical RAM and a 3.5GB swap file.

Two things I'd like to see :

Firstly, an opportunity to have the latest Up-date Release despatched by CD for a fairly minimal cost. ( I do not wish to afford Broadband, I consider it too insecure.)

Secondly, as a new feature; the ability to scan-into the game an image for use as the "Face" of my race on the Race Selection screen. All automated so that I don't have to worry about the pixel-size and format reqwuired for game compatability.

I also pledge my support to "Dystopic"/#45's ideas, and in general I would be far happier with improvements to the UI aspects of the Game. Multiplayer would be wasted effort for me. If a Galactopeadia would be interactive with the Tech-Tree screen, so that you could find out what Tech-path was needed for specific abilities or improvements, and you could get details of those abilities and improvements by clicking on them, then such a functional item would also command my support, otherwise it would be a waste of effort as it will very likely be expensive in terms of up-dating and version compatability.

I'd like to see some UI fixes too to make the game more fluent to play. Like when selecting and moving ships you don't always know what they're going to do, which ship actually is going to move. Also sometimes when I make a group of ships sometimes the game deselects the whole fleet, sometimes not. Also the rally point window seems to open with a delay. It might open after I close the screen where I pushed that button to set a rally point. Pretty hard to describe all this stuff, but to me it's fairly annoying.

Completely agree with this. Outside of the hassles with ship upgrading, this is the biggest usability problem.

I would still like to see a graphics pack with lots of ship jewellery.

Hopefully you will fix the major problem of trying to save your game...
After playing for a while and you build up somewhat and then try to save your current game it freezes and gives a error that it's out of memmory...
I have 1 gig of memory and shut off all other programs running in the background, including the firewall...
This is not good, after playing for hours you loose your saved game. The save must get corrupted because it don't show up again when you load the game and try to load a saved game.

Any further "imrpovements" or refinements to the single player game are going to be futile for the majority of players outside of residual sales of the game, and those people dont have anything to compare the changes to anyways.

Wow, that's a bit of projecting there.  You must have missed the poll in which only 33% of players would be willing to buy a $20 multiplayer-centric expansion.

 

* A way to diplomaticaly force foreign ships (anything except traders) to respect your borders. (and vice versa). Possibly look at Civ4's bordering system (they finaly got it right).

That would need a complete redesign of the current influence systems. Influence borders are not real borders!

Make with the Multiplayer (multiverse is a joke) to extend the viability of the game much longer, or stop wasting everybodys time (including your own...you could be making a new game instead).

You shouldn't be that egocentric, you know. There lot's of people who still play the game and not really a lot of people who want multiplayer.


Edit:

Note: Your sphere of influence is NOT your territory.

Beaten to the point.

Lol, that's the point of the game: To convince the other that you own the galaxy, hehe.