If you are asking for suggestions, I have one.

It would be nice to redo the planetary build screen to seperate the different types of buildings. For example: have a farms tab, a lab tab, a production tab, a morale tab, a trade good tab, and a super project tab. You could set it up like the Explorer in windows, by having them set up similar to how they are with the most advanced building available showing and a plus sign next to it if you want to expand it and pick a lower building (Because it would be faster to build.) It would be like this:

(-)Farming - Advanced Farming (BC 150)
Farming - Intensive Farming (BC 120)
Farming - Xeno Farming (BC 100)
Farming - Basic Farming (BC 50)
(+)Factory - Industrial Sector (BC 400)
(+)Laboratory - Neutrality Learning Center (BC 300)
(+)Morale - Multimedia Center (BC 100)
(+)Trade Good - Ultra Spices (BC 500)
(+)Super Project - Hyperion Shipyard (BC 1000)

If you want to build the most advanced building, you can do it the way it is currently done. If you want a less advanced building on the planet (such as Xeno Factory instead of Industrial Sector) then you hit the (+) sign and pick the option that you want under that section.

This way the screen would not be cluttered, but you would still have the flexibility to build what you want on the planets. (Especially important once you research Industrial Sector, since now you have to make sure that all of your planets are sufficiently productive before you can even consider researching that tech.)

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.

l

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!)

Galactic Encyclopeadia all the way and then make the dicovery screen pop-up more discrete, something like civ4. In my opinion it kind of disrupts gameplay especially if you have discoveries every 4 turns . Thanks Frogboy and team

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. i like it the way it is.


Sorry about the post with the "I" but i can't remove it. Iwas trying something and reedited but then suddenly i could no longer do 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.

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.

Good stuff. Expanded espionage is the main feature of the expansion pack which is also being worked on. Players will have agents (And counter agents) that they can assign to do bad things to opponents on different planets.

It would be nice to see an expanded UP...

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.

My requests for the next patch;


* A way to upgrade some ships from a fleet/(or ship stack) without having to split it up and send each to a different bit of space just so i can get the 'upgrade button' just place the fracking button in the ship info screen.

* A way to construct from within a fleet/stack. just put the construct button in the detailed ship info screen.

* 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).

* A way to diplomaticaly force foreign military starbases to be dismantled (if in your territory), and to have ownership on non millitary starbases turn over to you if in your territory.

* Make anomelies spawn randomly throughout the galaxy. in my games they are all gone just from flagships.

* encourage the AI to upgrade their flagship to their top-of-the-line ship.

* fix the scaling problem with engines that makes large hulls quicker then small ships.

* New Modules for ships;
- Repair Module, Repairs itself and ships in the stack. (equip one on a attack ship, or several on a dedicated freighter)
- Cloaking module, when immobile for more then a turn, decreases by a % the sensor radius of opposition ships (when looking for the ship).
- Carrier module, allows several small fighters to 'fleet' with the ship without increasing the logistics count.
- Salvage module, after battle, harvests a % of build costs from destroyed ships.
- Scrambler module,(only for small ships) scrambles all attempts to identify the owner of the ship, allowing you to create small pirate like bands to prey on opposition shipping without diplomatic incidents (or war). unless of course their spy level allows them to see the true owner.
- Dummy module, adding this module denotes that this ship and all its components are to be fabricated in cheap plastics, this module will fool any other ships/millitary value into thinking it is the real thing (until they attack). good for misdirection/bluffing.
- Emergency Warp pod, allows the ship (when below 25%) to flee combat.
- Warp dampener, stops any ships from fleeing combat.
- Weapon AI - Capital upgrade, this pod supplements your ships weapons AI increasing their effectiveness against capital ships.
- Weapon AI - Fighter upgrade, this pod supplements your ships weapons AI increasing their effectiveness against small hulled ships.
- Bio Armor, (smaller numbers then normal armor) instead of stopping damage each round of combat this ships armour will regenerate a number of hitpoints.
- Mass Distributer, this energy weapon teleports armor from the target ship to its own hull to help shield it from damage while weakening the target.
- Reflective munitions pod - this pod will absorb a percentage of the incoming attack and return it to them.
- Detention field pod, this ship projects a field slowing all opposition craft. (finaly catch up to those high speed troop transports)


Starbase Upgrades
- Offsite Prisons (increase morale on planets in range, small increase to production)
- Orbital construction yard (repairs ships in the stack)
- Resupply Point (increases the max range of ships nearby)
- Orbital barrier when two starbases are linked with this upgrade they project a beam between each other, denying access past the barrier for all non-trade ships. ships are forced to go around, or destroy the base.
- Immigration Processing Center, drains population from opposition world if nearby, and bestows them on your worlds if nearby.

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.

also wanted to put a thumbs up for orbital defence platforms.

its silly that orbital defence projects take up land.

instead players should be able to construct defence-only modules on their colonised planets. planets with this built could get a ring build around them (ala starship troopers). upgrades like the orbital fleet manager would be built by the planet and placed on this ring. weapons/shields would be placed there by constructors.

this wouls turn your planets into bastions of defence as they should be, and give a much greater benefit to ships stationed defending your planet.

this approach would also allow players to use 'uninhabital' planets as a basis for military starbases (ie 1 constuctor can build a battlestations1 ring on a planet from nothing.).

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.

Before you start thinking too much about "advanced algorithms" for the AI I'd like to suggest and help with making the present one not do anything especially stupid. For example you can learn much about the AI and its (in)effectiveness by playing as galactic arms supplier. Currently this is a very unsatisfying way to play.

In this one game the Terrans (me) were taking on all other civs on Painful with randomized intelligence on a large galaxy with around 50 colonizable planets to go around. As we join the action the Yor were at war with the Altarians and the Torians with the Drengin. Unwisely the Yor had also declared war against me as I was supplying the weaker Altarians with ships. Fast forward the Drengin took out the Torians and I used the Yor for target practice after the Altarians surrendered to me. They hadn't used my ships too well.

It was now the turn of the at time powerful Korx to pick a fight. Unfortunately they soon had all the other civs united in a crusade against them. Though I could gather they wanted peace with everyone pretty soon and managed to cease hostilities now and then, that civ had soon joined the action again mostly because of the Korx' original attack against the Iconians. A forced period of peace after a peace treaty really would seem to be a fine idea. Also the other civs should maybe "forget" the original unprovoked attack of in this case the Korx so they may have a chance to survive. Perhaps good civs could even "feel sorry" at some point for even an evil civ that is being ganged up on by nearly everyone else and help them out. Up to evil civs having a chance of becoming "gooder" as a result of being helped, if the technical implications can be managed.

In any case, the Korx, being at war with all except me and the Thalans, were the perfect specimen for supplying with masses of small but advanced ships. They had two nicely defended planets in one corner at the back of my empire (since I couldn't have possibly rush-colonized any more planets) and about 5 more planets on the other side of it. Suffice to say they were entirely unable to use my ships to defend themselves even though all they'd have to do was a while true { create_biggest_fleet(); attack_closest_target(); } Instead they moved over half of my ships to the two unthreatened planets at the back of my empire (we were best buddies as well) and the rest died in pointless ways at the other undefended and besieged planets. Not long and the Drengin had decided they'd take and use them for their own sinister goals, which was the extermination of their cloest target, the Iconians.

At that time I felt sorry for the Korx and didn't want all the enemy fleets going through my territory, so I paid everyone else to make peace with what was left of the Korx. (As an aside, I never cheated. The game's simply easy.) It was now the time to supply the Iconians in their struggle against my nearest competitor, the mighty Drengin, who went straight up the missile weapon tree and had very powerful ships and the most planets. I decided to switch to building large ships that would be especially deadly against Drengin armadas and with a movement of over 20. Again anything the Iconians would've had to do was point the ships at anything that moves and press Fire, even one-ship-by-one would've made a difference. Instead this is what happened...

There was this one Iconian planet within movement range of the point where I switched the ships over to them, always (as I had been doing all along) at least 5 ships at a time so an immediate fleet could be formed. Even gave them more logistics tech. Next to the planet were two Drenin attack fleets. But instead of bringing terror to the Drengin, and for three times in a row, the Iconians took the ships and moved all of them to the besieged planet. The Drengin didn't dare attack. Reaching the low point, the next turn the Iconians removed all but one ship from the planet and let them sit ungrouped right next to it. The Drengin said thank you and immediately destroyed all the ships one at a time. And it so happened again for two more times.

After the Iconians had fallen I was bored and somewhat disappointed so I made mine and the Drengins military power graph go vertical in opposite directions to ascertain how it should've been done. Didn't finish the game as there was little fun left.

Well that turned out as some story. Hopefully you can use this to make the AI a little smarter. I think I read somewhere that you were thinking of enabling players to make their own AI. I know me and surely many others would certainly look forward to getting our little programmer-hands on that ability.

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

* 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). * A way to diplomaticaly force foreign military starbases to be dismantled (if in your territory), and to have ownership on non millitary starbases turn over to you if in your territory.

I would second these changes

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.

I stopped playing GC2 a while back. Not because its bad...its a great game. But regardless of changes and improvements made, the vast majority of people can only play any single player game, even one with as much "replayability" as GC2, for so long before they move on to other games, and other things. Sorry rabid fanboys.


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.


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).


I give it to you straight, because I love. And I love GC2. A Galactopedia would have been a great feature at release when I was playing the game. But Im certainly not going to pick up a game thats run its course because of its addittion.

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.

 

Note: Your sphere of influence is NOT your territory.

* 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.

Note: Your sphere of influence is NOT your territory.

Says who? After all if I decide that the entire galaxy is my territory then it is a simple matter of confincing anyone else living there that this is so

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

Says who? After all if I decide that the entire galaxy is my territory then it is a simple matter of confincing anyone else living there that this is so

Ok, you've got a point there...