No more window dressing!

The support is great compared to what happened to MOO3. After playing GalCiv2 I've been wanting to fire up M003 just to see how it feels compared to GalCiv2.

Yeah

We neet anomalies to respawn because actually when the technology is available there are no anomaly left.

I would like aslo to see more improvement about AI and the way the events occurs.

I think the kind of thing you're asking for is the kind of thing you should pay again for. Like, what they're doing now is like coming over to the house they built for you and putting in carpet, changing the doorknobs and stuff -- sort of upgrading the same house, like they decided for what you paid them you really deserve a better house now that they have the upgraded platinum toilet bowls available. But if you want a shed and a pool put in, well, first they have to go back to blueprint stage and then they have to reroute some pipes, so it's like a whole new project.

Like when Civ releases a patch, it's to make the settler functions work better, but if you want new units, you have to pay for an expansion. This is real-time patching.

I don't think respawning anomalies, more ship parts, and new, more interesting star systems require an expansion pack. Star systems, maybe; I'd love to see some binary stars (binary stars, or stars that orbit around each other, like a pair of dancers, are actually more common than lone stars, like our own Sol), and I would understand if that would take some extra coding.

Respawning anomalies need to come in. Or, not necessarily respawn like ammo does in an FPS (same object in the same place), but rather anomalies randomly appearing. Even in a gigantic map, I would reckon that by the time you can build survey ships, all of the anomalies are either gone or are too far to be reached by yourself before another race gets to it.

Well building survey ships isn't really all that technology-intensive, provided you build your own designs with survey modules rather than getting all the techs to build the core survey ship. All it takes is Sensors I, which isn't all that hard to get, and on a big map with enough anomalies, researching up to sensors I and impulse drive or so and building a few survey ships can power massive deficit spending for quite a while with all the cash anomalies you'll get, not to mention ability bonuses.

Edit: I realize that that was totally off from the original subject of the thread, so I'll add that I think some of the UI improvements do greatly improve quality of gameplay and are more than window dressing, and that the 1.1 and presumably 1.2 patches have been improving the AI a good deal as well. I consider this a lot more important than new features or anything, because personally what will keep me replaying the game is a removal of all the little annoyances (like auto-focus) and a consistent challenge from the AI, preferably without having to push the difficulty all the way up to the top level where it gets absolutely ridiculous bonuses.

Chop off your arm. It's guaranteed Improvement. Chop off the left arm as well for the "happy fun multiplier" UI version.

I would be surprised if the free updates added expensive features.

But they have added some definitively non-window dressing features. 1.1 changed the economics pretty completely. 1.2 has a new combat system.