I’ve read through the Dark Avatar posts looking for these thoughts; I could not find them, so please forgive me, if these things have been mentioned before. Here are just a few things that after a lot of thought, would seem to add to the game- These suggestions are listed by there theoretical ease to implement
1) Since it has been determined that the only advantage a ship gets from experience is more hit points- which by the mid game are worthless, because ships attack values far exceed a ships hit points - a bad defensive roll? Your ship is toast. So there needs to be another bonus for achieving higher levels, giving the higher level ships a real value in the mid and end games- Namely weapons efficiency. The easiest idea to implement this would be for every level you go up; your weapons and defense become 1% more effective. This would not add to the ships top damage, but instead add it to the bottom end- i.e. while a rookie ship with 100 attack would do 1-100 points base damage, a level 23 ship would then do 23-100 points damage. This idea should be easy to express mathematically
1a) Also, ships should get more experience from fighting a ship solo, then it should get for being part of a large group. Experience earned should be value of ships killed / by ships that survived
2) Add a new defensive feature: Evade, would basically allow each ship before it makes its defensive roll, to make an evade roll. If it makes its roll, the attack on the ship fails, throw in a few new graphics like the evade ship kicking its engines on full, and then rolls out of the way, and presto! Now we have some cool new things to watch on the combat view screen
Now, please don't misunderstand, the evade roll should not be a generic percentage simply added across the hull spectrum. Tiny hulls should get the biggest bonus, then Small, then Medium up the line. With the Huge hulls getting what would amount to a ceremonial evade chance. You could even throw in a top gun like wonder which would increase the chance to evade.
3) Improved AI. Let’s face it. The computer is the master when it comes to Mathematics. Even the best human in the world can't outperform it in speed or accuracy. And yet the AI on this game can't even build its planets right- Its not uncommon to find Factories on Research squares, and research buildings on Approval tiles all on the same planet. Or my favorite; when I capture a 5pq or less planet only to find all factories with no starport. This should not happen. There should be a set build policy that achieves the desirable outcome, such as percentage of Factories, to research, to Stock Markets, etc.
Or triggers on what to build if a planet has a low PQ score. All factories and no starport on a planet should be a no-no.
4) Improved the AI's defensive/offensive capacity. The AI should know how many of its ships can fall on a square at any given time. If such a system were in place, this would allow the AI to know, that when you end your turn with a fleet worth 27 logistic points into parsec 135,57, where it has 51 logistic points of ships instantly available to strike, it should then compute how much force it needs to win with minimal losses, and then dispatch those ships to do it.
I don't really know how hard 3 and 4 would be to implement- 3 should be the easier then 4 because a planet isn't going to have more then 40 squares to build on. While the size of a universe what? 1000+x1000+? The time for the computer to compute the value of each parsec maybe too time extensive- I don't know. Thou at the risk of offending Stardock and being ostracized, I'd simply suggest that they find some decent experienced Chess programmer who's brain you can pick. After all when it comes to putting values on squares that works, a chess program has gotta be tops. Thanks for reading my ideas.
