I'm always bored at work, and one day I got thinking about things I would change (not necessarily that need changing for game balance, but maybe...).

First off, teach the AI the difference of me declaring war and me fulfilling an alliance obligation. I hate it how the AI keeps getting mad at me because they keep attacking my allies and I keep coming to their aid.

Which brings me to another point... Make the AI a bit more peaceful. I enjoy the periods of the game where I can go through 100 or so turns without SOMEONE being at war. This makes alliances more viable too, because as I said above, I'm not constantly in war due to my alliances. Sometimes it's fun to just rack up the BCs and improve my planets.

Also, give us control over which random events happen. I just recently discovered the joy of setting habitable planets to it's lowest setting, so everyone starts with like 2 or 3 planets and that's it till they start conquering. It pisses me off when suddenly they "discover" that precursor artifact that makes a ton of planets habitable and suddenly one race would win a culture victory (if I ever actually used that setting).

And while we are on the subject of random events, I have noticed that I never get precursor rangers, corvettes yes, but not rangers. I also have noticed that I never get the precursor planet quality booster (or even the above planets booster)or the manu/research/econ booster. I also noticed that I'm always the one with the disgruntled employee that shoots my ally at a conference (which breaks a team setting btw). Why don't these ever happen to other civs? (Or is it just bad luck on my part?).





Now, onto my ideas and away from semi-fixes.

Giving us the ability to train different kinds of soldiers would be cool. If I were actually leading my civ, I wouldn't just throw weapons at my citizens with no training (as far as I can tell) and send them off. I guess stardock did this to reduce micromanagement or something, but seriously, I have never understood why a civ would do this. A militia is cool, if a planet has no troops on it, the citizens would band together to defend, but they wouldn't be as powerful as trained troops.

Also, it would be nice if I didn't commit genocide everytime I invaded. The only MOO game I've played was MOO3 (from what I've heard I picked the wrong one) and they had a cool demographic thing that showed you how many of each race was living on your planet. You could even make a captured race slaves which would decrease their life span and give that planet a boost to manufacturing, but they would still show up on the demographic. That was pretty cool I thought.

Also, it would be cool if you could sorta make your own UP. Kinda like a NATO alliance. You could invite other civs into it, and it would function in a similar way to the UP, only all races would be allied with each other. The UP would be purely diplomatic, as is the UN, and would encompass everyone who didn't leave. These Civ made organizations would be more militarized in nature but still have some minor diplomatic decisions that it would make, but that wouldn't conflict with the UP laws.

Also, as for the UP, give the player a more active role. Allow individual civs to propse bills, including the player. It seems like I see the same bills right now over and over, and they could easily be classified into various catagories and sub-catagories for easy finding.

Also, although I probably won't expect to see this in DA due to the complexity of it, another thing in MOO3 that I liked was the ability to attack other civs ships and planets without declaring war. While this may seem retarded at first look, think perhaps about all those influence bases built around your planets, would it not be understandable that the "defending" civ might want them removed? Or say a you don't want a scout where it is (this is a tougher argument since there are not territory's perse). But in the above situations, you don't want to get into a prolonged war with the offender, just a slap on the rump to teach them a lesson without going to a full out fistfight. This happens all the time in the real world, is space really going to be that much different that war will ALWAYS be declared in conflicts? This could get complicated enough for the AI that I dont expect to see this anytime soon.

Another idea is raiding.  Give us the option of destroying or raiding starbases and cargo vessels.  Each starbase or vessel can only be raided once per turn however, so we don't have something get raided 10 times in one turn.  Raiding would net the raider bcs and would subtract bcs from the defending civ's income.  I think it might be difficult to specify more than bcs tha get raided, but if the devs want to, perhaps try to fit something in like if you successfully raid a military starbase then it increases the raiding ships hps or something.  So I guess just think about in addition to or instead of just bcs, give the raiding civ/unit a bonus depending on what is being raided.  Or just do bcs.  But right now, pirates seem to be more outlaws or mass murderers rather than actual pirates, seeing as how they don't recieve any benefits currently from what they do.

I would like to see both planetary bombardment but I won't go into that cause there are enough threads about that imo. Multiplayer (hotseat is all I want) would be nice too, but like planetary bombardment, I won't go into it cause I understand why it's not viable for DA. I'll prolly add more later as more comes to me.