3 Things You Would Like Added Since DA Is Released

Watuciswatugets

Join Date 12/2006

3 Things You Would Like Added Since DA Is Released

First want to say that for an Expansion DA exceeded my expectations. I base this on past history of buying expansion packs and comparing what was offered to the DA expansion pack. DA kicks some serious butt in this category with all the improvements in graphics, additions, and overall game play.

That being said... as with anything there is room for improvement. Everyone has an opinion based on their style of game play on what features they would like enhanced or added. I play on huge maps at the painful level so these comments are based on that type of game.

The 3 things I would like to see in future additions would be:

1.) Improved Land Based Combat. -

A.) Please at the very least upgrade those cheesy graphics in future updates. I feel like I am in a time warp back to the early 90's when I see the land based combat. Hell just put on a rockem sockem robots commercial (am I showing my age) in its place for entertainment value.

B.) The combat is overly simplistic and there is so much that could be added to enhance it. Separate out soldiers from the regular population base so that you can have more alignment specific choices. If you opt for a genocidal victory there should be some serious evil/influence alignment penalties along with degradation of the planet's quality or industry base. If you are good and keep the civilian population then you might have a more intact planet after conquest but be subjected to revolts, poor morale or other types of issue. Your influence might grow however as other races see you as a more benevolent dictator rather than some genocidal maniac. Again these are just ideas to show the possibilities. As it stands I go from attack to skip as fast as I can. After the first couple of combats does anyone actually sit there and watch the display? Come on be honest now!!

2.) Improved spying. This is overly simplistic and needs a little depth. Its going in the right direction just needs more enhancements. Give your spy's more to do. Perhaps even start giving them experience based on how long they are on the job without getting caught. Lots of things can be done just think that currently its a little barebones.

3.) Improved AI - There are quite a few area's in this category so I will limit myself to one that is a pet peeve.

Planet Development.

I think the AI is smoking crack when I see what they are building. I use this as an excuse for my good alignment to justify the genocide portion of the game. Better dead then a planet full of junkies!! The AI will have a technological capital on a PQ6 planet with only 1 lab 2 factories and a starbase and an embassy

In most cases it will ignore bonus tiles building random improvements on them. The AI will then leave a PQ20 planet relatively undeveloped after sinking recourses into developing the more useless planets. I am not sure how it formulates what to construct but I think that a balanced template should be implemented so that each AI planet gets a priority list of things to build initially then let it muddle things around the best it can later on.

On the smaller PQ planets I would build factory/market/entertainment center/basic farming. In this way even the smallest planets would be self sustaining and offer moderate defense with respect to having a higher population that could thwart a transport or two depending on your soldiering ability. The factory I usually upgrade to something else farther down the line (market perhaps for a higher positive cash flow) but I would not expect the AI to be that advanced. After these 4 items then let the AI kick in with whatever madness it does.

I would limit the population centers the AI builds so that the typical 30 billion max planets are thinned out or if it builds population centers have them do it on the correct tiles. Why build 3 or 4 population centers on everything but population bonus tiles then build a lab on the 300% bonus pop tile.

I am not sure how the AI survives without cash but if I built economy tiles like the AI does I would be bankrupt before the colony rush is over and no hope for stability later on. Maybe my approach to the economy part of the game needs work but I honestly cannot see how some of these AI races have a viable economy based on the build of their planets. I think there is a magic ATM supplementing their income somewhere in the mechanics of the game but I could be mistaken. Or perhaps this is why the econs seem to implode for the AI in the mid to later portion of the game. For a human (at least this human here) its the opposite. Struggling econ at the beginning of the game but thriving as time goes on.

Much as I would like to put a few others down I will leave that up to the community. It would be interesting to see a list of the more popular changes be put into a voting window. This might help drive the direction of progress for future updates/versions.

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Here's a few things off the top of my head:

3. Self-sustaining Starbases. It gets...tiresome, to say the least, to continually construct Constructors and send them out to BFE galaxy to upgrade my various starbases. It would be nice to add a 'factory' module (or whatever) that allowed the starbase to construct it's own modules and upgrade itself. Perhaps do this with in the influence area of a planet (with the planet having the same kind of influence area that starbases have now) where starbases could be constructed to be self sustaining. That way 'deep space' starbases would not be able to be self-sustaining and require constructors to upgrade them while those starbases closer to planets could sustain themselves, ostensibly with the help of the planet(s) they are in the influence of.

I agree. Starbases should be more self sufficient and more should go on at each base (i.e. ship construction, repair, etc.)

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I like that for starbases. It will really get rid of a tedious micromanagment that is not needed. We can have the initial constructor costing a bit more to make up for the fact that it is going to have everything needed to set up a starbase that can sustain itself.

I also like borders. We see it in the scifi all the time. "You are violating our space, this is an act of war! RAAR!" An extension of borders: probably a bit too much but neutral zones and diplomatically agreed buffers. One thing needed for borders though, the seperation of influence defining your political borders. Something I always have a nag about on the Civ forum, but cultural influence should not define what you politically own. Otherwise pretty much most of the world would belong to the US of A?

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

1) starbase defences would be nice, what's that you say? there are starbase defences already? ah is that what those funny little things are suposed to be??

2) Dreadlords more powerful, can colonise and can spawn like the peacekeeper mega event except with colonies.

3) i would like to see some super hull technology which would be prerequisited by some high end weapon technology. Just to have somthing awesome to look forward to late game.

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Another thing about the combat system:

Maybe I'm not thinking sci-fi enough with this one, but why not make some of the things available to military starbases available to ships? That way, like modern navies, certain ships would be dedicated to anti-air warfare for the whole fleet/battlegroup/task force. This could be, maybe, a defensive multiplier for the other ships in the fleet, allowing defenses to be pooled. Of course, you can't pool armor so ballistic weapons would take on a new importance. However, shields can be projected and point-defense is perfectly capable of engaging lots of targets, with reduced effectiveness against purely ballistic weapons (as opposed to guided missiles). With the ability to pool defenses, this would give defense a needed boost as well as place more importance on fleets rather than the odd super-ship that is a fleet killer in and of itself. It would also allow ships to mount reasonable defensive weapons, that when pooled with other ships, make for a formidable fighting force.

Thoughts?

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In order of importance to me:

1.I've never seen another 4X game with an alignment system, as far as I know it's unique. More depth should be put into this. Put more things to research in the tree on the alignment branch. Make it so that after you select alignment you still get to make choices as was mentioned above Also I've never seen the AI actually research Xeno Ethics (keep in mind I play with very slow tech rate and tech trading off).

2.Put more depth into, and give players more control of UP (as in selecting what initiatives to vote on in a round robin style, kicking members out, inviting minor races to join in certain circumstances and just making it more powerful in general).

3.Fix the really bad bugs/imbalances (I actually used to like defense) like the PQ rating of a planet after terraforming. Fixing some of the mega events, both plauges seem to totally destroy the AI and the Dread Lords are weak (I'm playing on Challenging, so don't know if this is different on higher levels).

There are more things, but these are the most important, I only put the bugs thing last because I've been wanting the other two for so long.

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Its amazing how so many people can want the same things.

My top DA wishlish is in no particular order.

- Much improved UP
- Old GC2 game engine problems solved.
- Kill SB constructor micromanagement hell
- Much improved land combat
- Borders
- Deep espionage system.

Sadly none of these got implemented

I cant help but to blaim the whole Epic Generator fiasco, I have a hunch that it ate alot of development time and thats why none of the best improvements got into the game

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1. Improved espionage system. My idea:

Never made much sense to me why you have to sacrifice an espionage team in order to capture an enemy agent. For spy defense, any spy in opponent territory should have a certain (rather low) chance of being caught each turn, modified by both civilizations espionage rating and much increased by agents set on the specific job (you should be able to place multiple agents on your infected tiles to speed up the capture).

Also, it would be a nice option to be able to tell your attacking spies to use deep cover and NOT shut down some facility, and in exchange, not being able to be traced to a site. Those spies would still gather general information and a chance at a tech steal and also have the chance at getting caught that localized spies do, just that you couldn't speed their capture.

And the system of the spy costs might do with some improvement. Maybe a base cost depending on galactic population or income, increased by how many spies are currently in service.

2. Something very practical to improve the micromanagement hassle on big maps would be an ability to change military production by rally point. Like: Change production of all planets rallying to (Rally point) to constructors while keeping the planets rallying somewhere else on warship production. That would enable the player to effectively manage production by space area without micromanaging all of it, and would probable make many grateful players on the bigger maps.

3. I generally agree with the AI suggestions, and would like to add something in particular:

I never got the impression that it ticked an AI player off when I send support (money, ships, tech) the way of their enemies (which it should IMHO). Of course that relations modifier should only apply when the AI is able to see what's going on, but in some cases that's rather obvious:

" So his treasury balance just plunged by 200.000 while that of the Korx was raised by the same amount? What a coincidence! "

" Wow, the 30 brand new warships the Drengin are using against me are the same design that the (Human player) has stationed all around his space? Fishy, very fishy indeed "

And I think, a computer player should in some cases even quit an alliance if you anger them enough (I don't know if they ever do, but it never happened with me)

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1. Multiplayer. No matter how good the AI gets it's still no match for experienced players (unless it gets heavy bonuses).

2. Better combat. Preferably tactical combat but also other things like small/large mounts, ship signatures etc. Land combat needs to get alot better. For example real soldiers should be trained and used from a portion of the population. And they could be armed depending on how much you spend on them.

3. Improve starbases. More hp, larger sphere of influence, easier to upgrade and have them somehow participate in battles inside their sphere of influence.

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1. kill the sb constructor micromanagement. you should be able to purchase the upgrades after one constructor builds the base. and improve the starbase defenses. it is almost pointless to build the starbases, they can be destroyed too easily.

2. better land battles, land battles are plain boring.

3. more hitpoints for ships.

4. I ususally only play real time games, but this game is pretty good

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Well. I'd like to see Map, Scenario, and Campaign editors. This stems more from me wanting to, uh, build my own campaigns and stuff. It feels really empty for the Campaign menu to have just one Campaign listed on it, and I had an entire series of campaigns plotted out after I made my one for Altarian Prophecy.

That's basically it for now, actually.

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Another thing I forgot to add:

Better Intelligence Reports on ships. The Intel reports might be pure fluff, but this is the kind of fluff that you buy a whole cake for. In short, I really like it, and would love to see something where a mouse over could give you info, or maybe just a small menu somewhere that would give you a weapons layout, defense layout, and an engineering layout. I've built ships for no other reason than to see the name of the weapon that I mounted on it. I think it's really cool.

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