I agree with those who have pointed out the "penalty for good" feature of the present system. As some have said, chosing good is equivalent to playing one difficulty level higher ... and it does not seem to have the kind of balance I assume the developers are aiming for. The balance needs to be addressed in the two ways that "good" is disadvantagaeous:
1) In the "choose one of three" events, "good" is almost always either accepting a penalty or forfeiting an advantage. This should be evened out with advantages/penalties going in different ways.
2) In the advantages given form Xeno Ethics, bring the advantages of "good" up to the level of the other two.

A little change to increase Fun/possibilities for modders:

jewelry which adds Hitpoints to the ship and costs masses of money.
then you can improve your ship after you have researched everything and build and build... the ultimate ship....ultimate 2...etc

The costs of this HP jewelry have to be so high that it don't kills the balance and just rich races can use them, well it's an idea and I have lot more ideas how to make mods with that change =O)

thank you in advance!

How about creating a GUI for the AI so we can tweakit without having to dig through piles of code? Something very visual like clustering all the Drengin ship parameters on a picture of a Drengin ship or some such thing. You could even put it in its own module. Wouldn't that be sweet!!!

I would like to see some sorting of ships possible in the orbiting ships queue. Sometimes you get 'holes' in the lineup when you make for instance the third ship in the line leave orbit. Also changing the order of ships by dragging or something like r-mouse click moves ship up front can by handy. In this way you can make the line such that new ships always endup at the end of the line (and not in the holes) and you can easily rearrange a line such that for instance your planet defender is always first in line.

Allowing ships to "patrol", which would essentially be like explore, but would keep them within the boundries of your area of influence, going into a sentry mode (focusing when there's a ship in its sensor range). And allowing the player to contact other civilizations to remove their ships from your area of influence (which of course would be influenced by your diplomacy skill and influence points)...they'd also be able to do the same. The only caveat would be if an alien's world is in your realm of influence, you cannot command that they remove ships if their homeworld is set to the world in your realm. Make sense?

How about updating the DL hulls to look as "shiny" as the DA hulls. Not too talk about the jewellery! (too much work?)

Thanks

I really hope Kryo or Frogboy actually reads these posts so all of us here are not posting for nothing.

That said. There is a bunch of issues that really would help the game.

1.Minor Races. Has anything been done about the AI for them yet? Some minors actually do stuff others sit around doing absolutely nothing until so major comes over and kills them. This is pointless, really. Let them colonise a planet or two and let them become a major like ppl said if they become stronger enough or if other majors surrender to the MINOR. I've noticed that the minors who comes into the game later through events are the ones who end up doing nothing.

A more radical suggestion would be to make the minors like in Birth of the Federation where you have the opinion to let them join your Empire after you enhanced relations with them giving you their planet-specific special abilities such as better defense of that planet or better research on that planet. Minors were a important part of that old game.

2. Starbases. They need more hitpoints. This can be solved simply by classifying them as huge hulls. Also in the late game starbases, even Military Starbases that act as my Fleet HQ are killed way too easily. Tweek the defense modules to make them actually worthwhile. Fully developed starbases took a huge amount of time and effort and they should be able to survive more. Also giving races different hull styles for starbases would be awesome.

3. Diplomacy. More treaty opinions such as being able to close your borders to other military ships unless you have an alliance with them. Other races that need to cross your territory can request passage.

4. Combat. The type of planetary attack should impact your ethical alinment. Core detonation and other "genocidal" opinions shouldn't even be offered to pure good races or if they choose to do so it should make them shift. Good, Neutral, or Bad should never be "locked" because it needs to be based on actions and not some special technology you researched. Also in planetary invasion, the orbiting military ships should provide attack bonuses when you attack with the troop transport. This one is so obvious.

5. United Planets. The penatly for leaving the UP is too harsh. No one in the mid game can survive without trade, the penatly should be a relations hit for being a political pariah and for being isolationist. There should also be an opinion to propose certain bills to the UP such as increasing trade routes, putting a galactic fair, taxing evil races, providing money and help to a minor under attack, etc. This means there WILL be emergency sessions and the UP will meet more frequently with limits say once every 3 weeks unless it is an emergency session. There can be a fee for this and the type of proposals could become available as you tech up. This would make politics VERY influential as the other races will vote favourably to your proposal based on their relations to you. A race targeted with a negative proposal could leave the UP. The diplomacy victory could be linked to the UP.

This would obviously take a lot of work but you have hundreds of people like myself in the fan community willing to help out with writing bills, etc. But imagine.

What do you guys think.

Stardock PLEASE ACT on the sum of all of our contributions. DON't let us post here for nothing.

1. In DA, the colony list should show for unowned planets what type they are?
Radioactive, toxic, etc.

2. The player should have the right to reject stolen tech (sometimes enhanced factories can bankrupt you)--this should be done in DL too.

3. Abiltity to create and reuse queues for planetary improvements. On many of my planets (not all) I do the same thing for the list of planetary improvements.

4. A slider that determines how many "unusual" potentially inhabitable planets there are compared to ordinary inhabitable planets. The unusual are the toxic, radioactive, aquatic. I also don't like the fact that if you research aquatic, you have to research it again to have full use of the planet. The first research is virtually useless since it takes so long to build things on half the squares. Takes too long.

As you can imagine some things people have proposed aren't really feasible outside of a second expansion or sequel, but that doesn't mean nobody's watching. We wouldn't solicit ideas if we were planning to ignore them.

This thread is rather long...
Guess Stardock is taking notes.
Would be nice to have some feedback after 7 pages of thread in the form of:
1) ideas accepted (twisted / merged / ...)
a) feasible in a small upgrade
confidered for future
2) ideas unfeasible / not aligned to goals / not effective

I understand that one major problem is to have the AI use the new features.

First of all, I'd just like to say that this is possibly one of the greatest games I've ever played (still reserving judgement on Spore!), with the originality of Space Rangers 2 and the civ-building of... well... Civ. Here are a few things that I would hope to see implemented:

1.I'm sure this has been said by more than a few people, but maybe there should be an adjustable parameter for minor races to make them more competitive (but not as much as in the prequel)
For example, have you choose whether they

1) Stay on home planet
2) Colonize home system
3) Colonize home sector

Or if that's too hard to implement, it could be slaved with a "minor races difficulty level" or smth.

2. Also a function that would upgrade all of an existing design to a new, better design (or at least as many as possible depending on your economic situation) would be nice.

3. Expanding on what the last poster had to say, have a (possibly text-edit) function allowing the player to handpick which kinds of random events he/she wants/does not want in a game

4. War weariness - a concept from the Civ-series. Effect depends upon whether you are/are not the aggressor, how the war is going, how long the war has gone on, etc. The effect should be lowest for imperial governments and highest for star federations.

5. This might be something of a stretch: morality choices that don't center around the "1 good, 1 evil, 1 neutral" system as of now. For example, there could be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" event where all three choices move you towards evil. The specific choices determine HOW MUCH towards evil you move. Also there could be foreign or domestic policy choices (that show up as a random event) that dont change alignment at all, but rather are more geared towards the civ. Two examples:

Increasing numbers of citizens are demanding a new policy on healthcare to deal with the increasing cost of insurance (to remain apolitical each choice will have tradeoffs)
- Implement Universal Healthcare: +10% Growth Rate, +10% Morale, +5% Production, -10% Economy
- Implement Mixed Government/Privatized System: +5% Morale, +5% Growth Rate
- Implement Privatized System: +20% Economy, -10% Morale

We are to choose our ambassador to the United Planets. Each public servant has had extensive experience (both positive and negative) with the other races, so choose carefully
- Guy A: Plus Relations w/ A,B,C, Minus Relations w/ X,Y,Z
- Guy B: Plus Relations w/ A,B,Z, Minus Relations w/ X,Y,A
- Guy C: Plus Relations w/ A,Y,Z, Minus Relations w/ X,A,B

etc etc...

In the battle screen you presently show the ship status as one square box representing the hit points left. It would be neat to also show the status of sheilds.