Streamlined starbase upgrading. There are too many weapon/defense upgrades and they are far too costly.
A more ambitious idea would be to eliminate the direct dependence on planetary production. Allow the player to BUY starbase upgrades through the starbase itself. Racial military production bonus would be applied as a discount to the purchase price. This would DRASTICALLY reduce micromanagement for anyone who keeps good cash flow. It might also give the *AI* an easier time getting good starbases, since it just has to pay to upgrade them instead of getting a steady stream of constructors through a potentially dangerous area.
Starbases: I don't see any reason to make them huge to start with. Instead I'd give them more HP with each added module (military modules might give more HP than others) so that they may end up as huge.
Allow constructors to carry more than one constructor module. It's an easy enough code thing and it'll significantly cut down on the micormanagement. You'll still need to select the modules you like, but you won't have to do it every single turn (unless you're a micro freak and then you're just asking for it).
I was just thinking about star bases and came up with some ideas.
First, you would only need to build one Constructor, to build the initial starbase. Once constructed, a supply line is established to the nearest planet with a Starport, similar to the way the Asteroid Fields now work. Or you could if you wanted, select another planet with a Starport to supply it, with some consequences I'll mention later.
If you wanted to build a module, you would click on the starbase itself and order it's construction. The resources that are required would be drawn directly from the supplying planet's military production through the route established. The player would be able to set the percentage of this production that he/she is willing to allocate for the construction of the module, and the distance between the starbase and the planet would play a factor in the time it takes for the module to be completed, representing the time it takes a supply ship to shuttle back and forth. So while the module was being built, the supplying planet would have less or no military production capabilities available for ships, depending on how the player allocates the resources of the planet. Or, if it turns out to be an issue for the AI have a fixed percentage that's required for starbase support.
There could even be a food component involved so that the supplying planet would also need to provide the starbase with food, and also an ongoing resource supply in order to maintain the base after the module was completed. So the larger the starbase became, the more continueing support it would require from the supplying planet. Go with say one food and one military production unit for every module built on the starbase, as an example. This could kill two birds with one stone really, since it would make those 300% food tiles useful. You could use planets with a high farming ability as suppliers for several starbases, provided you bring up your production there high enough. Also with a distance from supplying planet a factor in the construction of modules, it would reduce the spamming of starbases deep in an opponent's territory. Distant starbases would take much longer to construct than ones nearby.
This would also add some realism into having Starbases. Right now they're completely self-sufficient. Once you build them, no planets are involved in their upkeep, which wouldn't be the case in reality. They will always need to be supplied with food products and raw materils to be used in it's upkeep
Starbase Transporter/Tug Boat
Provide a ship module allowing you to create a starbase tugboat so you can move them around, (slowing of course) or simply provide a module which can be added to the SB to allow it to move itself. This would allow players to change thier tactical positioning. Again this should be a slow process.
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I like both options here
There should be two options when building.. (or a checkbox to enable it for each starbase)
Link to a planet (that planets production (or asteroids) would be used (you would have a slider to say X%))
This would give slow growth.. perfect for peace times.
Multiple constuctors per ship.. also perfect to reduce micro management
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Trade
1: Trading needs to be more profitable I dont even do it anymore . For example I will have long routes using a fast trading ship and get maybe 12bc /route and max out getting something like 250bc for trading ..wow very low when you compare it to getting 6-8000bc for tourism ! I concentrate on building for tourism and influence and economy .
Agreed.. if you up the ammount gotten by trading it would be worth it
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System management
Making the colony rush more fun would be cool (for people who use the game as a space empire simulator). It just makes more sense that an empire would be exploring for a long time before deciding to send settlers out to colonize new worlds. Perhaps worlds can be "claimed" by building an outpost first, and then colonized later. I thought Civ 4 was an improvement over Civ 3 in that respect. The settler spam phase of Civ 3 was annoying and repetitive.
Having just been made aware of the Governor in the colony details screen, I can definitely see room for improvement. First of all, it would be nice to have an "All Planets" button so I'd only have to set my preference once. I've decided that I don't want planets auto terraforming, and it would be great if I didn't have to go into every single planet screen in order to do this. Just set it once, hit the "All Planets" button and I wouldn't need to bother with it anymore.
An option to choose balanced starting positions would be nice. As it is now, at least one player gets a terrible start unless I ctrl+n a hundred times.
The ability to destroy and rebuild (elsewhere) major capitals (mfg, econ, tech, etc). Hand in hand with this, change the fact that destruction of a colony reduces the planet to Class 0. Destroying a colony should, by rights, only destroy THE COLONY, not planet's ecosystem. When the English Colony at Roanoke was destroyed, the island didn't disappear (neither did the building for that matter) just the people. And if you're thinking the colony was destroyed a by massive core detonation or some such planet devastating event, well, there are less drastic, and more efficeint ways of depopulating a colony than total annihilation. Please make destruction of a colony result in the planet reverting to its pre-colonized state. Thank you.
A map editor might help with this somewhat....
Having a govoner option to say what gets built automatically when you colonize would help with SOME micromanagement
This govoner would also have a option.. "ignore planetary upgrade /terrorforming" option
Fix the "destroy" colony bug.. its a bug when it turns to a class 0 and you only wanted the colony gone
Another option honestly is to add a "survey ship" type of ship. it would work simalar to a colony ship in the fact you can claim a planet.. but you don't get a population (robots would do all building and would not build very fast)
this would allow you to "claim" colonys but not have to worry about building them imeditally if you did not want to
(the colony could be conqured but would be more easy to influance.. and would give little influance, but would not be able to make ships research or money.)
(also this would allow to drop off coloniest using a troop transport)
This would be a one time use ship but not that expensive to make
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Minor races
how about making minor races into major races when they hit a certain level,also i'd like to see more options for custom races
I like the idea of giving a minor race a few planets and becoming a major race.. but only haveing a chance
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Bugs
1.The feature that allows you to define where launched ships exit from a planet is not working in my 1.5X game. I think I've seen posts where other people have seen this problem.
1) fix the (possible) bug with off-type defenses. some suggestions i've heard have included: remove ALL the calculation about how effective off-defneses work against improper weapons, and just give every defense a static value for which it'll work against improper weapons (so change zero-point armor to 4-10-4 in the defenses and remove all the square root business), or have the defense degredation work against the sqroot value rather than the max value - there are others i imagine you've read.
i think both bugs need fixing ASAP
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morality
2) make good a viable choice for ethical alignments. make the defense and HP bonuses they get with defense techs higher - or maybe even add new defense techs that are better than the best current ones. i like this idea. some would say 'but evil doesn't get better-than-best weapons.' however weapons are a lot costlier to research, and getting powerful ones earlier is a major advantage. i'd also consider adding other benefits to good, perhaps themed around their attraction of psychics. how about: telepathic sensors (+3 sensor module); psychokinetic warp field (either an overall engine boost, or a new engine type after hyperwarp 3). some of these ideas might begin to offset how much good sucks.
And the "moral decisions" are just *ridiculous*. Virtually all of them involve making a penalizing sacrifice as the good option, versus getting big bonuses for being an utter bastard. It's as if there is nothing but upside to being evil. Seldom is it a more realistic choice between different kinds of gain - peaceful growth versus military gain, for example.
I think that there needs to be a option... to take the best bonus but to have a cost.. either money.. or reseources.. this way you can still be good
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tech trading
Someone mentioned earlier that you shouldn't be allowed to trade/conquer/steal techs that you don't have the previous techs for. I totally agree with that. This is the way it's done in Civilization and it works well. I think this alone would go a long way to fixing the tech trading issue. You'd only have so many techs you could trade for at any one time, so you couldn't jump ahead of your current knowledge base.
3) I think you should be able to achieve a tech AND use it. Ex: when invading or trading, you should be able to acquire a warp drive II and put them on your ships. HOWEVER you should not be able to continue researching warp drive III with out all the previous techs. This would be a good balance. It would not kill tech trading, but it would get rid of the huge cheeeez of jumping straight to the end of a tech ladder just cause you got luck running across a computer file in an invasion… just because you found the blue prints doesn’t mean you know all the physics hind its workings. (this should also lessen how much the AI values a military tech)
I like the idea of being able to make the item but not research beyond it till you have filled in the missing techs.. also the limit of trading to X advanced might work?
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ships
- Large Cargo Hull (a bit more expensive than the basic Cargo Hull but with a few more Hitpoints (less than that of a tiny hull) and larger hold). Ideal for Invasion ships or large freighters (that should be able to fend off an uncoordinated pirate attack. It should cost more than a tiny/small vessel and have less HP, thus be unattractive for players to replace small hulls with it.
Ship Designer: allow viewing but not building unavailable ship designs
Allow the viewing of ship designs that currently can't be built because they require future tech. Based on a toggle button these future designs would be grayed out or not appear at all(current behavior).
I like the idea of being able to view ALL ships reguardless of class/type/tech and use them if the techs are avialable..
what if you were playing two games at the same time and wanted one ship to be in the other game.. it could not be right now
I like the larger cargo hull idea for later on in research.. it makes it easyer to work with
making spys work better would be good.. causing unrest would be a great idea but would need 3-5 spys do to a planet
Demographics.
i like these options it would make a planet that was liberated with good produce more (your savors.. of source you would work harder to help them)
