Good ideas. This would tie well with the idea recently posted about only having an available pool of soldiers per pop. The leftover conquered people could fall into this category. Rather than actually track race demographics, they could simply be lumped into a catch-all category labeled subjects or something.

I like this idea to if the subjects could expand as well and perhaps cause social infrastructure problems if they werent dealt with in some way (slavery, citizenship). And the pool would be maintained or added too as successive conquerors conquered. That could lead to interesting situations if the subjects were very diverse and hated each other on the same planet.

Non-policy and exploitation would actually be like Protectorate. Their pop would be assumed to be taxed locally, and only optionally on the imperial scale perhaps as a check box (tax at imperial scale if yes).

A hanger module for starships (Not A Carrier)

This would not allow you to move smaller ships into larger ones for transport to battles!

The hanger will be a new module that can be added to large, huge and possibly medium size vessels. A player cannot dock ships in these for transport but instead they would act as a purely offensive weapon system that would deploy small drones or fighters or heavy fighters as you progress through the research tree branch. A new branch in the research tree would need to be added “hangers”. As you research hangers they would become larger and supply more fighters during battle (more powerful).

Pros and Cons of hangers

Pros for adding hangers to your ships:
They add a lot of firepower to larger ships
This would also add a new type of strategy to space battles. Sometimes better to attack than to defend if you have a ship with hangers in you military convoy.
Nice visual effects in battles could be added
Would add fighter to the Space Battlefield in later battles where you use only larger more powerful ships.

Cons for adding hangers to your ships:
They can only be deployed if you are the attacking force, not if you were attacked.
This adds a risk to paying so much for more fire power you may not get to use it in your battle.
Since using a hanger will take up a lot of room on your ship they will probably need to be part of some sort of military convoy due to a weakened defensive ability.
They will take up a lot of room.


The fighters and or drones that would be deployed would be a standard looking fighter that was computer generated (Stardock designed), but would use the colors of your civilization.

I think we need more modules anyway.
This is just a thought.

Just remembered another one thats been in and out of my mind for a while - keep forgetting to post it.

Fleets - when upgrading the ships within a Fleet it is the Click Fest to end all Click Fests. I can minimise it from screaming frustration to mere passionate head banging as i play heavily armoured/full weapon array ships , not the mega numbers of small ships. The latter can be a large number with Logistics at 54 or 63.

Whilst accepting many Fleets are of a mixed ship type, which makes it almost impossible to do a bulk upgrade (even that could be done, although I acknowledge coding maybe somewhat complex for the effect achieved). The upgrading of a Fleet of ships of the same type to the latest Universal answer to the Dread Lords, involves a very large number of mouse clicks as you go in and out of the Fleet Management screen upgrading one at a time.

Why not put in a "upgrade Fleet " button on the Fleet Screen, the code behind that should not be horrendous, and all the User has to do is point and click one ship to the new type, its then replicated across the whole Fleet. While we are there, how about a mechanism to select multiple fleets of the same type for upgrade in the same way - now there would be heaven indeed, on a Gigantic All Abundant Middle-Late game such mechanisms in place would take seconds to use, and save literally hundreds - arguably thousands - of mouse clicks, and literally 20mins+ on game play.

Regards
Zy

I'd like the diplomancy system improved a bit, especially with respect to warefare and peace. My enemy may be technically stronger military and economically, but if I'm in a better position to assault and take his planets, and am seriously threatening to take over key planets, I'd like to see the AI more receptive to diplomatic action. I've also seen large empires get wared by 5 civilizations, and refuse to peace me even if all their major battlefleets are on the other side of a huge galaxy, sectors away from my weaker, but well-organized and concentrated assault forces. After taking a few solar systems, demolishing anything resembling defense near my sectors, and being well poised to threaten more planets, you'd think the big empire would be receptive to peace. I was obviously winning a war on a front that the AI wasn't ready to respond to, and I would expect the larger empire would perhaps try to pay me off in one way or another to stop me from chewing him in the behind. Instead, he only offered the occasional peace treaty, and outright refused if I try to initate the peace talks, even though I felt that because I was clearly winning the war, I should have been able to extort money, tech, etc. from him.

I know it'll probably never happen in galciv 2, and that detecting these kinds of things are difficult: but I don't think that if a civ decides it's winning or losing a war should be based on the power and economic graphs. I think it should also be based on the relative resources lost (essentially the ratio of the AI's power/economy I destroy to the amount of my power/economy the AI destroys), and on how "threatened" the AI feels by my ships being in it's territory. Even if you're technically twice my power and twice my economy, the AI is clearly not winning the war when it's lost 10 or 11 planets, twice the number of ships relative to me, and my forces are inside of their cultual bounds, organized and clearly able to threaten more land. Not to mention the fact that the AI has no presence whatsoever in any of my controlled territories.

Would like a much larger galaxy, for those month long epic gamers like myself.

I would like to be able to see a planet's wereabaouts when i am either in the civilization manager screen (where all of your planets are listed) or when Im viewing a planet. just like a blip on the minimap. with 50 plantes or so i get lost on which ones are where, especially the ones that keep flipping. so when im trying to decide who dbuilds what, it would be nice to be able to see, on the same screen the general location of the planet.

I mifght get a message that a planet just joined me, but not knowing where it was i cant decide if i should have it build a warship or a constructor. I usually have to exit the screen, find the planet and then go back to it. But its the same with my own planets. when the GNN telkls me that something is finished being built i 'd like to see where i am in the galaxy.

ALSO, i have never seen anyone complain about this but i can't stand wheni'm starting a turn and im clicking on the GNN screen to give orders to my planets and a flip planet message comes up and im sent to THAT planet, BUT when i try to pick an improvement im really on the previos planet. Does this happen to anyone else? Its like im looking at the planet that just flipped but the game thinks im on the planet i was trying to get to before the message came.

I would like to see an expansion of the tech trade options. I currently play with the trading off just because it seems unrealistic to me that the races trade with each other far to freely, even when they have neutral (or worse) relations. This may just be a perception error on my part, but that it what it looks like to me.
I would like to be able to tweak the tech trade to be able to say no tech trades unless races are in an alliance, or maybe turn individual tech trees off, for instance set it so no weapon techs can be traded. As it is, with trading set to off, the other races rarely seem to research Alliances, which means, even if you research it, you can't create an alliance.
I would also like a way to upgrade the starbases to increase their effectiveness in the late game. Once the races have gotten into the top third of thier research trees the starbases are severly outclassed. You have huge warships with hitpoints 4 to 5 times that of a star base that pack 10 or more times the weaponry. Maybe have the hit points of your bases double for each increase in scale building you research (medium, large, huge) so you would get 40 to start then 80, then 160, then 320. Maybe this is too much, but as it is, they are WAY to easy to kill in the late game.

Not if you have tech trading turned off, or at least my game won't let me do that.

If it's possible, make some of the un-moddable XML stuff, well, moddable. A specific example I have in mind would be the Orbital Fleet Manager--I personally think it's kinda silly to have to spend a valuable tile on each of your planets in order to allow orbiting ships to fight as a fleet, but I can't mod say, the Civilization Capital and Initial Colony to allow it. There's also the fact that you can't create different Starports.

Of course, if that's actually changed, and I just don't know about it, then feel free to ignore my rambling.

Here's my second idea.

Add a bunch of 'generic' super abilities for creating your own race. For instance, when I make a Minor Race be a playable opponent, I always come up with a new Super ability, for instance:

Super Telepath: Gain research bonus and start with Counter Espionage.
Super Migrant: You aren't out of the game until all of your ships are dead.
Super Swarm: Planets are more likely to convert during war, ground troop bonus.
Super Inventor: If you are behind tech-wise, your research gains bonuses.
Super Rebel: Your planets are less likely to convert and you have higher morale.
Super Prophet: Your planets only need to have twice the influence to convert others.
And so on...

If that makes sense to you   

You misunderstand (like many, but it is in the manual). There are no borders or 'territory' in this game, beyond orbit of the planets (notwithstanding the inconsistentcy of the UP vote that forces opponents out of your area of influence at the start of wars). It is part of the back story, sort of; i.e. Space is Big.

Those colored lines on the map are your area of cultural and political Influence, where your Influence is above 0 and greater than any other major empire's. They do not denote any sort of ownership or property rights. In effect, it could be viewed as an act of war to try to BAR ships from this open space; it is very anti-social of the Yor to use those suppression fields, threats of mines, etc, to try to slow transit of their AOI as it is. (Hmmm...Yor...anti-social...does not compute.)

drrider

Hmm... Auctioning is an interesting concept... but why would you need them? If other races only bid items from the trade screen (everything you mentioned shows up on the trade screen), what's the point? The only value I can see is that they might give you more knowing that another player is too.

But that really is of no value, because each player knows that you might give it to them later. Maybe you should tie in Auctioning with the Korx's super ability (Trader?), and only they can initiate one (or anyone with Super Trader). Or, if you don't want auctions, you could have the Korx ability player know what other deals are going on (For instance, the Arceans rejected an offer by the Drengin to sell their Impulse Drive for 476 BC and Shields, or they accepted. That way, that player can plan their offer accordingly.


Really? Sometimes I ask the AI for something, they refuse, and then a few turns later, they ask me to trade it for something else...