Custom Opponents and Ship Templates

Could we combine these two features together to create races with more "flavour". It would be nice to assign two or three templates per hull size to a custom race. Then they would have their own distinct appearance.

Life Support Tweaks

I get a bit bored being able to go wherever I want on the map. It would be fun to tweak the effectiveness of life support on game set up. I know we can do this with mods, but I was also thinking of something else: a refuelling module to make tanker ships. By including the ship in a fleet, it extends its own range to the other ships in that fleet, allowing it to "escort" ships with armaments to areas outside of your normal range. Perhaps allow it to build something like a starbase which extends range, and then remove the range bonus from the traditional starbases.

Space Monsters!

Enough said.   

Hi!
I have many. Consider this a warnig!

• Espionage: if I really must use spies, please make using them less invasive. Sometimes I want just to incease the intel level in order to avoid random events with that race, but I had to spend quite some of spies for that, since the receiving race defends itself. Multiply the number of lost spies with the number of races I want to keep as friends, and all of a sudden I'm without spies to defend myself.
  
• change the usage of spies to something more "real": currently they just annihilate each other. What I'd like to see is I send my spy to remove the other spy. In the next turn I got one of the following results:
  - my spy killed the other spy,
  - my spy chased away the other spy,
  - my spy captured the other spy,
  - my spy failed to do anything,
  - both spies dead,
  - my spy got kiled by the other spy,
  - my spy was captured by the other spy.
  The result should depend of the spying ability of my and the other spy, the luck roll and the "home terrain" advantage.
  
• introduce the spying ability tech branch, with ~4 levels, each giving ~10% boost to my spies, and at the end or it the "trade wonder" that gives additional 10% of spying ability.
  
• if a planet I'm currently viewing has my spies on it, enable me to access that planet via "Spy" button.
  
  
• Defenses: please make proper defenses less strong. In my current game (maso, large uni all common, slowest tech, no tech trade, 9 AIs) my single medium hull ship with 3 plasmas and 8 PD-combos, supported with one military-minig starbase (for beam attack 9 and missile defense 34) destroyed about 8 yor's fleets, each consisting of 3-4 small hulls equiped with Harpoons for 25-40 missile attack and no defense. Average damage it received was 2-3 points per battle. That's just plain silly: with two such ships, flying separated I removed Yor, the fourth strongest civilization, from the game. My costs: ~1k BC + troop transports. Yor's costs: 10k-15k BC + empire. Even if defenses would have the pre-patch costs, that wouldn't change much. I've used in combat JUST TWO SHIPS.
  
  I have three ideas what to change in defenses:
  
  1) make defenses sometimes fail. For each firing weapon there should be an additional probability of applied damage to pass through still existing defenses. Low tech defenses would have that probability about 0.30, and higher levels of defenses would get about 5% decrease for each type. Ultimate defenses would fail in ~5% cases of each single weapon attacks. This would also add a bonus to low tech weapons for scoring some damage, and would make small ships slightly more usefull in late game.
  In case of my ship vs. yor fleets I'd get about 4 points of damage each combat round, so I'd need to use at least two ships in a fleet in order to kill yor's fleets fast enough to not lose one of my ships. I'd also need to "recycle" my ships to heal combat damage, so I'd need even more of them, however I would probably not lose any. But that's IMO right. I used the right defenses.
  The other variant of changing defenses would be
  
  2) make defenses not recover to full strenght each combat round, but only regenerate for a certain percentage of their full strenght. Again lower tech defenses would regenerate less points as higher. Like: a ship with 20 shields would regenerate each combat round 10 shield points. If 18 shields would be removed from that ship in first combat round, it would start the second round only with remaining 2 + those 10 regenerated = 12 shields.
  
  3) simply make defenses (or their sizemod) bigger. In my case I just barely squeezed enough of them to my medium hull. Would they be just 1 space bigger, I'd need either to research next level of miniaturization (8 turns), next level of the same defense type (6 turns), or large hull (11 turns). In each case my war would not be so easy, as Yor at the time of my attack just started producing medium hulls with one engine and ~20 missile attack. But if I'd have Large hull tech the would not matter, so this solution probably isn't good.
  
  
• Research: add small bonuses (5%) for each new research breakthrough (new type of weapons/defenses/reseach building/econ building...). This would make mining galactic resources slightly less advantageous, esp. military, econ and research ones. Currently in mid game the race that mines two military resources can have attack bonus at 68% (10% from tech + 2*29% from mining), while race without them can have 10%. With 5% bonus for researching Lasers, 5% from Plasma and 5% from Stingers the first race would get 22% boost in weapons (68% + 15%), but to the other one a whole 150% (10% + 15%). Going with tech levels further would make posesion of military galactic resources a nice boost, but not a game-breaking feature it can be now.
  
• please balance some more the evil weapons. The Psionic missile is just a small improvement in attack power over missiles of comparable tech levels, while Psionic beam is a pure overkill (250% the firepower of the Nano Ripper, for the same size and price in reseach and build. I'd propose making them all attack-8 weapons, but would add a 10% weapons bonus for researching each of them.
  
  
• Combat: get rid of the "one shis survives the combat" rule. Too much "cheese" can be gained misusing it. Or make the surviving ship enter the "repair state" for 1-3 turns, with just 1 HP, no weapons, defenses and movement.
  
  
• current planetary production from factories and power plants is over-nerfed. In DA all production buildings already lost 2 production poits each type, but that was aleviated with introduction of Power Planets (PP) and asteroid mines. When I played DA campaign there was quite a lot of asteroids to mine, and power plants meant something, giving 25%, 50% and 100% boost to production. But in the latest patch they give only 10%, 20% and 30% respectively, so building a Fusion PP on a planet makes sense only on the HW with 7 factories. On ALL other planets it's a waste of tile - MUCH better result can be obtained with building just another factory. The Antimater PP is for all practicall use the same crap, as it is better only as the 5th factory. Since I can afford 4 factories only on planets class 14+ is the only PP that makes sense using there the Quantum one. But only on planets that have equivalent of 4 factories, and nowhere else .
  I can imagine you saying: "Use asteroids!". I'd do that, but in my current large all-common game the closest free (non-HW belonging) asteroids are 4 sectors away.
  I can hear you saying: "Build more factories!", but on maso level I can not afford that. If I build more factories I'll have less research and econ buildings, and will be at even bigger disadvantage as I'm currently to huge bonuses AIs get on maso level. What's the use of big production when I don't have money for it, or I can build only crappy ships because of low tech I have?
  Your last chance to beat me is "Use starbases!" I do, however there's lots of MM involved in their upgrading. Here we come to my next point.
  
  
• please introduce a SB upgrade governor, that will automaticaly (without asking me) assign an incoming constructor to a proper upgrade. I'd set the priorities for that governor when I construct the SB, and will give "him" priorities by setting 3 sliders from 0 to 5.
  - 1st for the task each SB is designated for (mining, manuf. support for planets, support of trade routes, influence, warship support),
  - 2nd slider for starbase attack modules, and
  - 3rd for SB defense modules.
  Setting first slider to position 0 means no constructor will be used for 1st purpose, and will be used for the 2nd or 3rd (if different from 0). Setting it to 5 will mean first 5 constructors will be used for the 1st purpose, and the 6th will be used for the 2nd. The process will go until there are no more avalable upgrades for that starbase and for the settings governor has. Only then the governor will alert me. With the use of a the waypoint from planet(s) to the position of that SB I can forget its upgrade and devote my time to more strategic tasks.
  
  
• Please introduce a planet-build-queue governors (similar to GC-1), that will on my click put in queue of a planet proper buildings. I'd set the priorities, type and percentage of buildings in the Governors window in an additional tab by setting 7 sliders for each governor from 0 to 100%. Each slider would be set to a certain type and tech level of a building, "leave empty" or "not set" and would mean a percentage of that building's type the governor should put on a planet. An example of one governor settings would be:
  - 1st slider 25% production buildings (max)
  - 2th slider 9% morale buildings (multimedia center)
  - 3nd slider 25% econ buidings (trade center)
  - 4th slider 9% farms (basic farm)
  - 5rd slider 20% research buildings (xeno lab)
  - 6th slider 10% leave empty
  - 7th slider terraform (max)
  If I'd order the described governor to put buildings on a class 8 planet, "he" would put in queue as first 2 best production buildings (max settings), NO multimedia center (9% of 8 is less than 1), with two trade centers as the 3rd and 4th bulding, one research building as 5th, and as last in queue all tiles that can be terraformed with the current tech. OFC each governor should look at bonus tiles when setting buildings on tiles, using proper tiles for particular building type, and using normal tiles first if there aren't appropriate bonus tiles for the particular building he's trying to put on a planet. On the player is then the task of putting in queue specific buildings like Starport, Manufacturing capital...
  - Please make those governors also able to upgrade existing buildings on a planet. I use old buildings in a planetary build extensively, and sometimes there's a lot of work involved in upgrading them - way too many "point-and-clicks".
  - Please make those governors save-able. When I design them, I'd like to use them in another game.
  
  
• please put the list of planetary upgrades in fixed order that will not change throughout the game. Always keep those "standard" building types that could be built on any planet (production, morale, econ, research, influence buildings, farms, starport) at the top and at about the same position (production always first, with available power plants following them, morale second/third... The actuall order doesn't matter, just don't change it throug the game please). Below them should be listed all other buildings and "wonders", but their order doesn't matter much, as I use them only once per a game.
  
  
• Extreme environments: currently the only penality for the uncomplete branch for a certain environment type is a reduced production. Tax revenue, growth, food, morale and research are not reduced. That's IMO not right. At least tax revenue, pop growth and research production should be reduced accordingly. If this will not apply, I predict players will stop researchig them alltogether and put research in just one tech branch: invasion tech. With that they'll get planets that will give them almost all they'll need: money, research and troops, with ships being the only exception; AND a chance to gat that planetary tech anyway through invasion. Speaking of it,
  
  
• Tech gained through invasion or trade: this should IMO be nerfed. It's just plain silly I can use Photonic torpedos II before knowing all previous techs. My factories just don't have proper tools for buiding them. So instead of gaining direct tech levels I'd rateher see a boost in research: each tech I 'd get would give me 50%-90% of its research points costs, that would be immediately applied to appropriate branch of my research tree. In my game when I've been invading Yor I'get instead of Harpoons III a boost of 50%-90% of 900 RPs to my missile weapons (since the slowest tech, only the developers know the proper amount )
  

That should be enough for today. Currently I also can not think of anything else. So thanx for asking and my respect for reading that long post to the end.

BR, Iztok

My meager 2 cents. I just want the ability to convert starbase types. When I'm done with an influence base I"d like to flip it military. In times of war that would be extremely handy. It might be costly, it might collapse the size of my empire, but it might save me a few planets.

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).

Fix the battles. The Defense problem signifies a more fundamental problem - you devs simply have no concrete idea of what you want out of the military picture. This means that every modification is basically a crapshoot with god knows what kind of effect.

Get your act together.

Decide on how you want defenses to work on each size of ship and what specific dynamics you want in the game. What should it cost to make defensive-oriented ships? Should such a thing even be possible? Should large or small ships be better at Defense? Should mixed defense ships be tenable? How will you code the defensive components to make it so that this is a good deal? In what particular situations is this deal possible or desireable? Should multiple attack type ships be good? In what situations? Should single attack type ships be good? In what situations?

The current paradigm is admirable but flawed: you design a simple abstract game within the game (paper, scissors, rock) and have ship design flow from that.

The problem with this approach is that players will seek optimized systems, and optimized systems in simple games inevitably have simple outcomes. Just as tic-tac-toe has a simple and inevitable solution, so too does such a simple system, even with the variables of galaxy management thrown in.

Start with the end in mind - visualize what specific and particular kinds of attack/defense relationships you want for all ship sizes and tech situations. Then create the numerical values that will realize your vision.

The bad thing about it is that you'll probably get it wrong the first few times. The good thing about it is that since you have a very concrete vision in mind, you will eventually get to your goal with a certainty, and it adds flavor to the game.

The parallel is Starcraft. The balance was all wrong for many of the early patches but since the designers had definite roles for all of the units in their heads for every stage of tech development, they eventually perfected it and molded it into a distinct vision. Protoss DO feel like very tough and highly advanced units. Zerg DO swarm their enemies.

That's my most important suggestion: define the military strategy game exhaustively, and then go from there.

I would like queues that could be saved and loaded for planetary improvements. Perhaps there could be standard queue of improvements that could be selected from the governors.

I think this may have been mentioned on an earlier page, but it would be nice to get some data on the fleet you're paying so handsomely for. For example, what the most prevalent ship design is and why it's still kicking around years after you obsoleted it.

On the whole, I'm very pleased with the current state of the game after 1.5X. Stomp out those remaining bugs and buff the Dread Lords and I'd pretty much be happy. That's not to say there aren't some great suggestions in this thread, but I'd encourage caution in implementing any of the more radically game altering ideas. In short, at this point, it should be about small tweaks and adjustments, not big shifts in gameplay.

Is it possible to massively improve demplomacy to attain great depths like in Space Empires V? The deplomacy here seems like you are playing with machines that calculates your offers and responds in a binary yes or no.

A larger map size for those of us with machines that can handle it. The game right now barely pushes the envelope on my system. Just a couple of extra rows all around would be nice. With 9 races, it would give each one a generous area to expand into.

Well, the main thing I would like are stand alone updates instead of having to use Stardock Central, because I have no desire to possibly have SDC end up trashing my computer again. Yes, I might be the only one it ever happened to, but even so, it wasn't much fun and I have no desire to risk going through that experience again. I've bought Gal Civ 1, the expansion for that, Gal Civ 2, and now Gal Civ 2 gold, so I am a loyal customer, not being able to update without having to use an invasive program like SDC is a slap in the face.

Beyond that:

Make the Snathi a major race. They are one of the few GalCiv races with any personality (even the Drengin are just Klingon ripoffs)

Have a slider for how easy tech trading is. Or allow it to be given freely, but not sold.

Improve the viewpoints in the combat viewer. Most of them stink.

It should be made impossible to win a Diplomatic victory when anyone is at war. It seems really weird that everyone except me can be blowing each other to bits, then I come by and say "hey, everyone, ally with me" and suddenly everyone drops their weapons and dances in the streets.

Instead, starting an alliance with a warring race should require you to join in on their side. This both makes more sense and is a fairly easy way to make diplomatic victories a bit more challenging, as IMO they're too easy right now. You'll either have to have a bunch of resources to throw at peace treaties, pick a side and fight, or let it play out and hope everyone still likes you at the end.

I've always thought that, ideally, an alliance victory should require all surviving civs to be allied to one another, not just the player. If that were the case, actually, I might be more inclined to turn them on again. As it is, I never check that box.

Couple more things I forgot from my first post.

Documentation: Ingame documentation of planetary improvements, techs, super abilities and pretty much everything is often very poor. It should be quite easy to check what everything really does and update all ingame infos to be both exact, clear and up to date.

Governors: A checkbox to either have or not have governors automatically doing their job on your planets. I do lots of micro management with planets and it's tedious to empty the update queue from each new planet you conquer.

There already is one of those in the colony details screen.

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.

I'd also like to be able to set priorities. For instance, if I have a planet devoted to manufacturing, I'd like to have all new Factory upgrades jump to the top of the queue. Same with economic or research planets respectively. Even influence with my border planets.

I would like to see the Galactic Resort live up to its promise. As it is, it gives a smaller morale boost than a zero-g arena. As a super project, it should give a much larger bonus, like 100-200%, which would allow the player to have one planet with a 25+ billion popuation.

Allow for the governments to be modded!

Governments are an aspect of the game that could be heavily expanded on in DA. This is not meant as a complaint as I am an avid fan of the game, but if you guys are not going to expand this area please allow us!

While the currently available governments are somewhat decent to game play, they could easily be expanded on in other creative ways. If there is some work-a-round in the area of modding this, please let me know.

Not exactly. Now there are checkboxes in every planet's details which I can uncheck after I've gained control of the planet. Unfortunately the governors fill the queue before I can kick them out of my planet so in the worst case scenario I might have to choose-and-delete more than 20 items from the list. What I'm wanting is a checkbox to rule them all - one that makes all planets to begin with no governors assigned.

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.

i don't agree. Tech trading should be free as it is. It's already very intricate to trade techs that i can't imagine myself in front of the diplomacy screen bargaining for hours for basic techs and weak weapons. In civ many techs (particularly in the beginning) need the knowledge of previous techs to work (how can you build cannons if you don't know how to deal with iron?), in GC the situation is completely different and i think you're able to understand for example plasma weapons even if you don't know laser I.

maybe it would be great if, when you trade/steal/conquest a superior tech, previous techs disappear from the diplomacy screen (except for that previous techs that give to you cumulative bonuses like diplomatic and planetary invasion techs). But again, also in this case i have doubts. In fact sometimes you could mass more weapons with a previous weapon tech than with the new (bigger) one.


Instead, it came in my mind something i haven't seen in this topic and appeared in solver's review at apolyton. I quote:




richard

It's not just about knowing the techs, but also about having the proper infrastructure. If you've never built a laser before, you're certainly not going to have the machinery in place to use the phasor technology.

And there are numerous techs that fall into your civ definition, at least in the early game. Laser requires Beam Theory, Space Weapons requires both Galactic Warfare and Space Militarization, all of which are primarily theoretical techs that serve as mere precursor for future knowledge. You shouldn't be able to jump ahead of the theory and start building the actual weapon first. You need to know the basics.

And it's not beyond the realm of possibility that you can't build Laser V without having Laser III first. Just look at today's computer's. They've evolved from clunky boxes with very little processing into power into what we have today. And they didn't just arrive that way, things have been learned along the way that have allowed for better processors etc. These lessons could not have been learned without taking the steps inbetween. One discovery/breakthrough leads to another and another.

But anyone could understand that technology, at least once someone explain it to you. So you maybe need beam weapon theory to understand laser V but i assume, if someone teach you laser V, in the meanwhile he is teaching you also the principles of beam weapon theory. Also we are talking about a very advanced universe and if you take any sci-fi example from books to television, you'll find that principle is valid. About the necessary infrastructures to produce a particular technology, they're well represented by your industrial capacity and your economy. So you can learn medium hulls from another race but if you are too weak you could need centuries to build a ship.. I'm sorry, i know this is not the place to discuss this so i stop immediatly... but belanos if you want to expand the discussion i will follow you in another topic.

richard

It's not just about the theory of it all, but also the gameplay. Obviously there's a problem with the tech trading in the game. We've gone from ridiculously easy to just as absurdly tough. If we had this as a limitation, I think it would go a long way to solving some of the problems in that area so we can find a proper middle ground. It works well in Civilization, I think it can also work well in this game.

I'd like to see a separate executable for the shipeditor. This would enable us to design ships outside a game using all available hull sizes and dummy elements for weapon placement.

This would allow for ship creation sessions which can later be used in a game when I just don't want to mess with designs.

The editor would just be a shipstyle selection, the shipyard and ship creation screen and instead of researched weapons or modules the user can place dummy elements which he can later replace in game. Alternatively provide all weapons and modules so one can plan all ships to be used in the next games.

*Streamline starbases and reduce starbase cheese*

Right now starbases are the source of several major problems:

1) It requires a lot of micromanagement to upgrade them.

2) Military starbases and combat-related starbase upgrades are pretty useless except for sometimes in the early game.

3) They can be an incedible source of human advantage over the AI because the AI doesn't build many starbases (and they're easy for humans to take out), whereas human players can stuff 4 econ starbases per sector, throw influence starbases deep into enemy territory, etc., etc.


I can think of several changes to remedy this, some major and some minor.

1) Simply change the rules so that STARBASE BONUSES DO NOT STACK.

For example, if your planet just happens to be within range of nine econ starbases with a certain +4% production module, it only gets that bonus once rather than nine times. (Alternatively, if different starbases offer a bonus to the same thing, simply take the highest bonus rather than considering which individual modules were responsible for it).

This one change would de-cheese starbases stupendously.


2) Change starbase weapons and defenses so that they're dependent on your *general* military technology, and treated a little more like a ship.

Treat a starbase weapons or defense module as having a certain amount of space to allocate to weapons of a given tech level, with the weapon types used being those for a huge ship. So when you research Phasor, all of a sudden you have a new Phasor upgrade for your starbase's beam attack type.

A starbase would have space for a certain number of weapons modules and defense modules. For each of them you could *choose* beam vs. mass driver vs. missile or armor vs. shield vs. point defense. Increases in your miniaturization tech will eventually give you the ability to add additional combat modules per starbase.

Basically, the idea is that a starbase should always be able to defend itself at least as well as a very high end ship using your tech. Consider it a kind of "super-hull", one hull type better than any other you've got. So if your warships are crushingly superior to those of the enemy, so are your starbases.


3) Add any possible conveniences to reduce constructor micromanagement.

A key problem is that it takes so MANY constructors to translate X units of planetary production into a fully upgraded starbase. One obvious solution is to allow the use of upgraded constructors which take longer to build, but can construct multiple improvements. At minimum, a constructor with an "advanced constructor module" that builds two improvements and costs maybe 210 BC (so that total ship cost is 2x that of a normal constructor). A player could add multiple modules, and then get upgrades at 25% off, but the penalty would be they'd HAVE to use 'em or lose 'em at one starbase since all the modules are on the same constructor.

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.

Some kind of empire-wide "starbase status" screen would also be pretty useful, to give an indication of which starbase actually has what.


4) More use for military starbases.

Right now, there isn't a heck of a lot of use for military starbases. The way their bonuses are applied, they're great for small ships but not so great for large ships. Since large ships are generally superior in the game, that makes them a specialized defensive tool but not very good for offense and fairly useless in the late game.

From the perspective of making the AI fight better, the military starbase probably works best if it's used to force the player into frontal combat rather than the evasive tactics that humans are better at. It's too easy to head straight for the AI's best worlds and seize them. Starbases should help defend the best worlds... and taking them out should be unrealistic unless the starbase is taken out *first*.

One idea is that starbases could help defend worlds in their area of influence against invasion by providing a soldiering bonus. Their presence hampers the logistics of the invading fleet, etc.

They could also support interdiction modules - reduce the speed of invading warships (perhaps not quite as potent as the Yor ability, or that sort of nerfs the Yor ability).