I think researching new things should be improving an object that to have greater yield and less maintenance. You shouldn't research to get the most expensive and ,obviously , the most *best* one. (Excuse the poor grammar right there.) Improvements should improve your empire all around, not a double-sided-axe your empire.

Which brings me to my next statement. You should have more options to pick from other than one factory. If you want an extremely cheap factory with a moderately high yield, you should be able to pick it. If you want to pick the biggest darn factory in the galaxy, you should be able to pick it....at the expense of your wallet of course.

PS: Is there an easy way to make research even slower? I know I could go in and double all the research costs manually, but I was just wondering if there was a slow tech mod for DA...

Woot! Finally. Maybe starbases can start holding there own in combat.

Yes!

i don't really agree. better stuff costs more money; that's what's common sense to me, anyway. but i guess in strat games you usually don't pay for your production in money but in resources (shields in Civ, minerals and gases in StarCraft). the only resource akin to these in GC2 is money, and everything you build is to either make more of it or put it to good use. even though that might not be the usual way of doing things, i think it's a lot simpler and easier to play than traditional multi-resource game models.

the slider system is another issue (i mean, if i've got the cash for it, why should't i be able to fully fund all my facilities? but i'm not about to get into that as a request).



i'll politely second that, and also add that a while ago i tried to get a disussion going about general changes for the ship editor, detailed here. there were a few modest ideas, and i think they were mostly good ones.

As a modder always working on creating a bigger, better, longer tech tree (as I always tech rush on gigantic maps and so exhaust the whole thing quickly), one itsy bitsy change I would like to see made is for there to be independent race values for beam, MD, missiles, PD, shields, and armor in addition to the default increases to weapons and defenses for racial abilities. That way I could make a tech like, say, "case hardening" that makes missiles 5% stronger, or "ultra-dense materials" which make armor 5% more resistant and do both without having to include other weapon or armor types in the tech. I'm not saying a new racial ability selector needs to be added for each at the choose abilities screen, just something like Logistics or Miniaturization where it lurks in the background for modders to play with if they want to for their own ends but not necessarily something that will impact a normal game in any way. Though, as it does not impact a normal game in any way, I doubt this change would be priority.

Repair ships would be a good addition, a module that increases by some percentage increases the repair rate of any ships in its fleet at the end of a turn; perhaps an additional use for the constructor module. Likewise, a jumpship would be fun, a module that increases the speed of a fleet by one, two, three, etc. In short, an increased role for support vessels would be nice, instead of the situation at present where support vessels are either TTs that follow the fleet or scouts that poke ahead of it. A reason to integrate non-combat components into combat fleets would make for an interesting depth addition to the gameplay and combat for those who seek it.

Bulkhead component, adds to the HP of a ship it is on rather than the defenses. Cheap, but very space prohibitive.

More spy missions. In addition to sabotaging improvements, I think there should be a variety of missions, such as:

* Sabotaging ships; planting agents to lower the speed, range, weapons, or defenses a ship so long as they are planted there. Blowing the ship up might be fun, but it seems like it would be an extremely cheap method of sniping enemy fleets early on unless that particular mission had a low success rate. 50% chance of the spy reaching an escape pod if you blow up the ship with him on it, allowing you to place it elsewhere, no chance if someone else blows it up.
* Diplomatic missions; infiltrate another race's foreign affairs branch and work to either improve or damage relations between two races. 75% success chance, 20% failure chance, 5% oops chance (has the opposite of intended effect).
* Influence mission; spy goes about promoting

Hi!

Any chance for a planet-build governors (like in GC-1), that automatically fill-up empty tiles or upgrade buildings by their user-defined settings?

BR, Iztok

I'd like to see some better management of ship components, right now if one uses a lot of modded shipcomponents it's a shore to sift through all of them to get to the ones I want. Maybe something like a favorite tab where I can mark a component as a favorite and it'll show up there so I don't have to go look for it again.

Also when swichting tabs (still talking about components) it would be nice if the previous tabs remembered where they were so I don't have to scroll from the beginning again when I go back to that tab.



KK

Yes and yes.

VERY good idea... it'd be great if it could be one space, so that "left-over" spaces on hulls could be used for something. If I could mod this, it would've been done already.





As a provider of some modded components, I would very much like to see this too.

I think it'd be too much of a pain. The "style" system could be a major obstacle: some components don't even have a unique ID: the xml references "Structure 301," and this refers to a different structure for each of the predefined styles! I suspect that would have to change first. I suspect there are more pressing wants. Oh well...

Shouldn't it work with using the

The list of changes looks great! I can't wait for even more improvements for starbases, I love it. Is there a limit to how high you can send their HP I wonder??

I like the new anomoly changes as well. Should really help the "all ships can survey" ability. I sympathize with Iztok wanting to be able to turn them off completely... but if they are respawning that might prove difficult.

As for some of the other ideas mentioned - i agree with Oldstatesman. I really would rather you not change the focus system and the current balance.


This is a suggestion I would like to second. I would love a "primitive" or "caveman" setting where even with huge tech output you can still only get a few techs. Keep wars at the low end of the tech tree... even on the top difficulty levels!

- Wyndstar

You guys going to switch to hexes from squares? Great work! Looking forward to 1.7!

those are pretty close to two of the suggestions i made in the forum i linked above. needless to say, i agree with them completely. taking it a step farther, it'd really be nice to be able to group whole sets of components, maybe even label them and set up custom tabs for each ship (the idea here is that i'd be very nice to be able to view the comps for a specific 'chunk' of some of my ships). when i build ships, i use A LOT of kryo's offsets; it'd absolutely rock if i could label which ones were doing what, instead of having to mess with each one to see what's attached to it. i'm certainly not a programmer, but it seems like this custom data could be stored in a separate file or separate section of the same ship files, so that the program would only need to access it... even if that's not the case, wouldn't it be mostly text anyway and not impact the speed of the game?

something i suggested a while ago and thought i'd try again: a new jewelry component that displayed the individual ship's name (similar to the race logo components) would also be exceptionally cool.

Hello,

One thing that I would like to see has to do with old/obsolete ship components. Once we research say Laser V, whats the point of having the option of building laser IV parts on a ship? Either the cost should be lessened for older technologies, or just have them removed from the build options. If the ONLY difference is that the older ones take up more space, then why even have the option of building them. Since they are of an older technology, they should be cheaper right? By the time I get to Laser V, Laser I should be cheap by comparison, but take up more room. Does this all make sense.
I'm also not a very big fan of the new espionage play.

Thanks, and keep up the good work

As always, Stardock, you guys excel at listening to your fans. I haven't played Civ IV or Age of Empires III in I don't know how long. DA is awesome.

- I would like to again ask for an official map editor. Modding just isn't the same without a fairly simple, straightfoward, and officially supported map editor. I'd even pay for it. I know you've said in the past that adding a map editor doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit standpoint, but considering how many updates to games I've purchased on XBOX Live, the model of $5 or so for an add-on works.

Look carefully at the stats for the weapons. Sometimes, they are actually cheaper or smaller than the final form is. For example, Phasor VI does one extra point of damage, but costs more than the previous models and sometimes actually takes slightly more space than the last versions did. Another example would be if you want to stick to the cheaper forms so as to not break your bank with overly pricey ships.


Oh, and can you PLEASE make the AI more agreeable when it comes to tech trading or dealing, Brad!?! For Christ sakes, I getting only around 400 credits in exchange for something as valuable as advanced barren world colonization or terraforming is just ridiculous!!!  

Well the really ridiculous part is if the tables were reversed (Trying to buy it from the AI instead of selling ). They value the tech alright. TOO MUCH. You'd need more than 10x that amount. Sometimes, late early game to mid-game - I still wouldn't get a trade if I gave them all my techs that they didn't have, all my cash and all my IP.
Anyways, I've gotten used to not trading with the AI anymore. After that, I became bitter at trading. Why bother? You're going to get screwed is what I end up thinking.

Other than that, I'd like to say GC2/DA is a fine game overall and I love the improvements made on it.

Another suggestion, a function for mining ships to auto mine in the same way survey ships can be set to auto survey to save a bit of the micro managing. Also, an auto colonize option would be nice too, something you can toggle to have all the colony ships you build automatically select the nearest unique world, so you don't have dozens of ships latching onto a single world and all flying at it, then colonize it. This would be extremely useful in the late colonization phase when you've taken all the choice planets and still need to fill in all the class 1-7s that are everywhere so your enemies don't get a shipyard on your front porch.

Oh, and planet design templates that can be saved would be nice too for a time saver. Instead of having to click Starport>Industrial Sector>IS>IS>IS>IS>Quantum Powerplant>Neutrality Learning Center>NLC>NLC on every planet with ten spaces on it, it would be nice to just click a template tab, click the template you saved as "Standard 10+ Base Start" and have it place all of that for you. Would save on the clicks and time, which would be nice during the late colonization phase when you have dozens of colony ships at a time that you have to manage each turn.

I thought they already did. Does not clicking "Automate" fulfil this function. Works for me, the ship will build/upgrade the nearest asteroid and then move on...and so on and so on....

Is this not what you mean?

STARDOCK YOU GUYS KICK ASS! THANK YOU! WOOHOO!

I'll look again but I haven't seen any button that does that. If there is, that is what I was talking about.

Yep, indeed there is. In the left pane of the ship function's window, click Automate, see here,



Hope that helps

That does, a great deal. Thank you much.

it took me a while to see all the new buttons on the DA UI, but i think that testifies to 1) how little read (or look for) instructions, and 2) how seamlessly they weaved the new features into the existing UI.

Sounds like an awesome set of new features!

How hard would it be to add slightly better support for hot seat mode? You guys are about 80% of the way there already, by using the ctrl+shift+z command. All that remains is to somehow keep the AI from making decisions for the second player when the 'End Turn' button is pushed.

No, it's nowhere close. Hotseat will not happen in a patch--there is far more stuff to be done than just that to make it practical as an official feature.