I hadn't played GalCiv for awhile but decided to preorder TA so I could check out some of the changes. I'm liking what I see so far, but some glaring things stand out to me:

The tech trading interface is still as frustrating and time consuming as ever. I desperately want "What will you give me for...?" and "What do you want for...?" options to cut to the chase. It's so frustrating to pick and choose techs you want to offer that most of the itme I just add techs starting at the top of my list until the reply goes green. Please please please improve this situation for TA -- I can't believe we're up to a second expansion and this *major* (imo) UI issue has not been addressed. Is this really not a problem for most players?

Also, the fact that we can freely trade all of the race-specific techs is problematic. Effectively all they do is add tons more tech options -- many of them simple bonuses --that have to be sorted through. If the Torians have a racial tech that gives +5 research, and I can trade for it like any other tech, it might as well be part of the universal tech tree since everyone essentially has access to it. It is functionally no different than any other tech. I love the idea of race-specific techs, but for them to matter, I think the way they are implemented needs to change. Perhaps they could be made inaccessible via diplomatic means, and only gained by another race through conquest or espionage? They end up adding little of the intended flavor when everyone can gain them by the usual means.

Yes I agree. The Yor should not have morale or taxes. They need to be more like a true collective. The same principle might apple to the Thalans. Ever seen an angry ant that starts an insurrection against its queen?

Ok some of my little suggestions.

First off i want bigger planets, not sure who else feels this way but 90% of worlds being class 9 or worse is frustrating especially with all the new buildings you can construct, space gun for example, awsome idea! but its just not worth the tile space when you only have 10 or so to play with.

For this i would say either give another option for world quality (mostly poor, mostly average, mostly good) or altneratively give each of the extreme colonization abilities a planet quality bonus (something like 2% per research maybe? 10 techs = 20% increase in planet quality)

Research should be slower it seems painfully quick even on the slowest research setting.

Yor-

Increase morale for the stalk buildings i suggest something along the lines of 10/20/30.

Give their one per planet research building a research bonus 5-10% would be good.

The Yor, in my opinion, should have some of the best manufacturing around but their % bonus building has only 20% manufacturing bonus (which is less than the best power plant). They do have that 50% bonus high upkeep building but thats an achievement so you can only build one of the things.

Sooooo in my humble opinion either make that 50% building one per planet (and increase its upkeep by 50% "you can have vast manufacturing! but its gonna cost you!") or increase their base factory manufacturing by 2 points or so.

(I've tested this as 1 per planet and 30 maintenance it does make your manufacturing worlds fairly awsome but you have to be very careful, the Yor dont have as much income as other races and this high maintenance can come back to bite you so i quite like how it works!)

Torians-

Give their Central mine a 5-10% manufacturing bonus.

Temple of memories increases empire wide morale by 1% as well as planet morale by 20% (it sounds likely it would have that effect, more temples means more planets remebering their races history, makes the old torians happy "sonny i remeber when all this were slave pens and we were worse for it!").

Arceans-

The Warrior temple has been changed and its planetary defence bonus revoked, i dont think a overall 2% increase in soldiering is worth it on its own. I'd like to see it given back a 25% planetary defence bonus and limited to 1 per planet

Increase the advanced navagation centre ship move bonus by +1 to a total of 2.

i like this idea, it would be cool

One small suggestion, when you have tech trading turned off, you still NEED to be able to trade/give the alliance technology.

The alliance tech a required by all races for an alliance victory, the player has to be able to give it to people so that they can win that way. Otherwise the opponents may never research it.

In my last game, I was playing as a diplomat trying to win an alliance victory on the largest TA map. The galaxy was pretty well split up evenly and everyone had researched alliances and I had brought them to by "cause" except the terrains. They refused to research it. We had close relations, but I had to eventually create a coalition to wipe them out because of their stubbornness

Any just a suggestion, thanks!

Nov 23,

How about a instant messaging popup which runs some scripted video cuts
from all the known races (major/minor) typically screaming about what one
of "those lowlife (insert race) diplomats have done to us now".

The content list could be immense with modding included.

Suggestion list No. 1. "They just declared war on us!"
2. "What have you heard about the (insert race)?"

Thankx,

Prof.
  

PS It might be prudent to be able to limit the popup rate for some players.

How about doing something with Survey Modules and Anomalies?
Like having to do more more research into survey that enables your ship (with specialized survey equipment) to find very rare or unique types of Anomalies.

I'd really like this option, too. Even before TA, it is unfair and exploitable that you can get any tech that your enemy has when you invade their planet. If you get lucky, you can get a tech that you are nowhere near researching, and then you can skip all the prerequisites. Or maybe just a change so that you can only steal a tech that you are currently capable of researching.

I agree that tech stealing should work like this. For example you only got beam weapon theory and you steal laserIV. You know nothing about lasers! You should be able only to steal simplest tech, laserI.

some things i thought of as i was going through the beta:

-survey moons and planets with low quality.
-more interesting (rare?) survey events with choices that affect morality.
-make initial range of civilizations much smaller and
create an upgrade to the starport for the planet to contribute to range (this will slow down the colony rush and make it more interesting)
-more invasion methods/results between races. ex. drengin use survivors as slaves (increase in production) and terrans incorporate into society (increase in influence)
-diplomatic option to warn player to leave territory and allow player to move freely in territory
-the speed of a ship contributes in some way to the defense of a ship
-attack with unit until destroyed option
-"move to top/bottom" button in build queue
-a remove all button or shift click to remove several spies at once in espionage screen
-better AI for minor races
-technology that provides war and peace dependent bonuses
-option to only watch "interesting" fleet battles

keep up the great work

I've already posted this, but it was kinda buried in with a lot of other things. This one shoudl be simple... I'd like a toggle at game setup that would let you enable or disable starting ships. In my head it would be more fun if everyone started off with nothing and had to build everything from scratch. Might not float everyone's boat, but I'd love to have the option.

What i'd like to see most is the ability to revive a race once it's been destroyed (an old ally) but you manage to take back it's homeworld.

You should have a button on the recaptured homeworld like "Grant independece to Iconian refuge" and this should recreate the race with just that colony. After that you can gift them a few new worlds.

Also what i currently don't like is that the AI always picks on the weakest player, no matter if they are/were friends of has the same ethical alignment. For instance the altarians will declare war and proceed to exterminate the terrans if the later are weak enough, even though tehy are stellar cousins. This never made any sense to me!