Having morale be dead to the Yor. The Yor are machines, which means that there are good odds that morale would have no effect on them whatsoever. Being machines, its much more likely that individual unit maintaince would be an issue (probally a large upkeep cost for large populations).

The same goes for taxes. Why would they have a tax system when its more likely they would be more concerned about efficiency? Instead of taxing individuals, they would work them like machines, always trying to achieve maxium efficiency.


The Yor might not be the only civ that might work differently. We don't know much of how to expect the Thanlans to turn out, but as I understand them, one would expect their hive system might function similiar to Yor, with maintaince costs to support their hive structures. The same for the Krynn, who are practically ready to give their lives in a Ji'had. They probally have a maintaince costs for their temples (Tithes).

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.

Two new hull sizes, gigantic and imense.

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?

One thing you guys are slightly missing is that the Yor, while they are machines, are ~sentient~ machines. And sentience, depending on your philosophical views, implies free will. Free will implies dissention. Therefore, the Yor have Morale just like everyone else, they just have different ways of handling it. Same with taxes.

Now the Thalan... The Thalan are a good contender for not having morale. Having a hive mind does tend to do odd things to concepts like morale and taxes... I can see how they could still have them, if it is a loose hive mind where individuality is still existent. But in a "true" hive mind, where the entire race shares one mind, morale and taxes are moot points because dissent is impossible.

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.

Sorry if any of this has been mentioned before but I'm too lazy to look at the moment   

- Make the planet list show the planet type icon so we can see if they're colonizable or not.

- Make the end of turn report window minimizeable. Example why this would be helpful: I lose several defender ships in one turn. This way, I can zoom to the planet that lost defenders, minimize the report, change production or buy a replacement defender, maximize the report and go to the next planet. There are several good reasons for a change like this and would be great in my opinion.

- Be able to click on the economy display in the lower left of the screen to cycle through showing how much you are making per turn instead of total money. I like this so i don't have to hover over or check the finance screen for the info so often.

- Option for a fleet on auto attack to toggle auto attack off after it's taken damage. This way it doesn't keep attacking at reduced strength. I can send it in for repairs.

Thanks for making a great game even better.

i like this idea, it would be cool

I got my reasons for the minimizeable end of turn report mixed up. I'd still like that feature but the example I gave was whacked heh. It's more for events not centered around planets since you can zoom to a planet, make changes, and go back to the report.

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!

Very much agree. Alliances should always be tradable, even with tech trading off. I've run into the very same problem.

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.

This should be changed. Why aren't they immune to conquering ? Culture-flipping is another way of conquest, good races are better at it, so this change should strenghten them. And if minor has as much influence as meakest member of U.P, it joins them (or there can be extra meeting of the U.P to vote this matter, let them join or not.
I always thought about minors - the younger races. Are behind technologically, have no survey ship. But if minor would colonize at least 1-2 planets ( at least from home star system if they are lucky enough to get it ) grab some resources, we have small empire, not lonely planet waiting to be conquered. Research treaty with one neighbour, economic with another, some wars between majors, and minors can stay in a game longer. Even become major race ? Win if exceptionally lucky ?
By the way english is not my native language, sorry for the mistakes.

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.

My thoughts:
1. I think there needs to be more restriction on race specific techs. Seems too exploitable. Maybe have the races value the techs at 3x their value. Another idea is that you can only trade for the chance to research the new tech, but still need to research it yourself.
2. I would like to be able to self-obsolete structures on the planet build list. I traded for Torian history and then was annoyed at all of the options available.
3. I agree that the build structure list should be earier to sort through (object locations stay the same and color coded).
4. I really wish the race bonuses were modified. It doesn't seem like some of the traits are ever used.
5. I would like to see defense structures not take up usable tiles. I think this would enable more use of defense structures, and thus make invasions a lot more difficult and interesting. It would also add more depth to certain races (ie. Arcean) who could have lots of planet defenses, vs other races (ie. Torian) which don't.
6. I would like to see the maintenance cost reduced for the Torian starting morale structure (can't remember the name). Why build it when you can get the healing pods later on (less maintenance and upgradable). Or maybe I am missing something.
7. Agree that minor race tweaks needed (stop making lots of constructors)
8. I would like to request that CTL-N resets all values. I like using random selections, but they don't seem to change when using CTL-N.
9. Sometimes, I don't like having to place the components on ships. It would be nice to have a mode you can turn on/off in which you can select the components and let the computer assemble the ship.

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'd like to see a small change in the ship details GUI. Currently, we can only view ship information while the ship is on the map. This means not only no way to see the (nice) intel report of orbiting ships, but also that to upgrade a ship we have to launch at least one of its type.

So I'd like the possibility to view the details screen of ships in orbit.

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.

I'd like to see more Trade Goods, especially ones that are unique to races. I'd like to see the Galactic Guide Book be a trade good, if nothing else.

Some randomization in what tiles will be able to be Teraform-able on planets. Some have more tiles, some have less. Or at least more consistent final-PQ numbers for lower class planets. Right now, fully teraformed class 4 worlds end up with more tiles than fully teraformed Class 5, 6, or 7 planets.

Bonus tiles can sometimes be tiles that have to be teraformed.

More attributes that modders can get a lot of use out of:

Alternate-Attributes for things other than Ship Components, and for other attributes than just Cost. Being able to trigger these alternate attributes via tech requirements would be nice too.

Multiple Tech Requirements for Planetary Improvements, Ship Components, etc. This can already kinda be done with Starbase Modules (ie: Smart Drones is a prereq for a later Economy module, so that module (and the later ones) effectively require Advanced Computer as well as whatever tech they come from. Multiple tech requirements for techs already exist too, but they don't display properly, sadly.

A placement limit tag for Ship Components. A way to specify a group of modules that you can only have so many out of that group on a ship would be nice (kinda like many of the Advanced Modules currently work).

Speaking of Advanced Modules... more of those things with different effects would be nice too

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 am red/green colorblind and for the most part I have no problem with DL, DA, or TotA. But I do have one problem (please excuse me if it has been stated elsewhere before I searched the forum but didn't find anything) in the game. When it comes to sectors on the planet map, I can't tell the difference between the Green and Yellow sectors until I either click on them or I stare at them for several seconds. It's not a big issue, it just gets a little tedious after awhile.

If the colors could be tweaked so that the green contrasted more with the yellow, it would help a lot. Or is nothing else, could the Sectors that require improvement have their color icon extended into an X mark through the center of the sector? That might be the best was to help everyone with color problems.

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.

I don't know if this has been suggested or not, but i'll go for it all the same.

What about making it so that you can add military starbase modules to terrorstars? That way they become like a mobile military base, making them a very valuable (albeit extremely expensive) asset, even more so than a terrorstar alone.

Just a thought...

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!

12 races on map same time
Also, set economy spending at start of game to 100%.