These ideas are probably too radical of changes for an expansion. How about having the United Planets more like the UN in Civilization IV? That is, civilizations elect a secretary general every so often, and the secretary general chooses resolutions to vote on.
Even on beginner, they can be quite aggressive. Also, try putting ships near their planets and building influence starbases. That can lead to wars.
If there are hundreds of habitable planets, I just build econ capital on the planet with the most farming resources. I build manuf. and research capitals on planets with the most manufacturing and research points. I'm not quite sure if that's the best strategy, though.
Defenses can be useful on large and huge hulls. Huge hulls actually have a good chance of beating small Dread Lord ships if they have a few shields and a lot of weapons. With them, use enough weapons to get a 1-hit kill of a heavy fighter or an escort. Build a lot of them and group them in fleets. Also, make extremely fast transports. Use the fleets to kill defenses, then move the transports from your own planets to the enemy planets. Use Traditional Warfare to invade. You can almost always beat
Don't use defenses either. They just waste space you could use for weapons/engines.
Try putting a lot of weapons on cargo hulls. The Dread Lords will kill all your ships in one hit anyway, and cargo hulls can carry more stuff. Also, use fleets of all tiny hulls. Tiny hulls are a lot cheaper, so you can make bigger fleets faster.
Now, it works normally, except with no labels on buttons. How do I fix that?
A while ago, my game had a bug in it. I tried to reinstall it. After that, it loaded, but buttons had no text on them. I uninstalled and reinstalled, but that didn't fix it. It crashed every time I started a game. My debug.err contents are as follows: Debug Message: Version v1.0 last updated on: Mon Feb 6 12:52:05 2006 Debug Message: Could not find a TGN Serial No. Debug Message: *********DXDiag info follows.********* System Info Time: 6/13/2007, 14:13:16 DirectX
