Hey guys. We're looking at ramping into Rebellion development now that 1.2 is out, and I'm looking at core work we could do while simultaneously working on Rebellion specific features. These would be things we could look into patching into Diplomacy while we go forward with Rebellion, so this isn't a feature request thread. There are really 2 types of things I'm looking for.
1. Long standing complaints, bugs, and glitches: Anything that's existed in Diplomacy, or previous versions that we might be able to fix between major tasks. I know many of these have likely been posted or reported, but combing through all the threads seems rather daunting in addition to actually getting some programming done.
2. Realistic concerns and mechanic suggestions: I can't make the game multi-threaded or 64-bit, and I can't make the AI scriptable in Lua, python, XML, or legos, I want to get that out of the way first. What I can say is that if you think a certain part of the game is a real mire or CPU bottleneck (like say the empire tree) I can focus some attention on that and see if there are any optimizations the team might be able to make now that we have some memory to play around with. I can also see if there are design or balance concerns we might address, though these are harder to deal with as they require a certain amount of bureaucratic process to actually be implemented.
I won't guarantee we get most, many, or even any of your suggestions in, but in a perfect world I would love to give you guys as much as we can in terms of the products you want and deserve, and if I can pluck a few cherry suggestions from the community then I will certainly do so.