I wish that there was some sort of notice as to the extermination of another galactic race - I am always a bit surprised to find another race suddenly vanished off the face of the galaxy without notice.

I'd like a quick available planet report for ease in selecting appropriate worlds for colonization. This is a common request.

Also, where can one go to find out the modifiers/benefits from wonders and trade goods AFTER they are created? It would be interesting to know where all my modifiers are coming from...

I don't know if it has been mentioned and I'm too lazy to read all posts but I find it very annoying that if you close the detailed planet view the right side panel resets to the map/charts panel:

1. Show the planet list.
2. Show planet details.
3. Click 'done' to close the planet details.
4. The right side panel resets to the map/charts, why?

Another minor thing, sometimes I want to see the details of what a planet is producing (how much was the morale boost of that thingy being built?) and it wasn't obvious to me that I could show the details by clicking on the 'Military' or 'Social' label. It would be nice with some indication when the mouse hovers over something that can be clicked.




~SDC~

Money not spent should go back into your treasury. It's a hassle to have to adjust the military and social sliders down to zero when your not building anything in military or social just so you don't spend money for nothing. If your not building anything in those catagories then the money should go into your treasury.

Ancient Warrior makes an excellent suggestion.

Also, it appears far too easy to accidentally make irrevocable decisions. Particularly, there does not appear to be a way to "undo" a build once you have started it. Accidentally starting a build on turn one or two can destroy your treasury because you can't undo it...or can you?

And...colonisation. I keep accidentally colonising really bad planets. How about a pop-up or an option to have a pop-up to confirm things like colonising a planet?

A wonderful game, but these little things keep popping up. I hope they are easy to adjust.

Just an idea I had about the setup screen. You can adjust the likelihood of finding habitable planets (e.g. abundant) and the way the stars cluster (e.g. tight clusters) with the BonusPak, I'd quite like to see something that can adjust the amount of stars on the map. Maybe sometimes play with loads of stars with few habitable planets, or maybe with a few stars with loads of habitable planets. Perhaps call it "star density"......
....unless there's a way to do this already that I've missed ?!

Trade Suggestion.

I noticed that a lot of people are mentioning the difficulty of trades with foreign empires.
Some talk of auto-trade to make choosing what the opposing empire will accept rather than just clicking the choices until it changes color.

How about an auto-compromise.
I know sometimes in games I'll offer XYZ for ABCDE, or try to trade LeClair for Forsberg, how about having the computer say, "No, I don't like that, but if you add such and such..." Or "That's not bad, but how about if I just give you ABCD" or "ABCDF"?

That way it is a little more interactive, more like another player rather than a math equation with no feedback other than a color change. Makes it feel more alive.

When I click the "Turn" button and have the Planets tab displayed, it should automatically update that tab--I shouldn't have to click on it again.

Otherwise good.

Oh, and cleaning up the PDF with better resolution text, bookmarks, etc would be nice.

AI and Reasons

The AI knows why it is grumpy (or happy) with you. It would be nice to have them give their one of their top beefs as a reason for demanding tribute. For example, "Your starbase USS Homer in 0.3 has too much culture impact on our people. Give us ... to let us overlook ..."

Presently I find that I don't know why the AI decides to come after me. It makes it feel random, although I'm confident it is not.

/ds

~SDC~

1. The arrow keys would be more usefully employed to move the map, instead of the selected ship (this could be a user-selectable option if others prefer to move ships that way). Also, a deselect unit key and/or way of clicking to deselect (left-click on empty space, preferably).

I would like to see more specialized combat ships and units, including ships that have particular strengths and corresponding weaknesses (rock, paper, and scissors-like, but not absolute), so that it is not simply a race to build the biggest ships only. I.e., make the use of balanced fleets worthwhile. For example, (assuming they don't exist in some form I haven't seen yet in the game):

2. Planetary bombardment missile: one shot like the bonuspack's missile unit (which I haven't seen in action yet) destroys one random civilian structure or starbase module. It can only be intercepted by a Missile destroyer or defended against by a Patriot missile installation built as a planetary structure or starbase module.

3. Missile destroyer: mobile version of the Patriot missile installation, no offensive strength, shoots down missiles within range.

4. Missile cruiser: produce/fire one type of missile (selected from available missiles) per turn.

Planetary sliders to adjust the budgets for each individual planet would be great, as would automatically returning to the treasury any money spent on an empty production queue. Or maybe this would be another option (or in addition to the sliders)... add the following projects into both build queues instead of the "Nothing" option...

Return to Treasury (money spent is added back to treasury)
Emergency Fund (placeholder project that can NEVER be completed, just saves up money for future production)
Divert to Social/Military (diverts funds from Military to Social or vice versa)

This way you could, without changing sliders, have all spending except research going into one queue or the other, or returning to the treasury, or just stockpiling so you can quick-build a project when the need arises. Of course... this would add additional strategy elements to the game that would need to be accounted for in the AI.

Just some thoughts...

~SDC~

When conducting diplomacy you should be able to click on the items you want from the other civilization and get a description of what it does. Techs would tell you their bonuses, so would trade goods, clicking on systems should tell you where they are located, etc. This way you won't have to go back and forth trying to figure out what everything is worth to you.

~SDC~

A gamma option. Please? Pretty please?

I *really* need to buy a new monitor. lol

Just finished playing my first full game (plus a number of "re-starts"), and I'll chime in with a couple suggestions that I know have been said in one way or the other already:

(1) Rally points. Please. When you're trying to build an offensive fleet, it's a pain to have to go to every system and pick out the offensive ships from the defensive ones in that little icon list.

(2) We *need* some sort of clearer "tech tree" layout on the research screen. Not knowing what you're researching up to is like playing chess looking only one move ahead. After a while, I got frustrated and just generally let the computer research whatever had the least amount of time left, hoping I'd get good ships sooner or later. Even a very clear, very simple tech tree map (which most games in this genre come with as matter of fact, and which there's just a really cruddy one in the PDF manual) would help.

(3) Ship combat is murky and far too quick. I don't need more animations, I just would like the option to see "rounds" of combat, including info on which ship loses Hit Points and which ships are destroyed... one at a time! Seeing 30 ships just "vanish" after one shot of an alien vessel doesn't help immerse me into the conflict, I just wonder what happened exactly.

~SDC~

I didn't read through this entire thread, so forgive me if this has been posted previously.

I'd like to see a new forum system here. Perhaps PHPBB or YapBB or maybe UBB.

I see this board quickly outgroing its capabilities, no search, no subforums, etc.

http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Discussion_Boards/ Lots of perl based forums here.

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Discussion_Boards/ And lots of PHP based forums here.

Again, sorry if this has been posted already.

idle

Whenever a planet or system is named, it should always be followed by the galactic coordinates of the sector it's in. Ditto for starbases. This would make decisions a little easier to make when cycling through planets at the start of each turn.


~SDC~

I would like to see ship characteristics called Shield Type and Weapon System Type.

Thus you could have weapons that are very effective against one most types of shield but not as effective against another specific type - Think "BORG"

Technology advances would give you access to different shield types and weapons types.

Also you might not have the technology to build an Ranger ship but you might have the technology to reduce their shield Type A strength by 50%, unless they invented a counter to this.

On the diplo screen, it should be possible to expand any one sub-part of the "We Have"/"They Have" bits. If I expand "Star Systems", for instance, that section would occupy the entire height, making it a lot easier to find the one I want. The expansions should be separate for the left part and right part so that I can expand Technology for me and Star Systems for them, for instance.


~SDC~

It should be possible to get a (sortable) list of:
* Tribute incoming and outgoing, showing amount, expiry date, direction, other civ involved

* Leases showing amount, expiry date, what each was used for and where


~SDC~

There should be statistics graphs per planet. For each planet, I want to be able to plot the historical development of:
- Bonuses (per type)
- Pop
- Pop growth
- Planet quality
- Maintenance
- Revenue
- Defense
- Ratings
- Morale
- Mil output
- Social output
- Research output
- Influence

I would also like for planets to remember which race they are. That's from the role player in me


~SDC~

It should say in the research screen how many research points each project needs, how many you have already spent on each project, how many remain on each project and how many you are cranking out each month.

~SDC~

So I've played for a number of hours now and generally love this game. Here are my suggestions:

1) The game badly needs a right-click interface to bring up details on techs/improvements/ships on the diplomacy and governor screens. This is one of those things that once I've got 50 hours under my belt, probably won't matter, but it sure would make the game more approachable early on.

2) Similiar to the above, since this game is basically civ 3 in space, let's go all the way. Create a tech tree interface where I can choose the tech I want to build towards and the game will just pick the correct techs until I get there. Having to print out a PDF file and post it on my wall (much to my wife's chargrin) shouldn't be my only option.

3) This is less needed, but would be really nice. I think the governers could be vastly improved with just a bit of AI added in. They should at least suggest the next improvement to build based upon the current needs of a planet (for instance they should know their planet is unhappy and suggest a morale booster).

4) Something is funky with the way ships are selected and moved. I can't tell you the number of times I selected a ship, moved the mini-map around to find a destination, and then found some other random ship moving their. I'm thinking this may be due to overloading the left button for too many purposes..

Thanks for the great game! I'm looking forward for it to get even better!

On the research screen, there should be a scroll bar in the techs list.

There should be little "?" icons next to each item that is listed in the main section so I can see what each thing does.

It should be possible to browse techs you haven't heard about yet.




~SDC~

Diplo:
The default amount of Influence to offer should be zero. Right now, I keep missing the "x for y months" line, hit the "1 influence points" line, click ok and then have to move the mouse down to the offer list to get rid of the influence. "1" doesn't seem like a useful default anyway and if it defaulted to zero then it would be a lot easier to get rid of an erroneously opened Influence offer.


~SDC~

I'm bad at maths. In the planet screen, the part that says e.g.,
Military (18 + 12)
should say
Military (18 + 12 = 30)


~SDC~