I honestly thought he was using sarcasm to be funny.

At first I thought that too... but considering that this request (fixing MCC) was made several times now I am just not sure.

It annoys me that when you upgrade a ship design, all weapons and modules are removed. I like to tweak my designs constantly, and having to re-add everything when I just wanted to check if I could squeeze in another weapon after researching a new miniaturization tech gets old pretty fast.

How about leaving these components in, and instead having a button "remove functional components" in the ship designer itself? That would be easy to use and make everyone happy!

This is already in there. In the options you can (un)choose 'Remove componants when upgrading ship' or somesuch.

1) Be able to build ships and alter mini map colour (that is, see how they look against each other) without having to start a game. Anymore than one game per boot crashes my gc2 and which translates to a LOT of fiddling around to get the colours discernable.

2) No messages that give away who you’re playing against until first contact is made.

3) Breaking alliances to damage the player. Cauldyth's morale suggestion was excellent, that being anything from immediate defection to a degrading morale penalty in order to hamper diplomatic exploitation.

4) "Option to lay mine fields with a constructor and to clean them up with another constructor, in which the latter should be a bit more expensive to do." This was someone else's idea (sorry forget who) and I think it is a corker.

5) I'm not 100 percent sure on this one yet, because I've only played 1 full game of ToA. But if trade is not meant to earn more than 300bc a turn on a huge map then pls multiply this by about five. Given the interdependent nature of the trade, losing an important route/s gave the game an added depth, that seemed to counter balance the necessary warmongering that goes on.

1. More robust tech editor. I would like the tech editor to allow me to do things like enhance only beam weapons or only armor, to screen out redundant technologies (e.g. if two copies of superior logistics end up in it twice), and to sort by more than just name (eg. sort by technologies that add ship components, planetary enhancements, that alter miniaturization, or what have you).

2. Send a magic patch that will fix the damn blue screen error I keep getting several hours into a game wherein the driver gets in an infinite loop or a memory parity error comes up. As this is an error in my machine in some form, and not a code problem, I request extra magic be used in this patch. And yes, I have updated my drivers.

3. Resource sliders. Something to increase or decrease the number of economic, influence, military, research, and morale resources in the universe to alter their role in the game as you can do with asteroids and to a lesser extent anomalies.

4. Closed borders. I would like a system to be put in place wherein you can kill ships that enter your territory without starting a war until you open borders with a race. You still take a PR hit for doing so, however, you cannot trade with any race you have not opened borders with. If you cannot police your space effectively, you still can't keep other races out but it is a little silly that you can have a massive spanning empire and nobody thinks a thing of it when another race colonizes the planet next to the homeworld. If nothing else, make it optional so those who like things the way they are now can turn it off if they don't want it.

5. Bigger gal... No, maybe not. Not yet. Economic slider then, where the game gives an economy boost or penalty to all races in a game where if you select lean economy it might give a 20% penalty to all economies where robust might give +20%. That would help take some of the emphasis off of economy micromanagement for people who wish to speed up games or for people who enjoy slower games it could lend another way to slow things down.

2. Ethics needs to be redone. It is extremely advantageous for evil races to hold off on selecting an alignment until after the colony phase because they get a lot of goodies like better PQ, higher morale, better production and research, etc. just from colonizing and as soon as they select a path, all those choices go away and no more free bonuses. Ethics need to be something ongoing throughout the game instead of a fire and forget once you reach development point X. Even then, often by that point I will have enough spare money in the treasury to buy into neutral or even good despite enslaving, nuking, exterminating, sacrificing, desecrating and otherwise act with unpleasantness to every species I come across in the galaxy at large.

If an alliance chooses good or evil, they should be expected to act in a good or evil fashion and if they start drifting from that, they should start losing bonuses associated with the choice. Towards that end, there needs to be a larger downside to selecting evil. Perhaps the cruelty of evil civilizations lowers population growth due to increased violent death. Perhaps the underhanded nature of evil civilizations undermine the economy. Who knows? Either way, good and evil need to be better differentiated choices and players who commit to walking a morale path should have to uphold it.

1) Zoom-To-Cursor instead of Zoom-To-Centre

2) Fix the MCC description

3) A third tech trading option: Allow trades except for the racially unique techs ('No tech brokering')

4) Allow espionage on Minor Races

5) Allow more AI players - on Immense maps, 9 opponents aren't enough

1. Adjust map scrolling speed according to zoom level. Currently, the same scrolling speed setting will make map scrolling uncontrollably fast when zoomed in, and at the same time unbearably slow when zoomed out. This makes map scrolling unusable as a feature. Simply modifying scroll speed by zoom level would solve the issue.

2. Let the AI bring constructors when they destroy enemy mining starbases. It's still far too easy to control the majority of resources by simply parking a constructor near an AI starbase, waiting until it gets destroyed in a war between two AIs, and then claiming the resource. The AI should be a bit smarter in that regard and add constructors to fleets that are sent out to destroy mining starbases.

3. Fixing the ship autobuilder so that it doesn't exceed a hull's max size when adding components. Currently, many autodesigned ships have more components than would actually fit on the hull. I'm not sure whether AI ships are affected by this bug; if they are, this one should be top priority.

4. Make Ascension victory condition scalable - either auto-scaling with map size, or give us an option to set the number of ascension points required. Ascension victory is a nice addition to the game, and it can actually help a lot to resolve endgame tedium in games that are already decided, but having a (planned) epic game end prematurely (because ascension victories are much quicker to achieve than any others on certain maps) isn't fun.

5. Complete the TotA manual. Currently, much of what I'm doing with the new features is guesswork because of the lacking documentation.

I also think that tweaking the tech trees is important, but I doubt that this can be done with a quick fix; I think this will be a ongoing process for the next months.

Finally, I don't really understand why some people demand a decoupling of sliders. This would take one of the strategic decisions out of the game, and I *want* to make strategic decisions in a strategy game. The reasons provided seem to hint at a misunderstanding of the sliders' meaning, which is "budget allocation", not just "workforce assignment".

Deleted By LogicSequence

I very strongly disagree. At the moment I have a *single* strategic decision to make - am I going to go all-factory or all-lab? Those are the only two options I consider because any partially balanced choice is (quite highly) inferior.

Decouple the sliders and you finally have a reason to do something other than all-X without deliberately hamstringing yourself. Sounds like that opens up a lot *more* strategic decisions to me!

These damn sliders are a game breaker for me (I know I'm probably alone in that!) I've barely played this game since I figured out the all-research strategy.

Im pretty sure the MCC comment was a joke. Sorta like if everyone was screaming the Thalans are still broken (oh wait, I think they still are), and then someone busts out a "Who are the Thalans?"

Anyone remember the movie Weird Science? "Who is this GARY character??"

If it wasn't a joke, at least I got a good laugh out of it...

I havn't really played TA yet, so I can't say much about the gameplay. But there are two things I really would like:

1)Better editors!

Not to say the existing ones are bad, but they could be better. For example the tech tree editor. It is really annoying to make all the weapons and defens technologies. It would be really cool to copy a tech from one tech editor into another tech editor, and a lot of easier.
A starting starsystem editor would also be nice.

2)The possibility to have more mega events or events in general. Some kind of slider would be nice. And of course new events!

I wanted to give my take on the whole slider issue. That issue being that it doesn't make sence. So, let me state how I see it and maybe it can clear it up for some people or make it more tollerable for them. Look at the United States, one conunrty with 50 states. Each planet (state) collects taxes, these are collectd by your central government (the FED). The fed takes the money and decides how it will be spent military / research or social, split for a total of 100%. Each turn you can change how your government is choosing to allocate its funding. So if the fed decides to put more money into research there will be less allocated to the military and social.

SO, its true that planet that doesn't even have a starport will lose production due to an empire wide slider thats set more towards military. But thats just the way it is. If the US gov't wanted to put more money into education and take away from military, those staes with military production plants would complain and those without would cheer. And vise versa.

You can focus production in one area per planet. That would be like having a state decide what its doing ith the money that the fed was giving it.

So to me the slider concept makes sence or at least doesnt need to be changed.

I love the scenarios like the the drengin one (can't remember the specific name). I guess I would like to see more of them. For example, some advanced race needs to be put to rest. So you start the game and your goal is to survive long enough to overcome an already established race.

or you must research this (insert tech here) before some race uses that against you.

I would like to understand what the heck the point system is in the quarterly reports. Like your military is rated at 50..... can you itemize that please?

I would also enjoy an option to enable control over space battles. it would be a blast to have like warhammer 40k TBS minigames for taking over planets and space combat.

It would also be sweet if this happens to have techs for specific perks to ships like evasive maneuvers or dead eye.

Espionage could be a fun minigame too like you sneak around and try not to get caught or use your tactfulness to get information.

I love the game, but sometimes if I don't have a specific goal in a game then I become unmotivated. I can conquer, but it would be sweet to have shorter scenarios with alternative goals.

I also think that a break from the main TBS is also refreshing, so minigames are perfect. I think this is what the Total War series has that I love so much.

Except that's not how it works in GalCiv2. You aren't limited financially. You can be making billions in taxes every week, and have trillions in your treasury, but you aren't allowed to spend it on research and production. If your factories are running at 50%, then your research labs can only work at 50%. It doesn't matter how much money you have.

An argument can be made that it's manpower, but that doesn't feel right either. It's completely independent of your population. Besides, when you adjust those sliders, are all your research scientists really packing up and flying to a new planet to suddenly become welders in the course of a week?

Once you realize the all-X strategy is superior to a more realistic, balanced approach, it detracts from the game, IMHO.

I agree that the present inferiority of a mixed strategy is a problem. But I don't agree with your proposed solution.



Not really. If you decouple the sliders, then the obvious winning strategy is to go all-x on both sliders, which is a no-brainer.

Also, you'd have to specify how you want to implement this decoupling in game-terms. The sliders allocate your budget. You can't allocate your whole budget twice, so you'd need a more fundamental change to the way the sliders work. There are several possibilities, but each of them introduces its own set of problems, while not actually solving the underlying problem.

Imho, the underlying problem is the curent inferiority of mixed strategies. *This* should be analyzed and addressed. A decoupling of sliders would just introduce new problems without actually solving the ones you mention.

But anyway, we've digressed far from the purpose of this thread, which IIRC was to collect ideas rather than discuss them. We should take this issue to a dedicated thread if you like to.

1. Make the AI research "Alliance" MUCH faster or make the ability to have alliances with someone not require a tech

2. Fixing the Tech-Trees

3. Fix the Asscension starbase bug (sometimes after the starbases are destroyed, sold or whatever the former owning civ still gets asscension-points

4. Make the 3 sliders independant (Why should the people on my all-lab planet stop working just because the people on my all industry-planet are working at 100%?)
OR leave the 3 sliders as they are BUT make it possible to ajust them differently for every planet

5. Give the possibility to breake alliances and econ/research-treaties without declaring war

6. Make the United Planets more important (You should be able to set up a request to be voted about every x month, for example that civ x stops the war with civ y and many other things)

1. High Prirority: Fix Auto designer. not only does it use more components than possible, it uses engines too rarely and if it does, it uses outdated ones. Also it should not use sensor modules for battleships.
(also fix mcc, thalan stabase ect...)

2. Reduce the cost of spy somehow. either depending by map size or over time.
(limit the spy mega event?) Having the squelch 28 spies with 28 spies for more than a trillion credits each is no fun or "realistic".

3. Well yes nerf all x and/or buff mixed strtategy. A decoupling of sliders would be a possibility.
Like the science slider is complete independ from 0 to 100%
Social+Military =100% while being effected by the spending slider.

Atm its not a economic 100%. i can easily earn thousends of bc oder making loses depending how much tax income i get. Nor is it workforce since scientist and workers cannont simply be replaced with each other. its an artificial 1=socialspending(in bc)/industry+militaryspending(in bc)/industry+sciencespending(in bc)/science. depending how many industry and science building you got you can spend more or less bc by altering the spending between the three.

4. fix various crashes

5. improve the invasion screen further.

Okay, sure, I can go along with that. As long as it encourages me to build a 'normal' empire, I'm fine with it.

It has been analyzed. It's inferior because of the sliders and focus buttons. Therefore, to fix it, change the way the sliders work.

(Nerfing the focus button further, or even removing it completely, won't address it, by the way. Focus is useful but not crucial to the strategy)

I'd like to see a game option setting for no events at all. Even some events that are not Mega-events are disruptive enough to mess up the game for me (like, losing 1 of my four planets to a criminal syndicate or cult or something). People who like them can leave them on, people who don't can turn them off...

I really like Loupdinour's suggestion, pasted below!

5. A new item on the main menu called "I'm feeling lucky" that randomly picks a race for you, randomly picks all the other sandbox settings, but has blind exploration on. TRUE randomization lol.

There are a lot of unfixed problems that go back to dread lords, like the mysterious difference between Morale and Popularity and the fact that since alliances tech is required to form an alliance with the A.I. I is very difficult to do so without tech trading on.

-Fix some of the earlier maps to include asteroids.

-When I want to create a custom race, let me pick some disadvantages to get some advantages. (+/-)

-Make the game work under VISTA some how (stability).

-Custom Event/Map Maker. I remember reading there would be one, but I do not see it in the interface to start off with.

- Let me automatically get rid of old ship designs from previous games. I am tired of seeing "Mother IV" in my designs. I want to create new designs for every game, but I use the same names.

- Let us automatically choose to upload a CTD save game to some help site, that can then identify the problem and you can fix it in future updates.

This was talked about in the Beta, but there were some concerns that the player could cripple the race with tons of negatives and then the AI couldn't adjust accordingly. I had offered the option to give 'points packages' so that you could get say...-1 speed/+1 defense to be a 'turtler' for example.



Go into the c:\Program Files....Twilight\Tools folder to find the editors.



Uncheck the 'save designs to disk' option in the one option window.



The closest to this I can think of is their Smart Exception program (free on SDC) that will gather various crash data for them.

1) Though it's inevitable that some races are now much harder to play than others ( since they each have unique tech trees mostly), I think it's still possible to tweak them if you have spare time - otherwise casual players will only play the three-four easiest. I find some of them ( like Arceans or Iconians ) now totally unbeffiting with my gameplay style in ToA on maps crowded with several rivals.

2) Tech tweaking: ONLY normal tech rate for MV games; Thalans should have farm techs; additional unique techs ( asterisks ) untradable ( too easy to get some powerful techs rendering obsolete some uniques in your tech tree), yet at the same time it should be (slightly) easier to trade military & extreme techs.

3) I concur that the MCC should be either fixed OR the text fixed. If you only fix the text, then the best players will always continue to submit Evil games and well, perhaps the Good alignment could get at last some love to offset the dreaded 100% econ bonus???

4) Massive Scale, Doom Ray, and the military best are still too ridiculously easy to get soon in a game, sometimes rendering frigates & battleships obsolete before having the chance to build them ( another reason why I want only one tech rate for MV games ).

5) Spies should have a huge maintenance cost if you let the AI using them aggressively.