I'd like to see three things changed: trade, espionage and ability costs.

Espionage was discussed a lot in this thread, so no need to add anything new.

Trade is worthless now. Maybe, just maybe, in some cases it's good way to get money, but it falls far, far behind comparing to almost all other coin minting strategies. Even Neutral Korx with 5 points spent on extra 30% Trade have very mediocre income with all 12 routes filled. Sure, there's diplo side to trading, but cost is just too great for possible benefits.

Many abilities have different impact on game depending on initial settings. +30% military production in Tiny galaxy is so more powerful than the same in larger one, where almost all + prod techs can be researched. Add resources into equation and some abilities become rather redundant. Worst ability cost-wise is trade routes imo. With hard-coded limit of 12 and price of 3 per route it's utterly useless in all but smallest of galaxies. Why trade can't play bigger role even on larger maps? Scale number of trade routes/trade income based on galaxy size or on number of habitable planets.

Even better, drop freighter idea completely. Just substitute with Economic treaties, which bring different profit depending on Trade level and number of hostile units in spheres of influence of both trading partners. Something among the lines of Alpha Centaur. Micromanagement != fun. Of course, number of treaties shouldn't be limited to one as it's now.

freeman commented on a previous post of mine in 72, on how the hole genocide thing is a bad idea.

I completely understand where he is coming from (and that little bit of good in me agrees) but you automatically commit genocide anyways each time you invade a planet. regardless of how terribly outmatched the enemy may be, you have to kill every living being on a planet to take it. I just think some more variety in invasion options before even building transports would be cool.

better yet, expand on those information warfare strategies. lets say that I can turn part of the population to your side, why not be able to start a revolution with something other than culture.

maybe warships could support invasions from space. If they were in the same fleet as the transport (or the transport had weapons) , they should be able to call in orbital strikes on enemy positions.


how about surrender. if I were one of 3 billion people witch was about to be invaded with the same number of troops, supported from space and the air as well as with whatever bonus they chose, I would probably be somewhat persuaded to join their empire. would you?

just my thoughts

Which simply vanish after, also btw. I'd certainly dispatch reusable (made of real visible matter paid for) ships before even wishing for any new alternate invasion tactics since to me, it doesn't make sense to send in troops to a planet, win it through hard fought battles and not board it right back to go to another objective nearby. That very next is Lost? It was destroyed by defenders, then.
Colonies, i understand.
But transports, it's just plain silly unrealistic.

There's a simple solution to the problem of allies and spies: Making an alliance would automatically give both sides:

1. Ship Vision
2. Planet Vision
3. Advanced Intelligence

Breaking an alliance would remove these benefits for both civs.

This seems pretty easy... they did it in SINS!

Well, no one but me seems to think this way but -

More Diplomatic options - Levels of diplomatic relations for talking to other Civs, where "face to face" meetings are unusual occurrences, a'la "Sire, the Drengin have approached us through the Terrans regarding some military issues. They seem honestly concerned . . ."

I would love for the AI's to have more options in discussion trees, something on the order of a low level chatbot - one get's tired of being threatened with annihilation in the same way all the time.

I think I mentioned in another thread I think the ability to cheaply 'license' technology, rather than sell it outright, would be useful, though I think it should be limited - there are technologies that just don't work as 'Black Box' technologies, ut wouldn't it be fun to just license doom ray tech to some minor race on the Drengin borders?

Jonnan

You're definitely not alone here, but I don't expect much diplo change for the 2.0 effort. The real problem, I suspect, is that adding diplo options for players would require *lots* of background coding to enable the computer civs to use the stuff effectively.

The tech licensing thing seems interesting, especially in the context of the TA tech trees. But maybe it would work better as the Super Trader ability and not a universally available option.

I'm gonna go off a bit on a tangent here and suggest something along the lines of graphics rather than features.

I personally would like to see more shaders in the game. Maybe some shaded exhaust from the engines, maybe some reflections and bloom on the metal. One of the great things about shaders is that they can do all sorts of neat stuff without taking a lot of memory, since all they are are mini-programs running n the GPU.

In addition, I'd like to see the lights placed on the spacecraft actually light up the side of it. Right now, the only thing they do is to light up themselves - they really don't light up anything around them.

These graphical things may seem pretty minor, but they really mean the difference between feeling like the graphics of previous generations of games versus a game made recently.

Sure, the higher res textures help, but you can only go so far with textures when the lighting and shading are lacking.

I'm not sure why you don't think anyone wants that, I see that request all the time and I've been saying it since I got here. I'd also like diplomatic negotiations between more than 2 parties at once, for starters. Not 100% sure how it'd work out but it'd sure be fun thinking about and designing. Is it alot of work? Sure, but that's the expectations we should hold when we're paying as much as it cost to buy the original game for two expansions.

I often give ships away to civs. It would be helpfull if there was a way of tagging the ships you want to give away so that I do not have to write the ship numbers down all the time.

I'd like to see ..... no bugs.

You can rename the ships; I usually go with something that will appear at the top of the list, like a1, a2, a3, a4, etc..

It is tedious, but less of a hassle for me than messing with paper & pen.

This seems like another swell spot where a context menu could really help. Use CTRL to get a multiple selection of ships (or just a single fleet), and right-click to get a menu that includes Give Ships To command with a submenu listing civs you can currently contact. Kind of like the Send To command in Windows.

I like this. Conversely, you could have a supernova mega event that would destroy a star system, creating new asteroids or resources to mine.

There have been many excellent suggestions so far. Some of mine are variations on those:

1. The ability to upgrade all ships of a certain type in a fleet, not just in the whole civ.

2. Have spies not only gather intelligence, but destabilize planetary sentiment so that planets "flip" to your side more quickly.

3. Create a device which allows you to harness the power of a star to say, increase production by 2 or 3 times, but will result in a reduction of planet quality for the planets in that star system. Maybe only allow one of these devices per civ, or something.

4. More robust civ info screens. One thing that really irks me is the inability to sort planets by influence points. This should be a column right next to the income, production and research summries.

5. Planetary economic bonus tiles. I suggested this for Gal Civ2. There are research and production bonus tiles...why not econ ones?

6. Orbital defense platforms of some type.

7. Race-specific victory conditions. For example..for races that build things like temples and shrines, have a victory condition that plays into that, like Arnorian Enlightenment or some goofy name like that.

8. Better auto ship designer. Is it me, or does this feature seem to be somewhat "single minded"?

9. Someone suggested dropping freighters or trading all together. However, I think that it could be tweaked to be a lot more fun. Something like commodities trading, where you have a planet where a highly coveted spice grows wild, and another race has a planet with large deposits of a rare but very strong and light metal occur. You could trade one for the other, increasing your HP, with the other race increasing their happiness level.

10. Gifting fleets as well as individual ships.

Hope that wasn't too long or too stupid.   

Although in early software writing, a bug was really an insect jammed in a relay contact, today's bugs are much more complicated issue. As software gets more complex, so do the bugs.

A software program that has no bugs has yet to be written!

OK, how about a full 8 hours of game play without a crash? Is that too much to ask?
I'm getting tired of having to spend hours getting my games to work.

Oh yah? I know one. It's called hello world. It's probably the easiest program to write that actually does something and I think it would be hard to find a computer that it wouldn't work on. It's about 3 lines of code!

I once had a teacher use that as an example of code that looked fine, even though it had a memory leak - {G}. I can't remember which variation of C it was in at the moment.

That said - Another Suggestion - found ships *besides* Precursor/Lucky Rangers? Humongous battleships would, one might think, be the least likely thing you would find.

"You have found an ancient scout ship - in working condition! While Unarmed the vessel has extraordinary range and sensors . . ."

"This ancient Starbase appears to have been a research center at one time - our scientists believe they could spend years unraveling the log entries - We already have an improved skin lotion!"

"My god, the weapons on this ancient starbase are still serviceable - if the power had been online, it would wipe out fleets. One wonders . . . what was it meant to defend against . . ."

Or even just a hulk in space - a special, un-upgradeable 'starbase' with just a few sections (Research facilities, shields, 0 engine speed sitting in deep space)

Various other thing would just flesh out other precursor ships - scouts, fighters, destroyers, et al.

Something that might be nifty for immersion purposes - 'damaged' textures for jewellery. One presumes that precursor rangers found on Interplanetary Excavations were probably not found in mint condition - there's something cool (to me) about the concept that the big, bad arse 10,000,000 year old ship that we can barely keep running *looks* like a big bad arse 10,000,000 year old ship -

All I want is for Stardock to code in some extra super abilities, so that your custom race can have a unique one (as opposed to, say, reusing Isolationist).

I don't have any ideas for them, but still.

I really like the previous suggestion though too, though I think it would be cooler as something other than a mega event. It would certainly be neat to be able to find and lay claim to remnants of the Precursors floating about in space. Maybe change the ascension victory, make it so that if you wind up controlling a certain percentage of these for some time, you suddenly discover the difference between them and your own race (ascension victory). In the meantime, said hulks give you certain bonuses, like starbases.

Say you have an Arnorian battleship with disabled engines that you've found. Say this same battleship has long-range weapons, and so can provide a huge attack assist bonus to ships within 1-2 p. of it. Something like that, that provides a traditionally unavailable bonus (maybe an ancient starbase with -5 to enemy speed?)

I mean, considering how much we lower races move about in space during a game, blowing up ships and etc, we must leave lots of garbage all over the place. Who knows how long the Precursors were there before our game took place?

I like those ideas very much. It would make the game less sterile if we could discover surprising things in space that vary from game to game ...

I know that there is no "perfect" program but still ...

I am not saying that GC2 is a big BUG to track down, personally the only thing that I dislike is the fact that when I alt-tab the game, it freezes, but my idea was that I see people asking for new things when the already programmed features have some minor problems.

So my point was, and I think the GC team has this priority too, to "balance" the game at this point and afterwards to add new things.

All in one GC2 is a great game, that's why I bought it, I haven't had any major problems with it and I hope I won't have any in the coming future also.

Oh - I like his version of my idea better that I do *my* Version - make the ascension crystals ancient precursor starbases and ships!

I'd like to be able to change the icons on the main map. Or at least assign the icon I'd prefer. It seems when you put a survey ship in a fleet, the icon for the fleet uses the tiny survey icon. I have a Battle Fleet with a fleet scout/survey unit and it has this tiny little icon, instead of a BIG HUGE ICON!!!

I think that makes more sense than some crystal floating about in space...

Fixes for diplomacy please. - Rework values so AI doesnt trade low pop planets and doesnt go to war for peanuts .At same time make it easier to trade planets and ships for OTHER planets and ships. As it stands AI wont trade high pop planet for my whole empire and surrender on top of it, while he will happily trade pq 26 world with low pop for a couple of good techs and declare war on anyone for half of it

(BTW I play on suicidal so all that problems are not remedied by higher level of difficulty).

Actually, I just thought of another thing I'd like...being able to upgrade a starbase on the first try. That would be nice.

Oh - UI improvement please -

If I have the colonies sorted in a specific order on the colonies screen, click a colony, work on it, and then clink the next or previous colony button, it should go to the next colony in the order I sorted it in.

I'm not quite sure what it does now - maybe the date of first colonization, but it is really annoying that when I have it sorted in a specific order, that has no effect on the order you go through the colonies in.

Mission Prioritization would be a neat feature too - if there's no anomalies in range, I would like ships to 'fall back' to exploration -

I'd love to be able to 'program' waypoints as well - all ships arriving at waypoint A should go to waypoint B, then to waypoint C, to create patrols, et al. That may be something the AI couldn't use properly, but the AI also has less *need* for something like that.

Thanks - Jonnan

I think you can do something similar to this right now. In the ship options you can choose to have a ship both explore and find anomalies. You are right though...this is not the default setting, and you have to do this manually.