Thoughts and Suggestions After Winning Game on Godlike

The primary reason I won has to do with the fact that I took advantage of what I believe are serious flaws in the logic related to special ships that you are rewarded for surveying anomalies like the Nail, Raptor, Ysengard, and Praxis.

Flaw 1: You can create new ship designs that are based on these special ships.  This allows you to queue-up production of multiple instances of these ships in all of your shipyards.  Since these special ships have lower construction costs and more capabilities than the ships that you could otherwise build, I believe this is an undesired advantage.  While it is true that you can no longer queue-up the ship designs that look like the special ships after the first ship is produced, you can get around this by removing the first 2 components that make it a "special" ship.  Saving the design without these components will return the construction cost to normal, but you will still have the extra capabilities and you can queue-up production of as many of them as you want at any time.

Flaw 2: For some reason, ship designs that were made based on special ships in previous games appear in the list of ships that are available to build in my current game.  The first screen snapshot below shows that, on turn 1, I can build a ship that is based on the Raptor and, as soon as I get some Thulium, I can build a ship that is based on the Ysengard.  It looks like the only limitation is the maximum mass that is allowed based on what I have researched.  The second screen snapshot below shows that the "Raptor 13.1" ship design has 2 Disruptor Bank weapons and a Carbon Crystal Plating defense component.  Clearly, I could not possibly have researched these items by turn 1 which proves that the game is making designs available for production that have components that have not been researched yet.  Yes, the "special" ships need to be able to be produced when they have been discovered, but ship designs that are based on them should not.  If you fix Flaw 1 by not allowing special ships to be used as a template for designing a new ship, this flaw goes away but, if you decide not to fix flaw 1, you will need to address this flaw.

The way I exploit these flaws is to play a game on the "Beginner" difficulty setting with "Research Rate" set to "Very Fast".  As I discover the special ships I do not build them.  After I have researched all of the technologies that affect what can go on an ship I then create designs based on each of the special ships that have all of the best components based on each of the maximum mass levels that you can have as you research the technologies that add to the maximum mass levels.

I can then start a game on "Godlike" and these ships will be available to me.  This gives me a tremendous advantage over the other civs.

This post is related to what ships appear in the list of available ships and in what order they appear.

As shown in the first screen snapshot below, there are multiple ship designs with the same name listed.  There are 2 with the name of "Cruiser 30" and there are 2 with the name of "Cruiser 35 A".  When I create a new ship design and I give it the name of an existing ship design, I am asked if I want to replace the existing design.  This should prevent multiple ship designs having the same name, but this is obviously not working correctly.

It also looks like the available ship designs are sorted by hull type, but there is no other sorting done within hull type.  The second screen snapshot below shows what the top of my list looks like.  You can see that constructors, colony ships, transports, freighters and supply ships are all intermixed with each other.  This makes it extremely difficult to find the ship design that you want to select.

I recommend the following sort order:

1. Hull type (low to high by mass)
2. Mass used
3. Combat rating

You may also want to consider allowing the player to manually choose how to sort the list.  For example, by name, and to flip between low to high and high to low.  You may also want to consider allowing the player to manually drag a design to another position.

I believe this one is a bug, but I leave open the possibility that this is working as designed.

If you have a ship that has a missile volley and a beam volley available to use and you choose to use the missile volley, after you are done both the missile volley and the beam volley are disabled.  However, if you choose to use the beam volley first, the missile volley is still available to use.

This means that you can use both the missile volley and the beam volley IF you use the beam volley first, but if you use the missile volley first then that is the only one you can use during that turn.

Staying on the topic of missile and beam volleys, there is a modification that I would like to request with respect to how fleets use volleys.

Here is the situation:

I have a fleet of ships that each can perform a missile and/or beam volley attack against a fleet of opponent ships.  If I perform the volley attack as a fleet against the opponent fleet, I will at most destroy one of the opponent ships.  However, if I disband the fleet and then perform the volley attack one ship at a time, I am likely to destroy many opponent ships.  However, doing this is a time-comsuming pain in the butt.

Suggestion:

When you perform a volley attack from a fleet, the game should calculate the damage to the opponent ships as though the attack was performed one ship at a time.  This would have the same effect as if you disbanded your fleet, did the attack one ship at a time, then reassembled the fleet, but with MUCH less effort on the part of the player.

I have posted this issue many times before, but to make this thread comprehensive, I am including it again.

You need to fix the issue of opponent ships on Subspace Gates.

Issue 1:  Ships from different civs can coexist on the same Subspace Gate cell even if they are at war with each other.

Issue 2:  If there are ships from multiple civs on a Subspace Gate cell and I am at war with one of them, I cannot attack the ships belonging to that civ unless I am at war with all of the civs that have ships on that cell.  I can cycle through the ships on the cell until a ship or fleet belonging to the civ with which I am at war is on top, then I can perform a volley attack against them, but that is all I can do.

This issue gets ridiculous when there are over 100 ships and/or fleets from many civs sitting on a Subspace Gate cell.

The end game experience is still very tedious.  However, I do want to say that you have made changes to reduce the tedium.  Specifically:

1. Creating Rally Points
2. Allowing you to produce a project indefinitely in the Planet Management screen
3. Allowing you to continue making a design until further notice in the Shipyard screen

However, there are still some changes you could make to improve the end game experience:

1. Give the ability to tell a fleet that has one or more transports to continue attacking the planets controlled by a specific enemy civ until that civ is destroyed or the player tells it to stop or the fleet loses half of its ships and/or hit points.
2. Give the ability to tell a fleet to attack any asset (ship, fleet, shipyard, or starbase) belonging to a specific enemy civ until that civ is destroyed or the player tells it to stop or the fleet loses half of its ships and/or hit points.

I think these 2 related changes would help speed-up the end game experience.

I really like the intent of the Ideologies and the traits within each ideology.  As a player, I have to make decisions about what ideology I assign to my custom civ and which traits I want to go after and the order in which I want to go after them.  Many of the traits give benefits that greatly affect your civ, your citizens, and your fleets.  All of that is great.

However, I think there are some improvements that you need to make:

1. You really need to make the effects of each trait very clear.  For example, the "Cooperation" trait within the "Collectivism" Ideology says that it "Spawns the support ship ""The Negotiator""", but it does not say what the properties of "The Negotiator" ship are.  How can a player know if they want that ship if they do not know what it does?  You may need additional popups to fully explain the value of each trait, but you need to go through each of the traits and make sure a new player would understand what they would get with each trait.
2. You need to make sure that, when a player spends Culture Points on a trait that the trait actually provides the benefits that it says it does.  Maybe it is just because the descriptions are not clear, but I have been unable to verify that I actually got what I thought I should have gotten.
3. You need to make clear how many Culture Points the player is getting per turn and how to increase the number of Culture Points you get per turn.  For example, you might make a popup available that shows all of the ways you can get Culture Points, how many Culture Points each one provides, and which ones the player has done.

The next topic is Executive Orders.  I have been playing for a long time and I only use these Executive Orders:

1. Galactic Festival
2. Invite Leaders
3. Draft Colonists

I do not use the rest because:

1. Their cost far outweighs their benefit
2. They are only of value for players whose civ likes pollution or crime

I have read that many players like the Telescope Takeover Executive Order, but I prefer to use the available Control points on drafting colonists.  I am able to expose the map using  Probes and the Golgi research improvement.

If would be nice if someone would go through the current list of Executive Orders and get rid of the useless ones and add in some new, tempting ones.

I do not trade with other civs because:

1. Other civs almost always propose trades that are ridiculously unfavorable to me.
2. When I want to initiate a trade I have no idea how the other civ values each of the items that can be traded.

I suggest that, when a player initiates a trade with another civ, that you display the buy and sell prices for each of the items that can be traded, similar to what you did with the Galactic Bazaar.  This would make it much easier for the player to determine if there are any items that could be traded.