that was mighty kind of you!

i just remembered another one that's i've been hoping for, but it's actually several requests with one theme: more setup options and more map diversity.

1) i can't remember if Kryo told me or what, but i'd really like to be able to affect star color, maybe a slider that would increase the variety of star color. i'm tired of seeing 90% yellow stars.

2) make star color mean something (more). currently, the only meaning of star color is that yellow stars are more likely to have habitable planets, and purple stars always have a PQ 26 planet. maybe make it a bit more interesting than that:
-planets around blue stars produce +1 food (planets love blue light, earth planets anyway)
-planets around gree stars produce +10% research (green stars are, after all, a scientific anomoly)
-etc.

3) i'd also really love a sider or curve bar of some sort to affect the distribution of planet quality - maybe a triple slider similar to the econ sliders that'll affect the percentage of low, medium and high quality planets.

4) enable the map generator to use more than 10 skins for PQ 0 planets! LogicSequence went to all that work on his high-res mod, and it's almost a bust because I only see the same 10 planets in most systems. almost a bust.

5) i'll throw in a vote for a map editor, but it seems like it could be a big effort, so it's not top on my list.


okay... one more. i requested this a while ago. in the ship designer, i'd love it if the pages of ship pieces didn't return to page one every time i add or move a piece. it can become extremely disconcerting when building a very large and complicated ship, trying to manage what's where (especially when using Kryo's mod's offsets and clusters). the full discussion that followed my reqeust of this can be found here.

Stuff that wouldn't require any extra AI programming at all:

1. A built-in map editor.

2. More Starbase hp.

3. NO special repair modules for starbases. I don't like this idea of special repair modules for starbases - I think that players' ships should simply get repair bonuses for being within range of a starbase at all. And don't they already? I remember something about that.

Instead, just give enhanced repair bonuses that come automatically from Military Bases through Starbase Mobilization techs. NO MODULES, since it would be too hard to get the AI to figure out how to prioritize something as abstract as that. This way doesn't even require the AI re-prioritize things; if they want a strategy that emphasizes starbases, then they'll need this benefit. If not, they won't.

This might require some modification of the way AI prioritizes things:

1. Reappearing anomalies. I put that in this category because that would make Surveying ships good, so the AI would have to figure out how many to build and when. But the code for surveying anomalies DOES exist, so it doesn't seem like a change in anything but adding another possible priority to the list. Maybe I'm wrong though, since I can't look at the code myself.

2. More powerful starbase defenses. In particular, Battle Stations need a boost. A Lvl 1 Battle Station should come with 2/2/2 Attack and 1/1/1 Defense, while a Lvl 2 should come with 4/4/4 Attack and 2/2/2 Defense. I'm definite on that - battle stations, at the least, need that extra oomph if I'm going to build an entire constructor for them and then pay for it too.

All the existing weapons and defenses need at least +1 to their current values also; that Beam you get for them at the beginning should do 8 rather than its current 7, Lvl 1 Weapons and Defenses should add at least 6, and so on.

The point is that it should be quite an ordeal to take starbases down, since it's so much time and cost just to get the constructors to continue upgrading them. The unique thing about GalCiv, I thought, was the way the game handles Starbases, and yet I see a lot of players apathetic to them. Mostly because they go down easily.

Stuff that would require extensively modifying existing AI programming by adding whole new ways of thinking:

1. Using constructors to repair damaged starbases. With the modifications for starbases I mentioned above, this may not be such a great idea; I only mention it because I think it would be neat, and it would definitely make starbases as they are worthwhile.

2. Moving military starbases - I liked the idea where military starbases can be turned into a module that is then moved by a constructor from one place to another.

Now this next one's ambiguous because I don't know how GalCiv AI handles this sort of thing; maybe lots of new progamming, maybe only a little. I do know that they used to build a lot of farms and research the farm techs like crazy for one reason or another.

The Shev Method of Fixing Farms:

Here's a relatively simple way to fix farms by doing nothing more than changing the morale formula: a basic farm increases max. population by 4 billion, and increases "morale tolerance" by 1 billion. But this bonus only applies ONCE.

Say, for example, that the current morale formula reaches a certain point of planetary morale at 6 billion. With one farm, it will reach that point at 7 billion, and continue stacking population on until it reaches the 10 billion max, so a basic (lvl 0, default tech) farm does still decrease approval as a penalty for the extra population. Then if another farm is built, it does nothing for tolerance. That's where the other farm tech comes in.

A Xeno Farm, or Lvl 1 Farm Tech, would give a 2 billion tolerance, so that 8 billion population is the same as 6 billion, but still only give 4 billion populace. This goes on until the Lvl 3 Farm Tech, which gives 4 billion morale tolerance and 4 billion extra pop. max.

A food bonus tile should increase tolerance as well as pop. max., so that a Lvl 3 food tile is actually a good thing to have: with a Lvl3 Farm Tech, a 300% Food Tile would increase population by 12 billion and tolerance by 12 billion as well, meaning that you get an 18 billion planet, with approval calculated as if it were only a 6 billion planet. It sounds like a nice reward for getting that high in a once-useless tech.

Of course, I don't have the slightest idea of what the planetary morale formula for GalCiv2 looks like. It could be enough to just change any instance of some planet_population variable in calculations to

planet_population * (6 / 6 + planet_morale_tolerance_in_billions)]

meaning that a population of 7 billion would be calculated as a population of 6 billion, a population of 10 billion would be calculated as a population of 60/7, or 8 4/7 billion, and so on.

But that may not work. Somehow I get the feeling that the morale formula is more complicated than this. But the bottom line is that farms should change the way morale scales, and more advanced farms should do that in a more beneficial way rather than growing more food.

Plot recap of what happened in your game sofar and where you are when you load a new game, and epic generator would be nice, but I can be patient.

1)As said above, military starbases just aren't useful on the bigger maps; maybe they could have their range of influence scaled with the map or maybe they could be made mobile one way or another, but it would be nice if they were more of a factor.
2)I like the idea above of evil races being able to break alliances at will, you shouldn't be able to trust an evil race because they "promised" that they're your friends.
3)Good ethics needs buffing, and evil probably does too; the morale bonus and the free terraforming for neutral is just too big. Also, the good/neutral/evil decisions you get on your planets should have a larger impact on your society's "leanings"; I play Altarians, and even if I consistently take the evil choice throughout a long game, when I get Xeno Ethics I never even make it to neutral on the scale, nothing I do can overcome their natural goodness, which removes all meaning from the ethical choices.
4)This probably isn't feasible, but the one thing I really miss from Master of Orion is different species naturally liking different kinds of planets (one likes high-grav gas giants, one likes cold, barren rocks). It meant that starting to conquer another race's planets was a big deal because having a new species in your empire meant that you could colonize additional worlds effectively. MoO never really implemented it right, but it was a terribly cool idea. I guess keeping track of the racial compositions of all the planetary populations and making different worlds have different PQ or something for different races would be a little complicated. Ah, well.

Thanks! Keep up the good work, it's a great game!

Allow custom races to change the name of their star. Its annoying that my star is always named after my planet. Also allow custom races to name a second planet, like all the other races have. It's really annoying when i want to call a planet "Altair Prime", and i want to call the system "Altair", the game decides to call the system by the name of the planet despite the racecfg saying otherwise.

I apologise if this has alreayd been mentioned and/or if this would be too big a feature but How about a U.P. Secretary General or Cheif chairman of some sort.

They could be voted in or go according to who has the most Influence points, making influence points much more valuble in the game.

The U.P. Secretary General or Cheif Chairman would get to choose from a random selection issues to be voted on by the U.P. you could even give them the ability to choose more than one depending on other factors such as influence points and type of government. i.e. a Star democracy is backed more by a people than a person and it would therefore be more permissable if that peoples leader is chairman for them to pick more then one issue to be voted on in the U.P.

I think this would add a new dynamic to the game and make it more interesting politically as well as more politically involved which if i recall is what Gal civ gamers were wanting in a poll awhile ago. It would also make the U.P. more than just that random bonus or negative you may get every year.

I will be happy just to see what's broken in 1.50X fixed.

- Combat is problematic and off-type defense is broken. Please simplify combat and fix defense.

- Tech trading is all but broken. Maybe tech whoring was rampant in previous versions, but just making AI value everything ridiculously high is taking the easy way out. Rethink the AI. Also, why don't you make the Terrans and the Korx rampant tech whores themselves? Fight fire with fire.

- There are still problems with moving ships around--sometimes the movement is jerky, and occasionally you'll spend movement points and they won't move at all.

- Sometimes the cost to upgrade planet tiles is actually more than the cost just to build an improvement on a blank tile.

- Video animation for one-on-one ship combat is too slow.

- Secret Police and Galactic Resort projects don't give morale bonuses appropriate for a super project.

Another voice in the mix:

*Race customization enhanced (allow changing of logistics, tech, miniaturization, etc.)

*Add additional map features (nebulae, space clouds, super novas, etc.) for more strategy

*Decrease micromanagement, particularly for Constructors- make them work more like miners

*Create an end-user map/scenario editor

*Improve UI, as listed in this thread:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=357&aid=143715

*Enforce influence areas more, so they can be treated more like borders:
-if someone crosses one, have option to declare war (like Civilizations)
-negotiate for safe travel, even if not allies

Good luck sifting through all of these requests. Looks like you'll have enough work for patch 1.999999999!

There's a lot of great ideas and suggestions in this thread!

The one most important thing I want to see in 1.6 is going back to the offline patch model where we don't need an internet connected machine to patch (or have to archive the game over and over every patch).

I'd like whatever obscure bug that has caused none of my saved games to work, new or old, be eradicated so that I don't feel like I spent money on making GalCiv2 unplayable.

... now, that said, I do think you're doing a great job and I do have faith. The above just depresses me.

A way to customize station graphics & a way to access the ship builder outside of an actual running game.

Mmm... I wouldn't mind a polycounter display during ship building. I'm trying to be more efficient.

I'll think harder this weekend.

Revamp Spying:
1-Add tech to increase spy effectiveness.
2-Allow spies to be focused on info gathering / espionage (tech stealing) / sabotage (destroy planetary improvement)
3-Allow spies to be assigned to guard planets.

Revamp UP Council:
1-Allow player/AI to suggest agendas. Must be seconded to be voted upon.
2-Allow races to be kicked out / invited to join / petition to join the UP Council
3-Add an abstain option to votes
4-Allow votes to be negotiated via diplomacy

-Add a section to reassign asteroid production in the same manor as rally points.
-Allow ships to orbit starbases.
-I love the suggestions for borders.
-Allow the Auto Attack to remain active should an enemy come within range again.

Remove the 10 ship limit.
Allow mass production of tiny hulls (2-3 a turn) so they're worth something.
The Jagged Knife should only take out planets with less than 70% aproval, and not your capital.
Give the AI more emphasice on reasearching at least Medium Hulls and Planetary Invasion if it hasn't and it's in a war.
Do not get "Twilight" in your report if there's only a 10 Point difference in military.
War Weariness.
Make entertainment wear-off less severe.
Ecumegalopolii (Were if 40+ tiles are covered in fully constructed sectors, their effectiveness is increased)
Tell the AI,"Get your **** out of my ****ing territory, ****"
And in that tone
Change visual proportion of Mediums and Smalls, smalls are too big or mediums are too large.
Make each new weapons module on a starbase a new weapon so it can multi-target. And a tech that gives stations an inherent "Battlestation"
Respawning anomalies.
Space distasters, i.e: Blackhole, ion storm, and bring back the space monsters!
The AI still doesn't use engines. Make it so.
If a ship or fleet has more movement points than a ship entering a 3x3 area around it, have that ship intercept it.
I think we should let starbases build ships, make it start at building tinies in a seperate tech line after you research medium hulls or the 3rd industrial sector tech.
Rework spending costs for building ships

1. Epic Generator
2. more flavor to the Battle Viewer, seems like all ships have retards at the helm, like to see more of a dogfight (ie attacker maybe chases down his enemy rather than flying in circles or away from the enemy)
3. This is a wish but i would still like maybe a few options in Battle, like different fleet formations that would provide a offensive or defense bounus even positive or negetive depending on the formation of the enemy.
4. *cough*deepspace carrie..*cough*
5. little more morale  currently it does no good to build the structures unless you build them on bonus tiles, and by the way what happened to all the bonus tiles, since the lastest patch they're almost non-existant, with the exception of the homeworld.

My wish is that DA will have better performance than DL. My computer ain't the best(yet),but DL runs perfectly on it, while DA...well reeks in performance.

I lied, thats not my only wish. Other things that would make DA cool:

-orbital defence platforms, ie macguns from halo.

-When a spore ship attacks a planet, the planet should toxify insstead of having the same picture when it wasn't toxic.

-Enviroment worlds should have advantages/disadvantages

-AI backstabbing and schemes

-More ways of collecting money. Like turning asteroids into money by beaming the asteroids another race for money.

-Balancing super abilities. Superadapter doesn't do much when there aren't special worlds around

-Starbases should be managed easier. You could have a waypoint go there, have a list of the upgrades you want on it instead of it constantly pestering you on what you want built on it

-Better espionage interface. EX: Techs are color coded to whether you have them or not compared to another race's techs.

-More espionage options, have 007 spies and tuff. They wuld be super spies that are pains to remove and have powerful abilities like making a planet revolt to you. On a sie note, you should be able to see where enemy ships are in the fog if you have "Advanced" intel on an enemy.

-Better minors(?)

-Races that are better suited for radioactive worlds or taxic worlds. They Would be immune to spores and would have to research normal planets.

-Have a second in command who manages all the minor stuff when you are playing a gigantic galaxy. Micromanagement can really bite.

-Up is never formed initially. It must be formed when order is wanted/required.
EX: The goodies form the UP and start to systematically kill all the evil civs. The Evil civs band together to form the "Evil UP" which is dedicated to suffering and hate. The different UPs have different laws and bonuses. So you would have to stay out of this "Guild war" or join a UP faction. The neutrals could have their own, but whats the fun in being neutral? (other than the neutral bonuses)

-And last but not least, a map editor. ( not sure if this one has been said)

Holy cow this thread is huge now!

I forgot... as someone else mentioned, it'd be kind nice to have the ability to blow up a planet again... like the terror star, or a gigantic gun that will barely fit on the largest hull ship... so you can't put extra engines or defense on the ship. Though I could be stupid and just not realized it's already in DA and missed it somehow(not talking about spore weapon).

*Drools* That would be perfect for my super-race! Also, why does the entire ship disappear when you use a spore capsule. Shouldn't it return to port for a refill? And if you put multiple spore capsules on a ship, why does it only invade one planet and die?

DL and DA have been truly excellent games, and I appreciate Stardock’s dedication to its game and fans (which are, in a way, one and the same).

My wish list parallels other suggestions:

Spies: Be able to ‘generally’ spy on an opponent instead of trying to place spies on his worlds (and have them countered two turns later). Also, this won’t hurt a race that is nominally your friend but that you’d like to keep tabs on.

Ship Update: Have an Auto Update of ships that will improve components to the best available in the current tech line (e.g. Plasma 2 to Plasma 3 or Plasma 3 to Phaser 1), with the understanding that there may be problems wrt space changes. This will make ship updates less tedious. SEIV did a good job on ship update, as I recall.

Ship Skins: have a few more available with various themes: organic (like the cool ships in the DA intro), angular, globular (bubble ships). All right, I know I can build these myself but I’m **sigh** not at all talented (or just plain lazy).

Ground Combat: Have ground combat NOT be genocidal unless you want it to be. To me it seems like there is little difference between the genocidal Korath and everyone else: you die, she dies, everybody dies (to quote the old movie Heavy Metal). Note – there is Propaganda Campaign option during ground combat, which somewhat accounts for this already.

Council: use some Council ideas from another of my favorite games, Alpha Centauri: Have elections for a Council President (with some bonus associated with it, perhaps low level infiltration of all factions or a few free extra spies); be able to propose some actions (very few with lower impact to reduce player abuse), such as sanctions on another race (kind of like Moo3), trade embargo, or a minor financial penalty; have the option to ‘buy’ influence during the Council interaction so that you can tip an election/resolution (e.g. – contact a faction to negotiate a purchase of IPs immediately before a vote)

Good alignment: give Good a few perks, such as Good Only beneficial random events (economic windfall to Good players) or structural benefits (trade routes increase in value more to reflect better cooperation between good wrt neutral or evil races). Or perhaps bad events that only affect Evil: planet revolt, fleets or ships go rogue/pirate (civil war (ala Fundamentalist and Drengin/Korath; THIS would be great! Like the Klingon civil war in STNG!),).

Ship experience rating: although it may be minor, I’d like to see ships have an experience level such as Green, Average, Veteran, Commando, Legendary, God-like. Right now we have is an XP number, which is meaningful but not very interesting. Also, is 50 good? How about 200? 1000? A little icon by a ship with this experience rating would be very helpful, too. Also, it would be nice to know what experience level(s) do for the effectiveness of a ship (e.g. 200 xp = 20% increase in HP, if that is true)

PQ0 planet utilization: be able to mine or place starbases on them.

Uber-advanced terraforming: be able to terraform (using a constructor?) and then colonize PQ0 planets, which will then be a PQ1 planet. This would be a benefit of high tech but non aggressive races. As it is you have to expand or die; growth from within should be an option.

War mongers: add diplomatic penalties to declaring war (there seems to be some of this already in the games I’ve played recently)

Map editor: please build one for DA so that designing campaigns or scenarios is easier (the 3rd party map editor from ~ June 2006 for DL is nice but unsupported)

If I see any of these things I’ll be thrilled as it will be icing on an already delicious cake!

Hydro

What I'd really like is a combination of 2 feats meantionend above:
i)Borders! Not like real big territory-including borders but rather the first one two or three little squares around every planet one owns. That would make Influence base spamming a wee bit harder,disallow parking fleets (like i sometimes do when i suspect treachery from me wonderfull allies ) AND it would also make planets some sort of a obstacle. Ships might have to make a detour round my planets and in wartime it would make conquering outlying cr***y planets worthwile.

ii) I'd like the diplomatic options of: "do this OR ELSE" and "get out of my territory/borders"


These things really bugger me as a roleplaying aspect of the game... I mean if I had a planetary empire/Alliance/mumbojumbo i shure as hell would mind ships and or bases being deployed in or near Orbit of my planet.
theres just no SUBTLE way to react which kinda sucks. Some times ye just dont automatically want a war


anyway: go improve away!!

a lot of people are requesting a way to bring back the old spying system, because they want all that juicy detail about their opponents. no! i say.

those represent (presumably) well-guarded government secrets, and it should be difficult to get them. i think people dislike the new espionage system (and i too wouldn't mind seeing it expanded, but i don't dislike it) --dislike it because they feel like it's a lot of work. it is a lot of work, but it's worth it if you ask me. it might be good to make it a bit more affordable, but i absolutely do not like the idea of simply being able to set a slider and forget about it.

i think using spies to gather intel is a good move, it makes getting the intel more valuable and difficult. maybe placating the restless masses would be a good compromise: add new types of intel that you gather through espionage, so that people think it's really worth it once they reach a given level. perhaps maybe alien ship designs could be something you can't access without having a certain spy level, or maybe only minimal info about the ship, something like: "our sensors can detect three phasor arrays on this ship, but we won't be able to rate how powerful these ships are without more intelligence on this empire."

i also think you shouldn't be able to see exactly what's on a planet when you place a spy there, at least not until a more advanced level. instead you'd see a generic icon for factories, banks, etc., and a generic for any super-project/wonder/etc in progress (so you can't spy on what they're building without really spying on them).

bottom line. i'll agree that the current (new) espionage system is simplistic and very expensive, but i think it's a step in the right direction, and i wouldn't want to see you (devs) revert to something more like the old system.

Maybe they could make ends meet with an option to pick wither the new or old espionage system(and if the espionage is expanded more options there too). I would also want to see a "What they are up to" area you can gain in espionage. That would be very useful to see what their next move is things like who they will attack, are they planning a influence battle, how will they manage the economy they have now, what new ships they are planning, what important projects they are building, or even where their spies are placed. For example you open the tab and see that the drengins are planning to attack the torians. This could mean you could take advantage of the situation somehow. Plus you could see whats up in their minds. Thats the reasoning for espionage right?

Another idea, when you research "Near omniscient" in the tech victory, you should be able to easily gain enemy info.

1. Anomolies to keep randomally re appearing along with special resources
2. Astroid mine defenses
3. Adjust number of more dramatically number of stars in galaxy
4. Allow minors to become a major race via special event or some drastic improvement of their own doing
5. Adjust number of Major events from low to high in game option screen.
6. Change moral figures for higher population.
7. Increase value of trade routes.
8. Allow pirates to attack trade routes and steal cargo but, not destroy trade route.
9. Allow option to turn off fog of war in game options but, recieve a score penilty.
10. Allow players to take over military or economy starbases via influence in area.
11. Allow more planitary buildings that increase whole races ability.
12. Allow random anomolies that will increase race abilities, miniterization, logistics, hit points ect..
13. Add option in game settings to increase or decrease special tiles on planet
14. Add option to planets to add tiles via special building terraforming after researching the highest terraforming option, at cost to natural planet moral or natural bonuses.

thank you for any improvements to the game

Personaly for me i would like to see a little more collor and painting control in the shipyard ship designer. now im still new to the game and havent spent as much time with the shipyard as anyone who entered there ship design, awsome designs by the way. ill have to continue to play with it but so far the game is definantly about a 4.5 besides some issues with my video card which im hopping the new drivers i just started downloading should fix.

I have not updated to 1.5x because of the comments I've read about changes to defense and tech trading. So maybe making the "fix" to defense on/off type as others have suggested would be adequate there. Some "slider" for difficulty in tech trading, or let it slide with the intelligence levels of the AI, so players who want it difficult can have their way, and those who like it easy can have their way, too.

I liked the way minor races operated in GalCiv 1. So maybe a series of toggles for the minor races: 1. basic on or off; 2. build star bases or not; 3. colonize planets in near-by sectors or not; 4. set minors' intelligence level as with majors. This would allow players to customize the experience of minors the way we can with principal races.

I have a few "cosmetic" requests, too. Without going into micro-control tactical combat, in the Combat Viewer, I wish weapons (guns) actually hit the enemy ships instead of sailing past -- I joke to myself that the enemy kills themselves out of fright because no weapons actually hit their ships! Also, ships should fly in definite patterns instead of just circles and ups and downs.

Also cosmetic: the engine textures in user-made ships do not appear to be as updated as the actual ship textures, so I find myself "hiding" engines by shrinking them as small as possible and reversing them up into the hulls of ships.

Finally, it may just be from patching and some files not updating correctly, but resource starbases in my games -- mine and other races -- are still missing one of the bottom leg points: three of the four are there. And it would be nice to show weapons on the starbases if they are installed since defenses change appearances to mark their presence.

Thanks for reading my two cents!

As previously mentioned, upgrading numerous starbases can be a bit overwhelming as your empire grows. A "technology" that can automate this process at later stages, would surely help. The time sink should of course stay.

I fondly remember a very old game called "Deuteros", where similar tasks tended to be automated when they started to become truly tedious. I am of course against too much automation, as the game should not play itself. But when you got a certain number of starbases, you tend to be bogged down in the upgrade process.

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I wish there was a way to designate some ships as "non-combat" so when you try to rally all ships to one rally point constructors and freighters do not rally also.