You had traded either your economic or research treaty to the Thalans. Attacking someone you had given treaties to gets you that diplomatic hit.

Worse is when you're allied to someone and have this happen. You're screwed either way - you either break the alliance, or break a treaty; you're going to take a diplo hit no matter what you do.

Ah, I must've had a research or economic treaty then.

Also, I enjoy my "treaties" tab in the diplomacy options, especially when theres 5 players left and I can form a star in red lines by bribing races to declare wars on each other, but I would like to be able to cancel my treaties too .
If there is a way I haven't found it .

You can only cancel them with war - but if you can get them to declare war on you, they take the hit.

Well, the other civ getting destroyed cancels the treaty, too.

Sometimes I feel like I paid to be a beta tester

Not that they didn't do a good job, the game is great, it just looks like they lack personnel.

I would like to see a 'zoom to cursor' on the Research Screen.

That would be fun, but I'd be sad if I saw that get added and not some of the major issues .

what i whould like to see but please tell me if you can do this
i want an extra slider in the ship devilment. like when you use the slider when making a ship it makes the component bigger but, what i want is one that incises the length but not the with and one that incises with but not the length.

Speaking of sliders for the ship builder, how about some x/y/z off-set sliders?

Do you mean instead of the 'clock' style? Those suck

ya that will help to

Pitch-Yaw-Tilt... all in their own tiny balls with nice arrows to simply tag a 5% (more or less) gap to the selected items? Full 360*, the entire spectrum of coordinates without the "normal" system of geometric Z_Y_X principles?
That one?

Yep_certainly_definitely, i could use another formal type of UI -- one, which gives me true precision instead of guess working my way into synchro & perspective symetry when i just put two (or more) wings (left or right, above or below, deep or closer, STRAIGHT onto a red (i want some of that blue or green coloring... cuz the XW_Apocalypsion hulls material is also reddish) harp-points on my space planes!

See, a shipyard can be user friendly if only options & features would be available to us.
Besides, we don't want to fall too far behind Spore's creature_creator, don't we?

That's probably my big pet peeve so far, in the ship designer. I really think it'd help to have a few things: 1. Connection point indicators on hull/ship jewlery be of a different color depending on orientation to the host hull piece (up, down, right, left, front, back). 2. Ability to resize those connection points so that one can see better the more zoomed in you are to a part to know how it'll connect. 3. A button for synchronization as said above. Click a component or jewlery part, click the sync button for mirror placment of 2 of whatever is selected.

Before anything else, I'd really like to have the AI improved in small but important ways:

- make the AI better at planning paths . At the moment it happily runs directly into most heavily guarded space. This is probably linked to the AI being bad a using sensors too. Instead it could stage some 'surprised' attacks.

- the AI is not good at predicting combat outcome either and goes into suicide attacks too easily: in one game it attacked a starbase it had no chance of ever destroying while the same (respectable) fleet could have been put to better use. Does the AI only looks at HP + attack + defence when evaluating military forces?? If yes that's very crude, and would explain the many stupid decisions I've seen. Computing odds is something machines are much better at than humans, so what not use it?

- the AI isn't goot at protecting mining starbase, why these usually provide huge bonusses (almost +40% when completely built out).

New cool tech: I really like the wormhole idea proposed earlier. This could be throttled to avoid completely chaotic games. The catch is that it only makes sense to have new techs if the AI use them reasonably well, otherwise it's a bit boring (e.g. Terror Stars).

Link hapiness and influence: this would make the game richer without introducing any new mechanism. The lower the hapiness, the easier it should be to flip a planet (since it's so bad here, why not try another ruler?), and the lower the influence, the lower the happiness should be (resident would be unhappy not to belong to another empire...).

Bug to correct: AI designed ships use greater capacity that current space (reported for instance here https://forums.galciv2.com/306683, looks like the designer does not take into account that components takes more space on bigger hulls).

GUI: better navigation in the ship mini list. Maybe using a tree like in SoaSE? (With different ways of grouping the nodes, class, expericne, sector, etc.) Could be expanded to the planet mini list (handy for very big games).

From the previous posts I quite like the 'spiral galaxy' option for galaxy layout.

Cloaking sounds good too (and easy to design, just like a negative sensor, reducing other ship's sensing range, e.g. is my cloaking is 2 and an enemy ship's sensor range is 4 I need to be within 2 square of the AI ship to be detected). Having the AI use it properly will be another matter!

A less radical alternative to the 'dwindling planet' suggestion could be to make asteroid and resource mining depletable, i.e. an asteroid field could disappear after being mined for too long. Could force some painful adjustments, and be fun for races at the height of their might.

Otherwise great game! I've never enjoyed a game so much since Civ 1.

I don't have too much new to add to the discussion, but thought I would at least voice what I would like changed most.

-Diplomacy:
-Allow vassals
-Allow players to threaten other races
example: "get that influence base out of here or else!!"



-Espionage: Make it less abstract such that

-players can reserach how to insert agents into enemy territory by:
-smuggling on freighters
-send spy ship to enemy planet
-send spy ship to enemy ship that could go to a planet

-Players can develop espionage networks using succesfully inserted agents
-to gather sympathizers
-Better entrench agents to be less lilkely detected
-various sabotage missions
-intelligence gathering missions
-research theft

-Players can develop counter-espionage:
-develop automated security patrols in area of influence to scan for
agents attempting to insert.
-opress one's population making it easier ot detect enemy agents
but reducing the moral of the planet
-train double agents


-Make starbases more effective and requiring less micromanagment to develop

Oh yea, forgot to mention it, but someone brought it up earlier too and its about victory conditions. If I've got influence victory turned off, the last thing I want is the ability to still flip planets through it. I'm not sure how they could treat the condition so it works when its off, but I suppose if they make it so that behind the scenes its equivalent to every planet having a re-education center or something at the time of colonization. That way influence can still spread until it butts with another border but that's where it should stop, leaving the planets unaffected themselves. Probably should disable any buildings that cause flips too higher in the tree when the condition is off. At the very least even if they couldn't kill influence affecting planets, maybe they could slow it down to a very very slow crawl. The only major exception I'd think would need to be asteroid fields.

you can do that but it will be considered a militay victory if you get all the planets flip. a influence victory is when you controle 75% of the galixy

This is best for DA I think, but can work in TA as well.

I would like the branches of the tech tree to continue. Not necessarily graphically, but I think each branch, or most branches, should have additional discoveries that can give percent bonuses to your abilities. So you can get a +1% to diplomacy, economics, weapons, etc. after you have completed that branch. I guess the green and pink branches won't continue.

The idea isn't to be able to continue on a branch to super size that ability, but to give the player something to use all that hard-built research capacity on. A lot of structures get built through the game; then in the later game its all wasted. Unless you are going for a Tech Victory there is nothing left to research and the spending for it is dropped. I would completely turn it off except for adding something to the tech score.

Each additional tech can be expensive as warranted and need not even have a name or show up on the tree. The research tree screen can just show that you are researching "Further researching into economics / defenses / industrial / etc.". A discovery can be shown as "completed research on further development of X" by the GNN.

Have I mentioned being able to actually see the AI's tech tree? MAybe color coded to see what techs you have in common.

Can we please get a progress report Stardock That would BE GREAT!   

This one seems to me to be a bad idea - I play with influence victory off myself, but that's no the same as wanting to give up the tactical component of using cultural pressure on planets. Toggling off the victory component is exactly what I want to do, not deprive myself of the tactic.

Jonnan

I can understand wanting to leave a tactic in, but when I want military conquest as the only option on, brute force should be the main thing in order to take planets besides trading for them regardless if your influence bubble overlaps someone's planets.

I was thinking too that an alternative to influence being the only way to sway asteroid fields to you, perhaps they could be treated as commoidity items in a trade and/or as well being able to divert ones you own to stream to an ally planet.

YES!

Indeed. Pretty please with sugar on top, even.

And on an unrelated note, I've finally remembered to mention how much I'd like it if the background nebula code was smart enough to keep itself out of a 5-7 square radius around the map focus. I love the eye candy almost all the time, but occasionally I have to re-load a game to get rid of a nebula background that makes the strategic-level zoom hard to read.

Some indication of a Release Date. The last ones I know of have already passed.

yeah, When - please?
We haven't had any indications lately, if everyone is still on vacations -- disregard.