Oh, almost forgot, add an option to toggle the cursor to show a starbase radius over the tile that the cursor is floating over. The player should be able to tell exactly where the AOE of a starbase will be before even building the constructor.

And add an option to show the grid-based equivalent of the AOE of a starbase. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a particular tile falls within the circular AOE.

Wow, some great suggestions here

I definitely second (or third or fourth) the following

* A message explicitly telling you when a race tells you that have declared war on you

* A radius whenever you are about to construct a starbase

* Circles around ships that you are war with

* An undo button on ship design


My own ideas are as follows. My apologies if these are already in the game

1) Suppose you have captured a planet with 8 factories. You want to replace 6 of those factories with labs. The easiest way of doing that is to demolish the six factories and order 6 labs in the queue. But this is also the slowest. The most optimum is to destroy one factory and then build one lab, then destroy another factory etc etc. A real micro managing pain. It would be handy if the demolish order appeared in the queue so that the building didn't disappear until the right time.

2) I THINK there are lots of different tracks of background game music (maybe one for each race, or ethos? I can't tell yet). If this is indeed the case it would be cool if there was an option that could be selected to cycle through them all. Some people may only ever play a couple of races.

3) Here is an easy one that I think people would love: IF your espionage level is high enough then during the Galactic council meeting that races vote is displayed BEFORE you vote. This should be easy to code since the computer has already determined how each race is going to vote, no? All you are doing is displaying this information for a few of the races. Now I know Brad hates putting in options that the AI can't use, and doing anything with the AI will never be "An Hour Fix". This feature gives an unfair advantage to the human player - so put it in as a game start option. Call it "Deep Espionage" or whatever you like. Lower total scores or invalidate games for the metaverse - whatever you think is fair, I still think a lot of people would really like this ability.

4) Along with the above 'Deep Espionage' game setting, is there a flag or line of code where the AI decides to start preparing for war against someone? There should be a chance that if the human player's espionage is high enough they get a heads up that that race is preparing for war against them, or another race.

5) Again, with the Deep Espionage setting - two races can be going at it tooth and nail, levelling entire solar systems, but unless I am actually watching it, I have no idea if another race is on the ropes or not until it is too late. It would be great if your espionage level was high enough to get reports of major victories or losses, so that you can better prop up the losers - or at the very least make them pay through the nose for aid.

Just my two credits worth

Dano

You did a fantastic job on this game Stardock, congratulations!

I didn't read every single post in details, so the following might have been mentioned already.

1) Have an option to randomly select the races you will be playing against in skirmish. It was fun in MoO2 to slowly discover just who else is out there. Race colors should be randomized too to preserve the mystery

2) Switch music tracks a bit more often in the main map. Sometimes it gets a bit repetitive.

3) Depending of the angle, I'm not always sure which direction maps to which key on the numpad. Something like civ4 with the numpad visible on the map squares would be nice.

4) Any place where you can add some randomness. I love random! Well, except for random crashes but that's another story.

The rest I've already seen mentioned, or takes longer than an hour to do

Just a couple of the top of my head.

Allow tabbing when entering account details in text fields to log into Metaverse (and to a lesser extent when naming custom civs)

When saving a ship design, allow the choice between, permenant save and "just for this game" save.
It's rather frustrating to have to delete or obsolete previous game's designs, I like to make brand new ones each game depending on the situations.

In the main galaxy screen, when I select a ship, I often want to know two things:

1. Where it's headed (ideally shown by a line / arrow to it's destination, when selected).
2. What it's logistic / fleet value is. It's frustrating to not know whether/not you can put two ships together in a fleet until you actually move them onto the same square.

Both of these pieces of info should be readily viewed in the zoomed out galaxy mode when the ship is selected.

Trade Screen Improvement!!!!!

When trading technology, I want to know how many research points each one is worth. I don't have a tech tree foldout, and it's a hassle to try and remember it all. PLEASE put a value next to each trade item to show it's relative worth.

FURTHER, it's annoying to constantly click on and off new techs, trying to max out a deal. Take a note from Civ and include a "what would make this trade work?" button: You simply stack up whatever you want from the person you're trading with, and click it. The AI will then stack up the minimum balance of tech and money that it would take to make him agree to the deal. It's MUCH less hassle for the player.

Maybe his was a design, but it's driving me nuts. If I'm in the Colony Management (planet surface) screen and I click on "Build Ship" in the upper right to start construction or change the ship being constructed, once I'm there and have selected a ship, I have two options: "Back to Planet" and "Done". "Done" drops me back to the main screen. Not where I started from and, not even at the main screen focused on the planet I was dealing with. "Back to Planet" doesn't save the change I made.

Please change it so that "Done" takes you back to the screen that you came from.

(I encounter this issue a lot, since I like to flip through my colonys and see their queues and empty spaces and all. If I try to change the ship being built....it's a pain.)

Thanks.

Was playing the campaign, Siege mission tonight. The Dread Lords took one of my planets (Andersona). For 2 or 3 turns after the fog of war around Andersona was lifted, even though my colonists had all been eaten.

Not complaining. I got a good look at a Dread Lord Battleship because of it (and sheesh, we're d0omed.) Anyway might be something to look into fixing.

- Add a 'boss mode' hotkey that will minimize the game to the taskbar and rename the title of the window to 'Windows Explorer' or something user configured.

I love it...

Perhaps "Productivity Increaser Mk XIV"

This might seem silly, but it bothers me.

The anomaly that has the message like "After a thorough search turned up nothing, our crew was about to leave the asteroid when the captain bent down and picked up a coin worth 1BC, saying 'Guess it's my lucky day after all!'"

Can you PLEASE make that worth 1 credit? It won't effect your actual economy (IE, the game's not gonna treat my cash as 1000.0000000001 BC) because really, 1BC doesn't either, and frankly, if I picked up a coin, by myself, worth a billion bucks (inflation or no!), I'd be a bit more excited than that guy!

Easy:
1. Game should default to auto-save each turn, with backlog of 5 saves.
(b'cos it's a pain to have it crash and revert to 12 saves earlier)
(GalCiv2 hung on me twice in a row

2. Game should default to "don't rotate view back on middle-mouse-button release".
(i thot it's a bug until i found the the setting hidden somewhere in options)

3. More meaningful help:
e.g. when my scout reaches an anomaly, it says "can't scan anomaly; a survey vessel is needed". It should tell us newbies what in the world is considered a survey vessel (i.e. special sensor module? more sensor? need to research a particular tech? special class of ship? or what???) and where to get one...
(maybe for advanced players playing using "intelligent AI", then game auto turns off these additional tips. o.w. for "beginners"-and below, more tips pls and don't assume we will read the manual, instead of jumping right into the game =P )


Moderate:
3. Make window-mode playing work, at a simple press of ALT-ENTER.
(btw, the 'fullscreen' option doesn't seem to do anything at all??)

4. In ship design, instead of having an ultra long list of 'extras'-components all saying something useless like "for decoration only", change it to small square boxes.
In this way, we can more easily choose the extras from the say 10-rows X5-columns list instead of 50-rows X1-column list. Can the ship preview window be bigger too?

Oh, I was playing tonight and thought of a few other things. Hopefully it's not on the list yet (it is getting rather lengthy!).

Since the middle button is so vital to rotating pretty much anything, is there a way to override the Windows assigned function and make the middle button act like a middle button when playing the game?

Basically what I mean is that I normally have my middle button act like a double click of the left mouse button. When I tried playing GalCiv2, it definitely didn't like that. I had to change my Windows button configuration to set the middle button to actually BE a middle button before it would work properly. It's a small price to pay admittedly, but I find myself missing it when I'm not playing the game.

Also, is there any way to somehow inform the user, in a "in your face" sort of way, that a colony has finished building a starport and is ready for ship construction? I find myself glossing over a lot of the construction reports between turns, only to find out that a colony just finished a starport and hasn't been doing anything with it for a while. Not entirely sure what would be appropriate. Perhaps a small popup of the ship construction screen on the main map with the focus being on the planet in question?

Thanks so much!