1) Make "Lucky Ranger" event perhaps 20X more rare, and only let it occur in certain situations (after the leading race has X military power, for example). It utterly breaks the game, especially on a tiny galaxy when nobody has much tech, to gain 2 rangers - either of which can destroy a grand alliance of all opponents.

2) Replace the current economic sliders.
Current: "Overall Output" + "Military, Social, Research Ratios"
Desired: "Military Output" + "Social Output" + "Research Output"
(better named as "Shipbuilding Output" + "Colony Improvement Output" + "Research Output")

Justification (reposted):

I really dislike the current system. You cannot effectively have planets specialize. For example, I wanted an industrial planet and a research planet. I made them... and the research planet had no spaceport. Unfortunately (disregarding social), that meant that I was always wasting half of the capacity of my research planet when Military was 50%, and half the capacity of my industrial planet when Research was 50%.

On the other hand, 2 identical planets, half labs - half factories - one starbase, would be using 100% of their capacities. Which means that generalized planets are always going to outperform the same number of specialized planets, so you should never make specialized planets, but rather make all your colonies identical clones. Which is boring.

I think that rather than 4 sliders - one for "overall output", and three for Military/Social/Research balance, a simpler system of 3 sliders would be better in every way. 0% to 100% output for each area, and forget the "overall output" slider.

Some ideas

1) If you click on a ship/fleet, then click on the radar, the game should remember that you're trying to move your fleet.
2) Have a map setting for locating resources on the radar, and make them more visible. I miss many resources that way
3) Perhaps a shipyard option that takes the components on your ship currently, and updates them to the latest version automatically?

I'd like to see Arrow buttons in the Planet screen so i can quickly cycle thru all my planets WHILE still in the Planet screen...like up by the Planets picture 2 buttons that let me just click->next planet (do my thing Click-> next planet...so on and so forth....just an idea..(i'm sure it's been said before, in that case (i second it)

Hi!
A not so short list of wishes:
Ship design window:
- right click or DEL button removes selected component,
- compact view on ship design: a component is displayed only once, but has a number in a corner that tells how many are there,
- pressing done button, but design not saved should ask if I want to save it, and bring up a proper dialog to do that.

Diplomacy window:
- decration of war notice,
- a prompt if I wish to ally , when AI wants that.

Planet window
- please eliminate the waste of social production when nothing is actually build!
- ability to downgrade farms,
- autolaunch new ships checkbox.

So far for now. I've just finished the second campaign game, so expect some more. But so far game plays very well on my Celeron 733 with Radeon 8500LE, 450MB RAM and WinXP.
BR, Iztok

Some seconds:

- A 'What would make this deal work' option like in Civ IV to speed Diplomatic negotiations.
- The ability to zoom out on the tech tree window.
- A preview of Starbase radius when you click on a constructor.
- Arrow keys move map, not ships
- A 'No tech trading' option.

One minor thing, that may be on the list already: When I have a starbase and rally point in the same space, it is impossible to select the rally point to edit or delete it. If I move a ship there, then the stacked ships interface appears and I can edit or delete the rally point. But I can't if there's no ship there.

Two more suggestions:

1. Computer AI use of player designed ships
The game is big on customization, and another neat feature could use our created ship designs for the computer players.

Let's say I go through a game as the Thalan, and I create and save several custom ships along the way. In a different game against the Thalan, I think it would be cool to see the computer using those same ship designs and ship class names that I crafted. This would add a whole new element of personalized game play. If you thought your Thalan battleship was awesome before, see how you manage it when your computer Thalan opponent is wielding that exact same looking and named ship!

2. Combat Simulator
Ship battles look great! How about a simulator button added to the design screen that allows you to test your ships vs. all known enemy/ally ships? This is not really a strategic addition, but it's more "candy" so to speak. It would be nice because that way you could see how your ships might fare against your allies without having to actually engage them in battle.

Thanks!

Haven't read all 4 pages, so this might be here already;

The ability to set a new home planet for a freighter. Basicly, I'd like to be able to build Freighters at my man capital instead of my eco capital, as it usually takes ages to build ships in the eco capital

The ability to reopen the GNN News after you close it.

I know all of these ideas have already been posted in some form or another on some thread or another, but here's my list:

Launch All button for ships orbiting a colony

Tabs for ship-types on colony launch screen (e.g. All, Cargo, Small, Medium, Large) so that I can launch based on hull size.

Right click menus for stacked ships so that I can still have access to the "construct" "upgrade" "guard" "sentry" buttons that you lose access to when ships get launched.

On the foreign policy screen it would be GREAT if I could just click a button to automatically get the max amount of money the AI player will give me for what I'm offering. That way I could sell them a tech and not have to fiddle around with the money bar to get the max BCs out of them.

More keyboard reactions on menus. Specifically I'm thinking about the ship building menus, shipyard and research windows. I like to use my keyboard as much as possible.

In the shipyard I should be able to highlight a ship part and then click and drag it off the hull (litterally pull the piece off). I should also be able to use the delete key to remove a piece that's been selected.

Once I've highlighted a ship piece in the shipyard screen I should be able to dynamically resize it without removing the piece, making one the right size and then resizing it.

Also, I should be able to use Shift to select multiple pieces of jewelery that are attached to my ship and resize them all simultaneously (not making them all the same size, but proportionally increasing all of them based on how much I move the slider (i.e. I select two parts, one is at 25% of max and the other is at 10% of max. I grab the slider and it will be at 0%, I'll slide it up to 10% and then my parts will be at 35% of max and 20% of max respectively.

I would also like to be able to upgrade core ships. I'm not that great at ship design, so I'd much rather just take the default troop transport and stick faster engines on it than go through and try to design a whole new one.

I'm glad you put in the recent update to the research screen an item that allows me to see specifically which techs remain for my ships to be built, but it does not currently take into effect ships that require miniaturization techs to fit everything on them.

Also, as I have acquired a large collection of user built ships already, it would be nice if these "techs required" items could expand/collapse with a +/- button.

Search feature on the forums.

Thanks for this thread. Hopefully someone will read this and tally up my ideas with everyone else who expressed the same ones. I admit to not reading this whole thread. There are tons of good ideas in here, though.

How about being able to continue the game after a Culture or Tech victory. I was on the verge of finally capture the home planet of one of the enemies and I got the culture victory. Would be nice to finsih the invasion if I can continue.

Please explain all underlying game mechanics. Manual is unclear or wrong about almost all of them. In particular the combat, influence, stat bonus, and tech progression elements of the game are at least wildly inaccurate.

Lack of transparency regarding the game engine is unacceptable, and the cause of many misunderstandings and frustrations. Please post how everything works online. The plaers deserve to know!

The most improtant things to explain:

1. Exactly how all ship combat works. All modifiers, rolls, etc. This is clearly wrong (and not well explained even if it was right, which it isn't)

2. All of the different AI behaviors on all difficulty levels. Particularly involving trading behavior (which is clearly broken), combat optimization, expansion, aggression, treaties, etc.

This should have been done from the start. There is even an area of this very website that's supposed to be for explaining game mechanics! That should have been the first thing addressed!

Instead all we get is cute comments from the devs like "Defence is very important, you'll see. "

I don't care about the dev's cute little ideas if they lead to broken gameplay.

Please explain all underlying game mechanics. Manual is unclear or wrong about almost all of them. In particular the combat, influence, stat bonus, and tech progression elements of the game are at least wildly inaccurate.

Lack of transparency regarding the game engine is unacceptable, and the cause of many misunderstandings and frustrations. Please post how everything works online. The plaers deserve to know!

The most improtant things to explain:

1. Exactly how all ship combat works. All modifiers, rolls, etc. This is clearly wrong (and not well explained even if it was right, which it isn't)

2. All of the different AI behaviors on all difficulty levels. Particularly involving trading behavior (which is clearly broken), combat optimization, expansion, aggression, treaties, etc.

This should have been done from the start. There is even an area of this very website that's supposed to be for explaining game mechanics! That should have been the first thing addressed!

Instead all we get is cute comments from the devs like "Defence is very important, you'll see. "

I don't care about the dev's cute little ideas if they lead to broken gameplay.