onomastikon

Join Date 02/2006

+18

Wishlist for 1.2

Add your wishes here!

I love 1.1, and I think there is so much room for improvement in this great game. Let's get started:

- PLEASE a checkbox in the diplomacy/trade screen for "hide skipped techs". (When you did a lot of bargaining, skipping over, say, everything from MiniBallsII to HD Spike, it is really hard to sort through all those techs you probably dont want. Perhaps you want to display them sometimes, hence the checkbox.)

- Shipyard should have a small field in which the parts in-ship displayed at the top of the screen are named; it is very hard to see, when updating, if that thingy is a warp drive II or a warp drive III, a laser or a laser II, for instance.

- Shipyard should give you a choice of displaying parts to insert by size

- Balance: Starbase fortification should be greatly overhauled; currently, it is FAR too easy to get nearly invulnerable starbases in the very early game: After Space weapons, you need only 2 techs for 450 points total to get SB-Fortification. Along with Battle Stations, 9 constructors give you a base which only mid-game fleets can damage. This is very sad, considering the next point:

- Tactical AI: The AI will still attempt to destroy starbases it cannot damage. It SHOULD be able to take out starbases early game, but we people can quickly and cheaply make them invulnerable (see above). The AI needs to calculate when it can damage a SB better.

- Influence victories are now far too easy. More effective modules should cost increasingly more money.

Thank you for listening!

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Oh, and perhaps this:

- option in the Game Creation screen to set the amount of money that each race starts with:
pauper: 0-1000 bc
very poor: 1001-2500 bc
poor: 2501-4000 bc
normal: 4001-6000 bc
rich: 6000-7000 bc
very rich: 7001-8000 bc

the game should randomize a cash amount within the acceptable range.

Personally, I would like to play games at pauper or very poor.

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When you choose a random number of races to play against it would be nice if you could select a max/min number, as it is i would like to use the option but i don't want to be stuck with only 1 or 2 races.

This leads me to my next point, the total race power bar shows at the very begining of the game what races you are playing against, if you have selected that you want the races to be kept hidden then this should only include races you have discovered.

Final point... the UP votes should only start when all the races have found each other, it is not fair that some races have to obey UP resolutions that they never got to vote on.

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Before I offer my suggestions, I would like to say that this thread has great potential to be read by a dev. If a dev comes in here, they will be more likely to take in the comments if the posts are reasonable. There are lots of things that I would like, but realistically they belong in an expansion pack, not a 1.2 patch, so posting them would be pointless and pollute the thread (making the devs more likely to skip them).

Here are my suggestions anyway:

1) On the trade window, when adjusting money, there should be a button that automatically sets the amount offered to the maximum the race would accept. The green text/red text means everyone can adjust this manually to the last credit, but its a royal pain in the butt. Why not allow us to do this on a button click? (Manual adjustments can be retained, when paying part cash - part influence).

2) Right now, while building improvements, you can have the program alert you every time, or only when a list is empty. Why not allow improvements to be flagged with a toggle button, so that the program alerts you when that specific improvement is finished? For example an orange instead of green icon could alert you to the construction, to show you that you specifically asked to be notified.

3) Add an option, so that the planet screen and tech window do not automatically appear when starting or loading a game. (When starting a game, I prefer: domestic window-->research window-->move ships-->planet window)

4) Add an option to lighten/darken the "sphere of influence" displayed over constructors. When the background nebula is blue I can't see it sometimes.

5) (PROBABLY MY MOST WANTED FEATURE) Add an option to prevent ship designs crossing over to new games. It may save time for some people, but as I like to redesign everything as the mood takes me, I seem to be forever deleting old designs that are cluttering up my shipyard. While we're at it, its annoying when you accidentally try deleting a core design, have to close the message and go back to obsolete. Wouldn't it be better to have a message saying "Core designs cannot be deleted. The design was instead automatically obsoleted, and will still appear in your next game."

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I second #3 - I'll open those windows if I need them, but for a reloaded game, its just a nuisance.
I second #4 - I too have suggested this b4.
I second #5 - This would be great!!!!

#2 could be cool - but here's a simpler thought: Alert me when a starport is completed - I *always* want to know when a starport is available (in addition to knowing when the queue is empty), as that is the time to queue military production - and failing to do so is just throwing money away! ugh!.

Great Game - Thanks to the many devs and folks involved - great community too!

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Here's another mechanism for #2 - just allow me to queue military production on all planets, even if they don't have a starport - then show the #turns til completed to never, until the SP is on-line. Then I can queue things up so that when the SP comes online, it just gets started w/o my having to intervene further.

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It would be great if one could select which ship designs will cross to the next game and which will not.

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I posted this in the bug forum but I will add it here for completeness
Here are two things I would love to see happen to the Star Base upgrade process
1. Seperate tabs for millitary improvments and social improvment
When I send 5 or 6 constructors to an Influence Star Base it is very annoying to have to scroll down past All the military upgrades to get to the two social upgrades on the bottom of the list
2. An option to disable the windows that a.) ask me am I sure for upgrades that cost money and b.) that shows the starbase after the upgrade.
Again this is insanly tedious with 4 or 5 upgrades going on in a single turn. It is funny that the computer doesn't ask "are you sure" when dealing with upgrades that don't cost money like the loss of a Construction Ship for an upgrade you didn't want is less painful than if it happened for an upgrade that cost and additional 200 bc.

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@Mordachi - great thoughts! I often miss it when starports are completed, only to discover them weeks later doing nothing.

Seperate tabs for millitary improvments and social improvment
When I send 5 or 6 constructors to an Influence Star Base it is very annoying to have to scroll down past All the military upgrades to get to the two social upgrades on the bottom of the list

I like that.

It would work for Military bases too, seperating starbase-boosting modules from ship-boosting ones.

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Other things for 1.2

Still need to fix the turn after loading the game bug, it seems as though planets still do not produce anything the turn after you load a saved game.

Would like some easy way to tell if a race has any technologies that I don't currently have in the diplomacy window, I hate checking all of them every five turns or so in a ten player FFA.

Have the computer place a higher priority on getting Star Republic and Xeno Ethics, any halfway competant player realizes how beneficial it can be to get these techs early.

Have an auto-launch feature for all ships. Every so often i just forget and leave a constructor sitting on a planet.

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- How about when you double clicked on a item in the ships and planets list, it would send you to that item. On a large map it's hard to find a specific place/ ship. Or is it just me?

- A built in clock or alarm to at least tell you how long you have been playing.

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Before I make suggestions just like to point out only playing for a little while so many of these may be already there.

HOw about an auto-build feature for the planet. Example: click auto-build and it builds it based on the style you want the planet - industry for example gives 1 farm, 1 morale and the rest factories, so on for other types research farm, morale and research buildings, economy, culture...

In the tech section it does not show how many points future techs are. When you start the game it show you this is 25 and that 50 but later when I look it tells me number of turns for what I am working on and describes the tech but does not say how many points. I might be interested in researching a tech that takes 5 turns if the next one is 5 as well but not if the next is 10.

THe Ai should not hold so many ships back. They have huge fleets but have them all on defence in all the planets. IF they placed some on border but none on the others they would do better. They should also focus on some larger sips with better speed. They also have way too many cultural tiles. At the huge difficulty settings the player should really have to work to win. If the ai plays better it would make it harder.

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1) When multiple constructors will arrive at one starbase in a single turn, have a field that displays the number of upgrades selected/available, checkboxes to select the upgrades, and a running total of additional costs, with just one confirmation at the end.

2) When loading a game, don't display the same message you get when you start a game, it just doesn't belong there at all and looks, well, rather dumb.

3) In the list of ships you get when you click on a fleet, have an upgrade button for each ship so you don't have to break up the fleet into separate map squares and upgrade each individually before reforming the fleet and continuing on...much too much tedium.

4) A built-in feature that will not let you play at all past a certain time, which you set once and cannot change without calling Stardock tech support, on Sunday-Thursday evenings

5) Ability to launch transports and colony ships with zero soldiers/colonists.

6) Ability to "launch all ships" or "launch all of a specific category or type", for instance all colony ships, all transports, all constructors, all warships.

7) Ability to customize the colours of all races in a game without "modding".

8) Ability to set all players to be custom races of any choice, to test your race selections against each other.

9) Instead of tabs for military vs. social starbase improvements, just have a checkbox that would put all military first, or all social first.

10) Ability to set all planets (even planets which don't yet have a starport, so they will being building them immediately after the port is finished) to building one particular type of ship, either repeatedly, once, or until a certain number of the ship are completed. For example, if I need 60 constructors to put a wall of starbases up along my border with the Drengi, I can say "build 60 'Constructor 12pc lr' then return to previous build instructions (or not)".

11) Instead of the above, create a "build queue" for starbases, so that as constructors arrived, the assigned modules would be automatically built. The option could exist to prepay for additional-cost modules, or have the "are you sure" popup appear as necessary.

Edit: 12) and make dialogs/popups movable so I can move them off to the side, even partially off-screen if I have to, to see where the heck I am in the galaxy when I need to!

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Much reasonable stuff here.
Some reminded me of more wishes, which I would like to include here:

- Queing: a) Queuing military production on planets, (

queuing research in the tree
- In the f6 screen, "stats and graphs" tabs, it would be nice if a mouseover told us where the boni came from
- PLEASE let there be more clarify in the improvements one can build in the scope of the boni they offer; I can often not tell if an improvement offers +x% locally, globally (as in: an "ability"), or as a multiplier factor. For instance, I was very keen on getting the Omega Research Center (galactic achievement), but was dissapointed to find out its bonus was local only.
- let there be a "wonders"-kind of tab, call it perhaps: "achievements", on the f6 screen in which we can see which galactic achievements and which trade goods have already been built.
- nerf neutrality research centers to 18 or so RP

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Hi onomastikon,

I just wanted to let you know that I REALLY like the suggestions in your OP and there are many other good suggestions by other posting contributors in here as well. I do hope a Dev reads this and takes them into consideration.

Cheers

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...

13) When you capture a colony, or flip it, the queue should automatically be stripped of improvements you cannot build or use yet, such as Manufacturing Centres if all you can use are Enhanced Factories.

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Remove the "go to next ship" feature, or make it optional!

Add and upgrade button to the ship information screen (so you can upgrade ships w/o breaking up a fleet)

Fix combat by creating individual ship innitiatives that are modified by speed, size and a random factor.

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Fix combat by creating individual ship innitiatives that are modified by speed, size and a random factor.

I think "fixing combat" will require more than this, and will probably require too many resources for a reasonable 1.2 patch. Some good things have been posted about it (my unhumble suggestions included!) elsewhere, but I doubt this could be rehauled for 1.2 in an acceptable way.

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- Diplomacy:

* Be able to treat, taunt, apology or beg to a race.
* Be able to apply diplomatic pressure: When we ask an opponent the same thing many times he should understand that we REALLY want that.
* Be able to set a weekly payment to a race as economic assistence, improving relations.
* Be able to manually change diplomatic instance towards another an AI race and give a reason it could understand.
* Be able to launch a preemptive or retaliatory attack without automatically launching an war.
* Be able to apology for certain acts, giving reasons AI could understand. Appealing for tolerance.
* Be able to require the AI do attack or make peace, making the AI understand that we are REQUIRING and not begging for help.
* Be able to restrain the AI from trading certain items with another or other races.
* Be able to required the AI to apply trade embargo against other race.
* Be able to be one of the rotative presidents of the United Planets. Therefore being able to propose resolutions.
* Be able to ask the United Planets to launch economic sanctions or military actions against a race.
* Be able to require AI races to keep their ships away from within our borders.
* Be able to require AI races to remove certain starbases and planet improvements.
* Be able to require AI races to limit its military power.

- Brain Candy:

* Don't go automatically to the next ship that is not on guard after you finished moves in one. I may be an alien, but my brain is not ready to change context yet. Instead please, use a "goto next" button and a hotkey to do so.
* Put an option to manage starbases so I can find out wich can be upgraded with the latest technology I discovered.
* About the option to browse the ships, please, make it a little wider and allow ships to be grouped in a tree because I have to scroll up down a lot to find my fighters when I have a load of constructors.
* Please, allow the names to contain more characters! I just can't rename Jothunheim to Jothumheim Research Labs II. The same for ships and starbases.
* Please, allow us to categorize planets and browse them in a tree grouped by these same categories.
* When moving the camera around, please use the "zoom out->move->zoom in" camera animation otherwise I would vomit after a couple hours of playing.

- Planetary Invasion

* I like the way you simplify ground combat with infantry running in the direction of one another but, you really could use 3d models for that with ocasional death animations.
* Take out those ugly vehicles and artillery because they are very ugly. The soldiers alone are fine. Even better was if there were multiple waves of soldiers! And blood lots of blood! hihihi cool...

- Space Combat

* When the fight involves tiny spacecrafts, the combat should be base on hit accuracy and not damage. Instead of calculate the damage of each shot, make it one-shot-one-kill but extremely dificulty to hit. This would be nice.
* Make it a little more like the movies. Since combat is not player-intereactive, the combat could be calculated and then played like an action movie. The current action camera just sucks.

Kisses from me...

Edna

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Perhaps this minor balance point:

Balance: Engines never really increase in cost -- but unlike sensors and support, which also do not, the engine tree is very long. Sensors and support is not differentiated much, and for good reason -- but a hyperwarp III engine still only costs 10bc, making it almost a no-brainer once you own it. Stardock has made the highest types of other systems (like, say, zero-point armor) exponentially more costly than earlier forms. I would like to see the higher engines cost quite a bit more (say, 40-50 bc).

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Shipyard / Build Ship Screen:

PLEASE let us be able to sort or have the ships displayed by size, not name. That is, it would be great if there were sections for tiny, small, med, large, huge, and cargo.
Currently, I have to design my ships with tedious names so that I can find them in the drop-down queue when building. It would be so helpful, however, if we could find ships in the scout/fighter section, the cruiser, battleship, or cargo section.

Thank you for listening.

Any chance that someone at Stardock might comment, just a one-liner, as to the reasonablility and/or affinity for some of the suggestions listed here? (Such as: "I like 60% of what has been said here, think that 40% is doable" or something?)

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Hi!
I'm usually playing games on crippling and masochistic. However there is currently a BIG difference in difficulty between these two adjacent levels. While I find the crippling with 25% AI bonus quite easy, is the masochistic AI with 200%+ a serious work, almost no fun anymore.
Since there are three levels above crippling, could you consider nerfing the masochistic level somewhat? Maybe only giving it about a half of the bonus AIs got now.
BR, Iztok

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I'd like to see military attack and defense assists help ONLY those ships which have those types of attacks and defenses; thus +missile attack should only give a bonus to missile attacks if a ship has missiles.

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However there is currently a BIG difference in difficulty between these two adjacent levels.

Completely agree with iztok, would love to see a level inbetween or crippling made harder or adjustable difficulty levels. Perhaps all of those.

Lenius.

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New, intermediate difficulty levels and new intermediate map sizes would be nice too. (Something between Medium and Large, Large and Huge would be nice.)

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Ashbery76

Join Date 02/2002

+36

I have never met the Dreadlords in the game.I'm not a campaign player.I only play sandbox and I would love to see the Dreadlords make an appearance in the sandbox mode as an event.This is my wish for 1.2.

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