I would add the ability to dispense beer. Preferably a dark beer. Maybe pizza too.

I thought that stardock were going to release GalCiv 2.5 after TotA has been released?
I'm sure I read that it would be a free and slightly radical shake up of the DL and DA?

Though not heard anything on the subject since they announced TotA

The economy is the number one thing that needs to be fixed in my mind. That and ground combat animation. I am sorry but blinking flags don't count for better ground combat animation. We have awesome ship battles and we can design ships with parts that can rotate on 3 different axis at varied speeds which is beyond awesome and takes the customization of ships to new heights, yet we can't see insectoid thalins charging against power armored drengin shock troops? Blinking flags with machine gun noise? Can't we do any better?


Anyway, the economy needs to be fixed. You feel like a total idiot if you don't go 100% research or 100% factories which just seems silly. I am sure everyone who plays on suicidal or harder uses the all labs or all factories approach at least some of the time. When you go half and half on a planet, you get the quartering phenomenon because of the way the economic sliders work. Yes, it gives increased flexibility but at a terrible sacrifice of producing power and efficiency to go half and half between production and research on your planets. Of course another incentive to "cheat" by going all labs or all factories is you don't have to research an entire portion of the tech tree as well! Go, go, exploiting the game!!

Anyway, a very simple fix that can make this game less tedious is to put the tax percentage on the main screen so you don't have to open the trade screen every single fricken turn just to optimize a certain approval rating. For example, in the beginning of the game I like to go 100% approval so I can double pop growth. Heaven forbid if I accidently have 99% approval and 25% growth on a given turn!! So every turn, its open the trade screen, monkey with the tax slider, close trade screen, etc. Every single turn you have to do this to optimize. Yawn. Why not just have that one slider on the main screen kind of like civ 4 where you had the tech, trade, and luxury slider on the mian screen? That way you can save time by not opening and closing the trade screen every turn. Or, even better, have a feature where the game automatically adjusts the tax percentage every turn to match a desired approval rating tt you input. So, I just input "I desire 100% approval" and every turn the game does the instant monkeying with the tax percent. If it is impossible to make a given desired approval rating the game then warns you it can't do what you want.

This is a great game otherwise! Being able to rotate different parts on your newly designed ships is just bad ass!!

I would also go along with Economy.

I am not saying its "broken", it works, but its the number one negative factor in the battle to pursuade new players to come on board with the game. It is very hard for new players to wrap their heads round the subtle parts of how the economy works. That can result in a big turn off at an early stage before the major positive factors of other parts of the game, have had chance to sink home to counter balance the negative effect of the economy in their minds. End result is a loss of new players before they have had a chance to take a balanced view on the game - they couldnt get into it fast enough to the "good" bits.

The difficulty is of course the fact that the economy is a Huge internal Control mechanism used to keep control of the game in a myriad of ways, and what the player is doing. The latter is not easy to change at a fundamental level, the knock on effects on the internal control mechanisms are huge. It is however something I believe needs to be addressed for GalCiv III in a few years time.

Regards
Zy