Hello TheTim, thank you for your feedback!

We are evaluating possible game mechanics, so it's great to hear other's opinion!

I mentioned this in other feedback areas, but I think the way to go is to return the ability to make survey ships (with the original pop cost)....but only allow flagships and commander ships to gain modules.

that way, you don't have the tedium of 20 ships all getting modules, but it returns the investment in surveying if you want to go that route.

There is actually a good side to the limited survey ships.  You pretty much get to keep all the goodies in your home system and even have some left in the unexplored systems.  Remember if you can spam survey ships the AI Civs can do it faster.

I like the limited survey ships - it means that the quests and the type of flagship choice where all their capital ships survey are valuable, it ensures you actually get to scan anomalies, and it spreads the RNG of anomalies over more turns, smoothing it out.

There are a lot of ways to get more flag ships.  For instance, most of the hero ships (commanders) can survey anomalies.  There are also various anomalies that will give you a survey module.

Frogboy - I think your "most" is "a few".  My commander set has 1 (Curiosity) of 7.  At turn 348 I have gotten 1 survey module (Prospector) out of 3 from anomalies.  That's 20% for me, so you might want to open it up a little closer to what you think it is (maybe 50%).  However I am very much in favor of this new design.  I hated the AI Civs spamming survey ships.

Agree. don't like the limitation on the number of Survey ships. If you are going to limit it, limit it to  5 or 10 instead of just one.  I thought only the one Commander ship in the Terran ship set (Curiosity) could survey. Then you might get a couple of more if you are lucky.   But I feel you should be able to build at  least a few of them.  Plus as the game progresses I like to build more advanced survey ships. It's like being the Federation. Your early survey ship is an NX-01 (or even worse).  Later you can build a Constitution.  Later on you build.. you get it.

I dont mind the limitations, you explore till endgame. what I HATE is not being able to find or upgrade my flagship. lategame ill design a new flagship, but by this point i have around 4. so which one do i decommission to build a new one?

I'd suggest at least letting us upgrade old flagships to new designs.

I also find it impossible to figure out which fleets /ships are survey capable lategame when i have a bunch of fleets so i start not surveying because they get "lost" in the woodwork.

Here's the workaround that I use.  Add an "*" (or any non-alpha character of your choice) to the front of the name of your flagship.  Then sort your ships by name & all the flagships will appear at the top of the list.  You can then click on the flagship you want to locate. 

The feature works well for small galaxies.  But in a large galaxy with many clusters, not so well.

Could it be that instead of one per civilization, it becomes one per cluster, as per the map settings?  Too hard to implement, I guess?

I feel that there are a few things in the game don't scale well into the larger maps.  Great game overall, though.

I just now got the game.  However, I played GC1-3.  GC3 used to try and limit the number of survey ships with admin points, but did a poor job at it because there were plenty of ways to boost your admin.   GC4 has SO many events that it makes sense to try and throttle that.

What I especially like are the survey ships that can fight, so that it forces you to make a game decision whether to send the Enterprise out exploring or to join the fleet and fight.  Can't do both.  The Drengin are up north, but the deep space anomalies are down south.