My 2c on wish making
I haven’t had too much MP experience with the game yet, mostly SP so those are just my thoughts so far.
1. Suggestion on system defenses. Leave only inner ring available for structure placement. Then add "area of control" that would allow to place buildings around it to some structure (the repair thingie comes to mind + asteroids with built mines) and allow that structure to be placed anywhere in the gravity well.
What this will give us - ability to put cannons at the warp in zone thus making them more useful, while not boosting them to be uber (if the building with control zone(same goes for the planet) is destroyed all defense building would either get -50% efficiency due to loss of coordinated control or just go offline.
Or make those cannons\missile defenses deployable\movable objects, i.e. system patrol craft with no Phase Jump engines.
2. Capital Ships - I’m all for there being more of them in play, boosting their HP and giving them passive bonuses for smaller ships in their fleet\system is the way to go. For ex. Carrier`s passive ability would give 30% boost not only to his fighters but to all in the system. The Battleship would say give 30% boost to all flack frigates vs. fighters and the Anti-planet ship would give appropriate Boom bonus. This would encourage ppl to use cap ships in conjunction with appropriate small stuff.
In any case there should be a free choice and not I-win button, whether u want to use mainly capitals with small number of escorts or blobs of escorts with no capitals (pointing to shield mitigation numbers in general vs. large numbers and specifically for cap ships). 1 L1 Cap ship should be able to kill 40-points worth of frigates with 50% probability w/o using any specials, but at the same time 16 level 1 capitals should be able to survive 640-points of frigates with the same 50% probability w/o losing more than 6-8 ships. I`m all for having lvl 9 caps being 9 times as tough as lvl 1 , but its probably just me
3. Amount of fighters in the groups seems fine as it is. How often do you zoom completely in during the battle to view them zipping around anyway ? They are bit too small to see them even with medium zooming. I personally, 90% of the time just see icons moving around. Only in the beginning when u have small force engagements and don’t have to worry about too much things u get the time to enjoy close view of the pew pew bzzz boooom stuff.
4. My personal preference for modules would be:
Phase Jump Inhibitors -lock system down for any jump-outs by un-allied forces until it is destroyed.
Planetary Shields - no killing ur ppl until you blow the module.
Phase Gate with Armada Tech - just kill it all together, make tech give you 1 time fleet detachment on completion, say 2 random capitals + 120 points of frigates, but certainly nothing like it is now.
Culture buildings - take away stacking bonus, i.e. only 1 building per system is effective, 100% - 1 jump away and 50% effective at 2 jumps away. This will mean that if you want to culture flip neighboring system build Culture building here and then go kill his Culture building in the target system (if he has one). No more flipping 3 jumps away just because u built 5 in ur system. You want planet 2 jumps away ? go conquer system next to his, not more sitting with ur fleet on top of Culture buildings and waiting to planets to fall into ur hands. What if you can’t build anything in the system next to his ? i.e. Gas planet or such... well though luck bring ur fleet and do it the old fashion way. I think at the moment culture take over is way overpowered.
Refinery - i think moving it to the 2nd lvl next to the trade center would liven the beginning of the game with it recourse boost.
5. A good Guard and Patrol commands would be welcomed, i.e. setting ur Flack frigates to guard capitals and not wonder away, as well as letting ur fleet in solar system patrol few jump zones. AI evading static defenses until he cleared every other threat, calculating whether it would be worth to kill a constructor before it finishes a defensive structure, deciding whether its pirate raiders can plot course and slip past defenses and kill mining\economy\production building or planet itself unmolested would be great.
PS. Btw why ppl compare gameplay to HW when this is a Hegemonia with new FX ? Wish you could add current engine to Moo3 or SE5 but alas.. oh well its not a bad game at it is, needs more 4X though
