Lot of great thoughts and ideas in here, my condolences to Ironclad for having to pick and choose

I agree that PJI's need a huge boost. I'd like to see them prevent any jumps out of the grav well for enemy fleets entirely (until destroyed), or at least prevent jumping through phase lanes that have a PJI at BOTH ends.

Siege frigates are annoying as hell when massed. I'd like to see their dmg either neutered, or cap greatly increased (Again).

Planetary defenses are part of the above problem. IMO, 'stationary' defenses don't make a lot of sense to me in space. My friend and I were talking about what it would be like if the defense platforms were ORBITAL.. ie, IF they are build within the planet's 'orbit' (pretty close to the planet itself) they could 'fly' around in circles around it to defend. This might make it easier to focus fire on those siege spammers. Although I do think the defenses could use a boost themselves in terms of range + dmg because.

I'm not a big fan of turtling, but what I hate is having to have 3-4 fleets on larger maps that are ONLY used to defend my outter planets because my planets simply die or get bypassed all too easily. Thus requiring so many fleets to ALWAYS be within a jump (or dare I say two!) of all my outter planets. Makes it extremely hard to go on the offensive on medium-large maps

And one more request: give yourselves a pat on the back for a job well done

Give phase gates a rally point to be used with the Returning Armada ability. It's not fun to have to herd all your sheep from across the system every few minutes

Actually Pirates attack the least defended planet, and take the shortest route to get there. In that sense, pirates can take several routes.

Great news concerning your sales ! In the long run, sales have to be good, to justify paying salaries for further enhancements and expansions. Of course...

I played my very first ICO game last evening, and one guy mysteriously left after 15 minutes. On the other hand, some games on ICO start with A.I. place-holders, while some people can't find a game to join.

Consequently (to stress points already made by others) :

1. A patch should allow to replace a human player (voluntarily leaving or disconnected) by an A.I., during the heat of a MP game.

2. And another patch could allow to replace an A.I. with a human player who would like to jump-in (that would be more difficult to implement, because ICO would have to offer a special menu to display the possibilities).

This because damage is only updated every 10 seconds, this is done both for performance and graphical reasons (ie damage is at one instant but weapons fire animations can be fairly long, so its to make the discrepancy less obvious) Im pointing this out because i thought it looked bad too, so modded it so to update 100x faster, the engine just crashed after about a minute, 10x faster (ie once a second) still looks weird and there is a fair performance hit.

And what do i want from the next patch. An ability to specify target preferences rather than just targets, e.g. i tell my all (or some) of my heavy cruisers to attack an enemy carrier, they go blow it up, and then automatically look for another carrier to blow up, and will continue to do so until there are none left at which point they default to normal preferences.

Four pages back I tried to tell them to quit writing wish-lists to Santa and get practical and they didn't listen. Don't even bother, Annatar. They just want to fantasize rather than get down to the brass tacks of balancing this game.

Agree whole heartedly. At the moment the fact that I'm constantly having to fight off practically every AI is spoiling what would otherwise be an awesome game for me. The result is I can't ever focus on battles because there's always someone else invading me. Initial neutrality with declarations of war seems a better option to me (though perhaps you could make this optional for those that like a free for all slug fest).

2 cents on UI improvements:

First)
Make the middle mouse click more useful. Currently, when you click it, you hop to (focus on) whatever you have selected. Click it again and you zoom in/out (context zoom).

The problem with this is that players rarely will want to focus on what they have selected. If they do, theres a bind in the key config called "Focus on selection" for this purpose. Theres also a key binding for "Context zoom".

Conclusion: Make the middle mouse click do something different. Like,
1) Select under cursor + focus on this unit
2) Do nothing (makes it available for rebinding)


Second)
The camera zoom is great and very useful. But it is very aggressive with its "lock-on" feature. It will, for instance, lock on to fighter squads when you're at grav-well view distance.

The problem with this is that it's distracting for the player to have the camera move around unexpectedly when he's trying to get an overview of a situation.

Conclusion: Minimize the "lock-on" aggressiveness, like
1) Disregard the "lock-on" feature until whichever ship is being zoomed on, comes out of icon-mode.
2) Disregard the "lock-on" feature until a set zoom range (being less than grav-well).
3) Switch the function of the "No zoom to cursor" button, to be a "No lock-on on zoom". (Taking into consideration that few players, if any, ever disable zoom-to-cursor.)

*Sorry for a long post, but atleast its professional

Suggestions for patch in the near-term:
*Phase Jump Inhibitors need to be more effective
*AI retreats too much. It's smart not to fight a losing battle, but it needs to figure that some planets he can't afford to lose no matter the cost. Strategically, his last stand shouldn't always be at his homeworld.
*Make the alerts a little more intelligent. I don't want to know when an enemy scout has jumped into my ally's territory, but I do want to know when a sizeable enemy fleet has arrived.
*Add SHIP BASED phase jump inhibitors. Units have so many hps in this game that retreat has a minimal penalty. Retreat should be viable but not costless.
*Add an ACCEPT/REJECT option for each mission AI's offer you. Many missions they offer are just not doable. Also, maybe just a "Destroy x structures OR x ships" would be better.

Long term suggestions:
*Revamp diplomacy. Real diplomatic options would be nice, not just these random missions. More like GalCiv2 would be awesome.
*Add unique units for each side that have no direct mirrors on the opposing sides.
*Custom unit building (think GalCiv2). Custom capship building would be particularly welcome.

Also

*Please allow queues to be made for a destination system even before a fleet has jumped to that system. i.e. I want to queue an order for my ship to jump to a system, colonize it and then jump to another system.
*Please have ships that join a fleet automatically adopt the same tactics as that fleet and it's group jump setting (I don't want to have to reset the entire fleets engagement range, cohesion, and group phase jump every time I add a ship).
*please ad NLIPS (non-linear inverse perspective scaling) so that it does not become "war of the icons" so often.

Love the game so far!


Here are some simple requests:

- A way to flag planets so ships don't try to path across them unless explicitly directed. This saves your auto-explore scout ships from trying to cross a death trap planet, such as directly crossing the grav well of a pirate base.

Map Generator (which I LOVE by the way)

- A way to control the min and max distance for player starting worlds so they are not all on the outer edge.
- A toggle to turn off the asteroid and ice/volcano planet that comes with every player starting world.
- A way to duplicate the template for a star or planet group. I've made some complex star / planet groups and it is painful to duplicate it several times for each star on the map.


Diplomacy needs reworking, but here is a simple idea:

Mission reward: Offer of Ceasefire, or Peace if already at Ceasefire. This is more reciprocal than 20% goodwill that is soon lost.

Also, while I'm on the subject....

A "Non Aggression Pact" would be great to have. This could replace Ceasefire, or possibly be implicit with a trade agreement. This way your ships will automatically defend against incursions, but you won't fight if you happen across the other player in a neutral or enemy grav-well.

I just wanted to second a major suggestion, one I didn't see mentioned again:


Quick diplomacy fix: make everyone start as neutral instead of shoot on sight. This would make the current diplomacy system useable atleast.

You would have to declare war before your ships start shooting others down.

Be sure the AI doesn't exploit it too.




That would be perfect.

i have dropped from a few good games and it sucks. this would be a very nice feature. like maybe the ai will take over for a bit, but when you rejoin your back in control. i think this would be ideal. often the game just crashes, and i can rejoin in 1 minute. So the ai playing for one minute wont really change the game too much.