Try pushing the Pause key on your keyboard.

Watch the opening credits, you CANNOT have neutral starts w/ the AI (unless you put them on your team). It's a new war and being chums in the beginning will case future problems. To keep the game interesting I can understand the issue, but there should be a chart with the ceasefire, peace treaty, trade, things like that. And the AI should understand it rather than having you backstab your ally. They should backstab each other.

Mines!!!!!!!!, i would liek to be able to mine the area around my sun or liek a gas giant so that my flanks are protected!!!

An additional point on pirate attacks. In my 1v1 game last night against a friend, I happened to coordinate an attack of mine to hit at the same time in the same system pirates were pillaging.

The bounty was far higher on my opponent than me, yet for some reason the pirates seemed far more entertained by firing on my ships than on his. I can understand if I was doing more damage they might have been irritated and also that I still had some bounty on my head. It would seem to be a good change though to prioritize pirates to actually focus more on who they launched against and keep other forces to a secondary target.

Joining games in progress + AI replacement for leaving players are the only features I request, since I play with friends that can't always stay the full duration of the game, and sometimes want to join once we've already started.

There should be a panel or something on the main game screen showing bounty on your head, and the most wanted player. This way, you can quickly check your bounty instead of having to pull up the pirates screen.

Be able to toggle the Pirates On/Off at players choice!

PLEASE let there be a toggle setting much like the resource/speed toggles that allows a player to SLOW DOWN production speeds on ships and buildings.

As it is right now, the game ceases to be strategic when you are able to build ships at three times the speed that they can be destroyed (yeesh...) - there is little incentive to worry about being careful with your forces since a replacement fleet can be whipped up in mere minutes (sometimes before the original battle is even over!).

"Fixing" this one aspect would allow for much faster small map games as well since no empire would be able to just keep cranking out frigates like twinkies and creating these system tug-of-wars that start to wear out this galactic emperor's patience.

Thanks!

Its a little late for 1.03 but I have an idea to spice up the battles. The battles are epic sometimes but they do get stale because there's no modifiers from battle damage. Imaging a fleet that needs to retreat due to some enemy reinforcement but some of their ships stand little chance of escaping due to severe engine damage. It will be a few systems like: Shield charge rate and strength, weapon strength and rate, slipstream charge and speed, engine speed and antimatter charge and containment. First hit would be slight, then moderate then severely and finally destroyed. In a little twist, hits to the antimatter systems would also damage other systems due to its volatile nature.

Oh God yes! Please give us -actual- capital ships not the formidable battleships that are already ingame.

EVE Online-style anyone?

Rrrgghhhh that'd be sexy. Twice as big as one of the current ones perhaps.

Four things come to mind:

1. I'd like to see the ability to have star systems with multiple stars (binary stars), etc. I know it wouldn't add anything play-wise, but it'd be nice for a more random/realistic model of space.

2. Like my first idea, adding black holes. Perhaps have some sort of artifact that could be retrieved or a neutral colony/space station that could be captured, but balanced against a random chance for getting sucked in/destroyed every so often or losing control of the artifact.

3. Add moons to the planets. They could be colonized or not.

4. I'd also like to see some sort of resource use for Gas Giants. Maybe setting up a station or something to "mine" the gas could add a modifier to Crystal/Metal Production. You know, the gas acting as a catalyst.

Sorry if I repeat stuff that was already said, but as the search function won't do me any good on that one and I don't want to read 33 pages, I'll just say what I would like to see changed/added in 1.03 or a later patch.

Planetary Defense:
- Platforms should have a greater range. If I build them on the outer yellow line, they should actually reach the end of the grav well, so that they can shoot down fleeing ships and attack ships as soon as they approach.

- Platforms should deal more damage, maybe through an reasearchable upgrade on research tier 5/6. This way they would stay as they are in the early game but would be of more use in the later game against mid sized and big fleets.

- Phase Jump Inhibitors should cover the whole grav well and they should jam all outgoing phase jumps for the enemy or at least greatly prolong the jump preps. This way they could actually stop ships from rushing through your system or just jumping away as soon as your reinforcements arrive.

Resarch:
- Research of the military and the civilian tech tree should be independent. What is the point in having two different reseach facilities if all work on the same project anyway? So players should be able to research a civilian and a military project at the same time, not one after another.

- There should be a way to accelerate research in the late game. Maybe each additional research lab could grant a bonus to research time or something like that. Right now it takes way to much time to research the whole tree in a 4-player game. I guess in an 8-player game the research time is ok, because these games are longer anyway.

Options:
- There should be an option to deactivate certain auto-casts in general. I don't want my ships to form up fleets on their own.

Additional Buildings:
- I think it would be cool if we would have something like a battle/space station.
Maybe the colony frigates could "sacrifice" themself in becoming a stationary platform. They could allow the player to build platforms arround them (therefore extending the build range arround your planets) or they could allow them to build stationary defense in otherwise uncolonizable systems like arround the sun or a gas giant.