concerning declaring war....

What if when trying to declare war, to try to avoid the Senate vetoing the act, you have the option to "bribe key Senate leaders"...different amounts of money (yes, it would come out of the Government Treasury, money laundering, you know). The higher amount of money, the better the chance that the Senate members will be "bought"...but also, the more money you pay out, the more likely your little bribe will be "found out". If that happens, then Morale goes down Empire-wide....

Sound like a good idea???

Great game! A lot of great ideas posted.

1. I would vote that individual planetary sliders would make planetary management micromanagement hell. GalCiv's simplicity makes it great.

2. Is there a way to "launch all" ships at a planet? I've been doing it one at a time, and it gets repetetive fast. If not, it would be nice to have.

3. It would be nice if there were an abandon planet warning if you try to load your entire planet's population onto a transport or colony ship. I did this early in one game and emptied Earth. Oops.

4. Would like to add my voice to those asking for way-points, rally points, and easier manipulation of the bc/influence sliders in the diplomacy screen.

5. Also, as others have mentioned, an "auto-resolve monetary amounts" for a given trade would be nice. It adds nothing to the game to get your deal to green, then spend three or four minutes tweaking the bc payment screen to maximize the 50-month revenue stream. Every trade. All game. Yikes. Not fun.

6. I would also add a vote for a formal declaration of war option, and for having a players actions regarding this impact his morality score, sometimes dramatically. One of the strengths of the game is that your friends can be relied upon, but it gives the human player an advantage when he can betray friends and launch vicious attacks on them without having it impact his reputation with univolved civs.

Oh, yes, an AI tweak...

I was able to successfully block a convoy of friendly transports (speed of 2) with four ships. First, with a speed of two, the AI convoy should have been able to go around my ships:

Before move:
C
SSSS

After move:
/-
CSSSS

But the AI instead did this:

--C
SSSS

It stayed blocked.

Also, it would be nice if there were some AI code that told the computer when a friend was blocking a ship's movement, so that the AI could complain. Maybe something along the lines of recognizing it's path is blocked by the same civ for a certain percentage of turns, then making a formal diplomatic request to get the hell out of the way. Refusing the request should drop relations between the two countries.

Thanks for a great game!

Damn it. That move display didn't turn out at all. Sorry. I thought it might work.

make it so u can offer the comp something and then have them offer something in return, instead of going through their entire list of techs and ships to find out what they will offer you

~SDC~

These have probably already been mentioned but it bears repeating.

1.) Enemy ships orbiting their own planets should not be visible to the player unless.

A.)The player sends a ship withing sensor range of the planet

B.)The player invest enough money in Espionage to gather such information.

It is wrong that a player can find out the fleet composition of any planet just by clicking on it, no matter the distance.

2.) More interaction with the United Planets. Such as being able to raise issues for votes.

3.) Stop other races from selling off all their ships to you, when you have massed great amount of ships of your own and are ready to strike. A player can sit a large fleet in plain sight an opponents planet, call them up and purchase all of their ships and then waltz right in and take the planet. The AI is supposed to mimic human players. Only a complete idoit would sell off all of their ships while a fleet sits on their doorstep or when they see that the other player has more than enough ships. To combat this maybee, only allow Close or Allys to sell ships to you when not at war and in desperate need. I'm not sure of the particulars but i know something needs tweaking here.

Just my ideas.

If not mentioned before, I'd like a way to locate a nonoccupied planet by name. I got a random event describing a quality 35 planet, but I can't find the darn thing!


~SDC~

Can we get a "what do you offer for this?" button in the trade screen? I'd like to offer a tech, for instance, and see what the AI is willing to offer for it. If they can make spontaneous offer, they ought to be able to do this.

~SDC~

I would love to see Multiplayer.

On the topic of "Random Events" :notsure:

Why is it that these events (XX found a Rnager, XXX found a Planet Quality upgrade artifact, XX found an artifact that increased their power - stop them before it's too late!, etc.) always happen to OTHER civs? Why can't I ever get a free upgrade?

Second, these events, as currently implemented, are just too destabilizing! Unless it's really late in the game, that Ranger is going to just crush half the other civs' entire fleets!

I thought about requesting a "Play with/without random events" toggle, but then I got to thinking, why not make it a slider? For the events with a sense of magnitude to them (PQ upgrade of +3, vs. PQ upgrade of +12), make the slider control the maximum allowable value or amplitude of the variation. For events that just happen or don't (free Ranger), make the slider control the chance of ovvurance.

For people looking for a "purer" strategy game, they can set the slider to zero. For people looking for a wild ride, set it to max. For those of us who think the default value should just be lower, we could do that.

~SDC~

How about changing 'guard' to 'never wake guard'. I like sitting defenders on top of space stations but they keep waking when the enemy nears. They`re just there to soak up damage! Why do they keep bothering me?! LOL

I want to add my voice in support of two suggestions about trade:

Auto-resolve trade: Yin and bentcd (and perhaps others - I only went as far as post 49) suggestions are both good. Either let us know the cash/influence balancing number for a trade, or prevent us from endless goal-seek manual entries. There is no skill in it as it stands, it is only a tedious mechanical process that I would rather the computer perform for me.

Tech tree: I would like some way to know either the value of the techs (i.e. how long it would take me to build the one to trade for, and how long it took me to build the one I am proposing to trade) and what bonuses they provide (I can't remember what most of these techs do!). A roll-over or a pop-up is what I have in mind.


~SDC~

First off, this game rocks. Big time. I just won a cultural victory. That was very, very satisfying. Anyway, my comments:

1) I like the customizable difficulty, being able to specify the intelligences of the major races. I just finished my first game, with all of them on sub-normal. I'd like to kick it up a notch, and put some on normal, some on sub-normal, but I *don't* want to necessarily know which ones are the smart ones (that'd affect my strategy). I can see the rationale for it being fixed (such and such race is known throughout the galaxy for being stupid), but it'd be nice to be able to specify "3 normals and 2 sub-normals, assigned randomly. While we're at it, maybe do the same thing with alignments (Scenario: You choose to go evil, and you know exactly two of your opponents are also evil, but you don't know which ones right off the bat. Find them and join them).

2) I really like the United Planets. Especially how it often makes proposals that redistribute wealth/tech from the leader to the rest (I bet that doesn't seem so unfair on high difficulty levels when you're bringing up the rear!). I just want to add my support to the idea of being able to initiate laws to vote on (maybe at the cost of a hefty chunk of influence; it shouldn't be that easy for the upstart humans to fling laws around their first few years in the UP).

Can we have events that aren't restricted to colonizing?

Perhaps linkable to buildings being created, espionage levels reached, ships being built, or even as simple as number of turns expired?

I'm talking good neutral evil choices here... as after the beginning of the game you don't seem to have much option to change, or grow more evil/good.

I'd like to see for instance, 'Such and such a planet has left the Drengins and joined our empire'. Do you a) Accept the population of the planet as your own -10% production, Kill the ruling caste -2% morale, or c) Free slaves! +20 production.

Hi All,

I'd like to see the Draginol "Something evil growing on your planet" Event Toned down. I played a game yesterday, medium map, i was doing well, i had rush colonised 20 planets, and had researched battleAx's to combat the Yor who declared war on me. Suddenly about an hour into the game, i got the Message saying that Something Evil was growin on Earth, i sure as hell did'nt want to abandon my capital, so i left it.

10 turns later it converts to draginol, 10 minutes later his Ships with 30 attack had destroyed my fleet of 30 BattleAx's (Only 5 def) i tried to make peace, bu they wouldnt. The promptly destoyed all but a few of my worlds, and pretty much took out the other Civs. I personally LOVE the random events, but the fact this one can pop up so early and destroy you is way way overkill Looking around the board i see MANY threads on this event, some people haveing it occur within 15 minutes of a new game

Please guys, take out the killer events that effectivly mean game over. Its not fun.

~SDC~

Also, isnt it a bit lame that in the later game, the only way to get a planets moral back up is to ship off a 1/4 of the population. This for me is incredibly annoying when i have 30+ planets all suddenly dropping to 30% moral, despite i have almost every tec and building to reduce moral, also for my civ bonus i selected the Joyous trait, and the govt style thet adds +20% moral, looking at my civ bonuses, i have a +60% moral, but i still dont have a planet over 40% moral. (Despite spending a fortune on propaganda too!) My tax rate is only about 12%. Is this *really* meant to work this way? I dont even have any planets to move them to, so i end up deleting them. To be honest in my current game, on a large map..its becoming an incredible chore :

~SDC~

Add something called Cryogenic Colony Ship to solve
the overpopulation/morale quandry. With this ship..
you load up colonists and then send them out on the
ship to parts unknown and farther than the known galaxy.

In Effect..the colonists will vanish when the ship is launched as will the ship. It will prevent having colony
ships just milling about.

1) The domestic spending sliders really need locks. I'm going nuts trying to keep military as a "reference" value and adjust social and research around it.

2) As has been said before, autopilot's pretty awful as it is. I'd very much prefer something like what HOMM does, where remaining paths are just stored but are never automagically resolved. Instead, you select the unit in question and issue a "continue move" command that sends it along its stored way. On subsequent turns, you repeat until it reaches the destination. You could keep the option to continue-move all units with moves remaining at the end of a turn, but please, document when the autopilot's going to fire off if you do that. If that option's there, there needs to be an intelligent way of handling what happens when an automoved unit has movement points left.

3) The ship list should list moves remaining, since that's the primary thing I'm likely to want to use it for.

~SDC~

not sure if been mentioned yet but rename planets a "Thomas Mode" (Thats me) were you start out with all the tech but final frounter and have super tons of money and you have to mediate all of the races in the galaxy for like 50 years then a intergalaxtic super race comes and theres a huge war:sniff!: and fun stuf like that and a custom ship creation wizerd (out side of game) with easy anyone can understand instructions and step by step idiot proff instructions for making the grafics and animations for them.

I *need* the following

1. Ability to dismiss ships from the ship list, without returning to other displays in between (have you ever tried decomissioning >100 ships in one turn? *tedious*...)

2. The two views of the galaxy (standard and tactical) for the planet list is great! Can you guys provide same on the ship list? I'd be nice to get a graphic idea of where my ships are relative to the other Civilizations'.

Thanks guys!

~SDC~

First things first: great game!! I am thouroughly enjoying myself (all I seem to win are cultural victories so far, but a victory is a victory :))

1) Let me add my voice to offer expanded United Planet options. This is a really fun part of the game to me and it would be cool to bring resolutions to the table to be voted on (trade embargos anyone?). Anything you could do to expand the UP would be really cool.

2) This might already be in the game (I havent seen it yet, but...) but being able to do really evil stuff like build bio/chemical weapons for use in terrorism against your enemies would be cool.

I cant think of anything else right now, but I am really enjoying the game. Thanks!

New form of government: Confederation.

Gets the 60% economic bonus of Federation and is just as hard to maintain control of the senate.

How it differs from Federation is that if the currently wasted manpower resources is fixed and it is something like "Trade Goods", you cannot transfer money made at one planet to another. Each planet does give another planet or the associations of planets this extra cash and only spends it on its own projects. The planet can store up the money for future ones, but not transfer it to other planets to use. With this heavy of a penalty, the counter bonus should be that there are no successions of planet members from this form of government. The planets are already basically independent to start with.

I typed: "Each planet does give another planet or the association..."

I meant to type: "Each planet does not give another..."

OH, and how hard would it be to have a spellchecker and preview on this form????? Please get these. In fact, this is the only forum I know that doesn't at least have a preview option. For a supposed high-tech game, this forum is sure behind the times.

Autoscout ability for ships.

Adjust the impact population has on morale. Its out of whack.

olaf

Going back to the United Planets subject, maybe we could add the ability to influence another race's vote once an issue comes up. Something like in Alpha Centauri. An issue comes up, and I click on a guy to bring up the diplomacy screen. I can demand a 'yes' or 'no' vote, and offer lots of stuff or a threat. It'd have to be costly as hell for it to make sense, like if I'm ahead in tech and I'm trying to get my good buddies the Altairans to vote against tech redistribution, I should probably have to give them all my techs (since they would have gotten them anyway). Then maybe they'd go for it, since they win and their opponents lose on the deal. That sort of thing.

BUOYS

I'd like to be able to drop BUOYS on resources/planets I have discovered with scouts and will want to go back to with Constuctors or Colony Ships. Even better would be dropping a buoy AND saying (send next colony ship/constructor HERE)