I have read all the posts and would like to echo the advice of my favorite post so far.

1) Large maps and mega wars make cap/scaling off balance:
a) The role of capital ships gets dwarfed in a massive battle.
Planetary defense becomes next to worthless when you have 100+ships attacking.
- this makes defensive players sitting ducks.
- There is no home team advantage making the game offensively bent.
c) Capital Centers influence is not effective enough.


2) The AI seems to break and run to much..even when they out number you.

3) AI seems to spam low level units and ignores tech.

4) It would be nice to see what kind of tech the enemy is using..whether this be granted as a "tech ability" or something. This adds at least some kind of "counter" strat to the game.
Thanks

can we stickied this thread. Please, so that it is easier to find. Because there are multiple threads regarding upcoming 1.03 patch.

And..for 1.03, can we see more diplomacy options like giving players ships or giving them planets.

Also, make the superweapons for TEC less powerful or make it more costly for them to build and use. Just find some ways that non TEC players can make it easier for them to defend against. Also, likewise with the Varsrai and their Dark fleet special ability.

is it possible to have espionage like in Galciv 2 for Sins. It would be so cool to send agents to destablize a planet's alleigance.

I like the idea of drunken pirates . We should get alot of optional small random triggers like that, which you could enable/disable before starting a game. More 4X! ^^

I find the idea of destroying planets unapealing. You can simply leave a planet and make sure you have spread your culture enough so that the enemy can't capture it.
However...
Perhaps an end game idea would be destroying stars.

For example:

If you(r team) pretty much own a galaxy in a huge map with different star systems, you would be given the option to move your fleet to an enemy galaxy and destroy their star.
Destoying the star can be done by setting up a doomsday device there, siege weapons or whatever fits.

The inhabitor(s) of that galaxy is/are pretty much forced to move their main fleet to their star or risk losing their empire. Quick alliances have to be made, even if unsteady...

Once you destroyed the star you can get some time, 10 minutes for example, before the star forms a black hole and swallows up all the planets. If you are inhabiting that galaxy, you probably want to try sneaking a colony ship through it to see if you can still make a comeback.

Moving for an enemy star will be forcing the end-game, a clash between at least 2 decently sized fleets without structure (but perhaps culture) advantages.

Not sure what the pirates should do in that case, probably just try to move to the next galaxy within the 10 minutes after the star is destroyed.

Any idea of this or perhaps another end-game game mechanic?

we need more

COLORS

... im sick of it when I find im BLUE and my enemy is slightly LIGHTER BLUE


   please please please!!!

All my comments are based on single player, that is where I would like to see expansion.
1. Diplomacy
Don't know why this is not mentioned more. Any game without locked teams is just silly, everyone hates me because I didn't kill x ships in few minutes on the other side of the galaxy and the AI certainly doesn't treat itself the same way. Smooth this out, make it feel more realistic if that's possible or more forgiving. And why does the entire diplomacy system always come down to military action, I'd like to see relationships entirely based on trade and commerce. Perhaps missions by the AI to create x frigates for him and a way to donate them for example. Or even a mission to swap x metal for x crystal could improve faction. Think US or UK/Saudi relationship, US needs Saudi resources while Saudi enjoys US arms. Ideally I'd like to see military and commerce missions both available when they tell me they have a mission for me and completing either appeases their insatiable desire for my help. Of course if the emphasis is taken away from military action another way to cause strife between factions needs to occur such as completing missions with one faction having negative effect on another factions standing.

2. Make base defence guns on a par with Hangers.
Currently it feels like it's only worth building hangers and maybe a repair bay or Vasari phase jump thingy. Guns only get built when you run out of slots. I don't agree that we need to improve the effectiveness of base defence, but a balance of the current options would be nice.

3. Wouldn't it be nice if we could change the left hand interface to do like LRM x 40 rather than 40 little LRM icons? Full complements on a great interface, but would be nice for an option like this.

4. Explosions!
currently the way ships expire isn't nearly as gratuitous and exciting as I hoped it would be

5. Races
Not for 1.3, more likely an expansion but wouldn't it be lovely to have more factions for those big epic games.

6. In 1.3 I'd like to have a clock on the screen so I don't end up going to sleep at 5:30 in the morning with work the next day

7. Last but not least perhaps a 45(?) second cooldown on Phase Jump engines to try and reduce the amount people can just ping pong forces to keep their fleet from taking damage. Shouldn't effect travel too much as traversing Gravity Wells normally takes about this time. This would also conversely mean PJI's are slightly better for people trying to catch Ping Pongers as the increased Phase Jump time is added after the proposed engine cooldown expires.

Its already in the game. Look at the top left next to the search button.

I'd also really like to be able to negotiate a peace treaty between two ai-players.

for example, im at 100% peace with 2 players that hate eachother and keep askin me to kill eachother for them wich offcourse im not gonna do cause i want to keep my relations high.

or maybe a way to make em hate some other player more or something though the peace treaty would be better .

oh and maybe i allready posted this but it would be really nice to be able to ask the ai for resources like they do me.

heavly damadged ships have negative effects like , 10 drop in fire power , 25% drop in speed ,etc.

I would like to see two thing added in the next update or so;

1) A real time clock in the game UI. I have been playing this game WAAAAY to late in the evening(morning?). Having a small clock off in one corner with the real world time would be helpfull. An alarm function would be nice also .

2) I find the request and diplomacy from the game UI to be fairly useless. I keep getting quests to kill this or that for some empire halfway across the star system. And then the time that you have to do it in is to short. There is no way I could complete the quest and defend my own empire. I would like to see the time to complete either longer or something else. As it is I mostly ignore the AI diplomacy missions.

Great game guys!

TNX
Blair.

Well the game is good but there are a few things i would like to see in the next patch if possible.

1. Some how upgrade the visual quality of the planets, stars, units, and buildings. I know this will take time. So i'm not in a hurry to see it done.

2. When a player has finished attacking a planet and killing all the structures around it with a fleet. The fleet tends to move to the edge of the grav well by default? I personally think thats a waste of time. The fleet should just stay at the location they are at when the mission is accomplished.

3. you should add an option for units to be able to set a patrol route along your empire or around a planet you own. it gets tiring that when you are under attack your fleet is on the other side of the planet and they have to move around the planet to get to the attackers. if there was a way to make units follow a set number of waypoints and auto attack any enemies they encounter.

4. you should also add a way to delete saves from the menu. i have way to many auto save that i want to get rid of but i cant because there is no delete button!

5. the fleets within the game seem to have no real formation. when you attack they just get within range and fire away. this get tiring if you are not constantly telling the fleet what to attack. after all you have other things to do you cant always put most of your time to managing the battles. The carriers should stay near the back of the fleet. The captial ships should be near the front of the fleet. The more powerfull units should be near the front of the formation to support in attacking. The units with the special support abilities should not actively get involved in the battle unless otherwise ordered to. They tend to have weak firepower. You might consider increasing the antimatter they have and decreasing the cost to use the abilities. The anti fighter frigates should attack fighters should be spread out within the formation. The units thay are "planet killers" tend to break of from a fleet and attack a planet. They seem to get killed to easily if one can concentrate firepower on it. They are no match for other ships in a one on one battle. I belive they should be near the back of the formation with the carriers. Oh and also give them higher hp or shields or at least increase the fire power that they have when attacking a ship instead of a planet.

6. The rate of extraction form the mines tend to make a way to get your econ up and running pretty hard. The black market tends to be just too expensive to use in the begening unless a player have a economy that can handle the rediclious prices you get sometimes. And somehow when you research the ability to extract more metal or crystals increase the rate in which they are gathered for that particular planet. in game that i have played when i max out on the tech to extract better amounts of metal and crystal i still tend to get a measly 1-3 extraction rate per sec(depends on the number of planets i have) for my empire as a whole. i don't really see a significant increase in gathering rate.

These are all the ones i can think of right now but ill post again if i can think of something else. These are just my opinions which i hope are considered to be in the next patch.

I like this idea a lot.   

1. Make it possible for teammates to choose whether or not they want to start in the same solar system. Its kind of hard to rush aid to a teammate if he's not local.

2. Peg the fleet upkeep cost to the actual size of the fleet and not the total ship slots.

And for the guy who requested a MP pause option...press the pause key.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet (this is a really long thread), but I'd really like to see the military, civilian, and fleet research functions be able to each research one item at a time mutually independent of each other. Right now there tends to be these huge research backlogs that develop. You might be in the middle of a major battle and really need extra ships, but civilian or military research is clogging up your ability to do fleet research. You have to go through and wipe out things in the string of research entries in order to bring a particular necessity to the top of the to-do list.

Sorry, looks like I'm late to the party, and I don't have time to read through 32 pages, so hopefully I'm not repeating someone else's suggestion.

I was hoping there'd be a little more 4x in the game. So far it leans more heavily towards RTS imo. I don't think a patch will resolve that, but here is one thing that I think could help (I also apologize if it's already been implemented, because I just started playing):

Set up trade agreements. If I'm allied with my teammate, I'd just like to setup a permanent exchange of resources, maybe x per second, or per minute or whatever. And then you could set maybe a max resource or time cap before the agreement expires. Or if the other player's obligations aren't met, the deal is canceled. In our last game, my teammate was swimming in metal, and I was swimming in crystal, but as far as I knew, the only way to exchange was through the diplomacy menu, which we had to do repeatedly.

I'm not sure, but do shift and ctrl click work on resource purchase and trade, a la Rise of Nations / AoE?

PS. Great job on the engine performance. I was expecting to see some slowdown (don't most PC players?) But I was zooming and rotating everywhere, and it was very fluid and smooth.

PPS. Oh yeah, and put me down for even faster game speed. At this point, it seems RTS heavy anyway, might as well offer even faster speeds, maybe even as fast as starcraft.

Maybe a mothership...like in homeworld 2...

Diplomacy needs to be tweaked to be more useful, not sure how because at this point I don't use it.

Tie fleet maintenance costs to actual fleet cap consumed (can still be based on levels) not researched. Even consider some sort of bonus for researching to a higher fleet cap but not using it all under the assumption that you have researched how to field a navy of a certain size, and that technological know how would benefit smaller navies. This would help a player recover from a devastating loss by freeing up capital to replenish the fleet without the penalty of having a big fleet upkeep cost for no ships.

Make the max fleet cap vary based on the size of the map being played (based on total number of planets? stars? etc.)

Campaign.

1) Something I noticed mentioned in another thread - the AI seems to have a habit of sending in a giant fleet of planet bombing ships, wiping out the planet, and...leaving. I've only seen them actually colonize the planet afterwards once, and it still took them about half an hour. They also completely ignore my structures in orbit, unless they brought some other frigates along - and even then all they seem to hit is missile platforms and maybe frigate/capital ship factories.

2) Targeting priority - I've only noticed this with smaller groups, but it still seems rather odd....I will have (for example) a capital ship and 3 frigates beating the tar out of a couple of light frigates (usually the random ones that sit in orbit around unexplored & unclaimed planets). I then jump a colony ship in, and the ships will immediately drop all attack on my other ships to go after the colonizer while i'm still slaughtering them, even if they were close to taking out one of my ships. I can practically drag them around like they're on a leash by moving the colonizer back & forth.

3) Please add a non-random way to pick which skybox to use - the brighter ones start causing eyestrain for me on longer games, and a way to bypass them or at least take them out of the rotation would be great. Apologies if this is already in there somewhere and i'm just blind.

4) Seconding something mentioned above in another post - let us have at least one civilian and one warfare research going at once....I don't see any logical reason why working on one type should block the other, especially if we have to build two different kinds of facilities. More than one of each type going at once would probably be unbalancing, though maybe a (very) small boost in research speed for going beyond the minimum number of labs for a particular tech might be nice.

1) If possible a fix for the framrate. Its fine when you load, then it just goes ape shit!

2) Sharper textures. So you can zoom in furthur on the large ships and let them actually seem massive.

i hope they don't do this. already in longer games, by the end every player has nearly everything researched. the last thing we need is to double research speed and remove any tough decisions to be made on what paths are most worth researching immediately.

Probably already mentioned, but this idea came to me from last night's game, so thought I'd drop by and post it.

Pirates ought to flee back to their homeworld whenever the bounty has been used up on someone. They've collected all the cash that was available to be awarded and they're not philanthropists trying to aid the group that paid them so further ship losses aren't worth it to them.

Summation: Collect all available bounty and then retreat. Don't fight to the death.

If not both at full speed, then maybe be able to start the second one at a heavy penalty until the other one finishes....something besides completely blocking, at least if the two separate lab types are going to remain.

It's pretty much always a bad idea to alter good game mechanics in order to improve theme. Right now if the research mechanic has a problem, it's that it's far too easy to get all of the techs in a single game. By the end of the game, all of the races have everything worthwhile researched. So any suggestion to speed up the research rate at all is advocating pushing things in the wrong direction. My idea of a perfect system would be to double the size of the tech trees, and keep the research rate the same. Then the empires might end up significantly different by end game, based on what they felt were the important tech paths to go down.

As for theme, I'm sure the developers can come up with some BS thematic reason why the empires aren't able to research more than a single tech path at once. It's really a moot point, and not worth making the actual game play worse over.