Voice acting for the pirates!

Just two or three different sound bytes for when they set out or attack. It would make me smile even as they blow me out of orbit. Appropriately pirate-ish, of course.

Some more character portraits. (Female TEC officer would be really cool.)

Improve the ICO interface a bit. (We really don't need to know whenever someone joins and leaves the channel, at least at the lobbies, and keep it from reseting the scroll-box on the side when people enter or leave.) Maybe make it so that when you right-click a person's name, it brings up the option to send them a whisper, or add them to your friend's list?

Don't know if there's already a stats board up somewhere, showing the top players and whatnot, but that'd be neat. Player profiles showing their performance and achievements. Foster an active community when you can, I suppose.

Oh, I also noticed that after a few hours, the sound-based notifications would stop entirely. When you're managing an empire across multiple star systems, those become pretty important, so when the sounds cut out late game, it can be a hassle. (I'm running Vista with realtek onboard sound).

Ships stop autoattacking late-game when in large fleets. I noticed this the other night. I sent my fleet into an enemy system and they just sort of sat there in rather impressive formation while getting picked at by a few enemy frigates.

Ok, that's all I can think of.

Neh, I've been playing games for years online, and I've really just seen the 'clan scene' start off strong, drag in new players, and a brief way down the line, they begin to overestimate their worth to the game and begin with the elitist bullshit. IE: "I'm in clan XXX and I want the game like this - you're just a pub scrub so stfu we clearly know the game more than you."

Also, the nature of competition means that to win people are going to exploit and abuse the game to 'get ahead', so it's not in their own interest to actually FIX the game. If a 'top player' is relying on an imbalance to win, why the hell would he ever call it out? I'd like to say "not all clanners are like that", but I've found that yes, they really are. I've honestly never seen a game truly benefit from a clan-heavy scene. It's possible that the game may be 'kept alive' for years to come by a dedicated clan scene, but consider that these zombified games generally aren't attracting new players there's little difference between a game being dead, and a game being supported by a few die-hards.

But I digress. I've just had miserable experiences with "CLANS" in damn-near every game you can name.

I think there are really 3 viable ways to fix the current population cap.

1) Pop Cap scales with the size of the map
2) Pop Cap is based on the number of plants controlled. HOWEVER, this should not be 1 for 1. I would suggest that it is only ~50% scaled by planets so that there is a disadvantage for growing to big. The idea is that if a players power is ~= pop cap, then power ~= planets owned. So there is little disadvantage to growing. However, if it is only partially scaled by planets than growing an empire to fast will leave you with a relatively weaker fleet than the size of your empire which would keep the current dynamic. E.G. In a 5 player game if each player has a base of 250 pop cap + 25 per planet. A player who control 50% of the map will neither have 50% of pop cap, nor only a 5th. Having only a 5th places that player at too major of a disadvantage
3) Some combination of 1 and 2

Better PJIs and bigger fleet cap. Then 3/4 of the complaints are gone.

^

Obviously larger galaxies should have bigger fleets, but

The problem really is the 'slippery slope', which 'scaling with planets' may induce. That is, once a player starts losing, they simply cannot actually fight back, as the balance was tipped and it's inevitable.

I've only finished one game, but here are a few ideas I have:

1. Mopping up the AI was annoying, they kept phase jumping their fleet instead of fighting it out. A surrender option would be nice.

2. Make it easier to see planet names, either have an option to display them in the zoomed out view or just automatically display it on the screen when I mouse over so I don't have to select it. We were constantly having exchanges that went something like "Send your forces to Aegina!" "Where's that?"

3. Although I haven't built up a big enough fleet to experience this, a friend complained that once you research a certain fleet limit you can't go back to smaller fleet limits, so if you lose your gigantic fleet you have to rebuild it all while dealing with the expensive fleet size penalty. It seems like it would be better to either make the penalty dependent on the number of fleet supply units currently being used, or add the ability to switch between any of the fleet size techs that you have researched.

totally agree with camomilk about being able to reduce your fleet logistics research. It stinks to own half of a huge map, then suddenly, you can't rebuild even a tiny fleet if you get wiped out.

First I'd say that the game is awesome - you guys did a fantastic job.

My first gripe, which shouldn't be addressed probably so early in post-dev, is that the three factions all play too similarly for me. Maybe I haven't played enough, or I don't understand how they are that different... My advice would be to differentiate the ships in some larger way.

The point that I think could be worked on in a patch is that defense seems poor. Everyone else is saying they don't like the PJI, but I'm saying I don't like the hangers or the gun emplacements. Even early on in the game a planet with three guns and a hanger cannot fight off a half a dozen ships, which is a similar cost investment I think.

From an AI standpoint, I'm questioning the AIs tendancy to gang up on the human player. I've been in a gravity well, had three AI enemies jump in, all of them ignore each other, and all of them attack me. Even after I left, they just attacked my structures, bombed the planet, and then warped away without engaging each other.

I also think the enemy runs away too quickly. I guess there is not any advantage in engaging a larger force, even to defend a valuable planet, but the AI seems to cut and run when facing anything even similar to an equal force, even when it has a defensive advantage.

Once again, great job guys and hopefully this isn't too long and foolish to read.

Simple solution for fleet cap: keep current system, but add (empire total population) / 4 (or whatever) to the cap.

Its quite possible (and noticeable!) that enemy fleets ignoring each other to attack you exclusively are doing so because their controlling factions have Cease Fire agreements or Alliances.

I was winning one game when my foes turned the tables on me and crushed me through Allied cooperation. Thats fair - I should have moved more quickly.

If you make factions in this context too different, you risk making a group far-fetched. In the Babylon 5 series, the factions were quite similar too... beam weapons and missiles of various types being exchanged on a regular basis, yet the battles were thoroughly entertaining and engrossing.

Certain strategic abilities and capital ship special abilities serve to distinguish the factions from one another mechanically.

As for defense, the point in Sins is to slow down an attacker until a friendly fleet can arrive to either destroy or drive them away. Perfect as is, to this gamer.

There is an option for this already. Alternatively, if you don't have that option enabled, you can see the planet names by pressing alt.

1. add a copy options for stars and planet groups to the map creator
2. tweak defensive structures so that they are useful vs human players.
3. add the options to make the game speed adjustable after the game has started so a player can play it on slow when there is a lot to do and speed it up when they are just waiting for their fleets to fly across the map.
4. add the option for no pirates outside of the map selection, where you set the game speed and locked teams, so someone can override a map to add or remove pirates if they want.
5. make the other 2 superweapons worth building, as it stands the superweapon choices are either TECs total devastation, or be a minor annoyance at best using the other two.

[possible bug that may need fixed] when I declared war on an ally AI a few seconds before the only remaining hostile AI died (the timer was still running) my forces would not auto attack their structures after the time expired.

A question for those asking for larger fleets in larger galaxies, how thinly spread do your troops become? I haven't been in anything over a 6 player 2 galaxy game so far so I am not familiar with the issue. Would something like a standard 10% increase to max cap for every additional solar system in the game be enough, or are we talking something way more?

I would like to see something like smuggler bases that are weaker then priates and when you destroy them you get a small resource boost(such as like +100 cyrstal).

So, I forgot a few things in my previous post.

One thing that really annoys me is that damage is not assigned as it happens, but at the end of the firing cycle, this means that a ship that is at 1 hp and 0 shields does not die until the end of the firing cycle of the ship(s) attacking it. This leads to ships being able to contribute damage long after they were technically destroyed, it also leads to shields recharging to a level that they would not have recharged to if damage was assigned when the beam/laser/projectile first hit and during the hit.

What should happen is that the damage is assigned as each bolt or projectile hits and over the entire duration of a beam attack.

Fleet corrections:

Turn the current fleet system into taskforces and make taskforces be a part of fleets which are the old command groups. This way we can keep ships cohesive and still use command groups. Double tapping the command group number would cycle through the taskforces within the command group.

Miscellaneous:
Can we get some actual info on the build button info cards. Something besides a description of a ship/structures role in the fleet, some actual hard data on what the ship does, what its abilities do, etc. This would really help with the learning curve that a lot of new players are running into of not knowing what something does until they build it.

Seems 2 be enough ideas here to keep the developers busy for centeries to come,n tho this is likely to be ignored how bout ppl start off small.

besides the obvious balance fixes etc, how bout getting a better way to watch the replayes. blasting thru on 8x speed is stupid n i often miss the epic battle i wanted to watch in the 1st place. y not just add a duration bar like when watching a movie on windows media player

speaking of watching battles isnt that part of what real time stragy is about. with the current "no movement" battles i might as well role dice cuz its just as boring to watch. yes the explosions n effects r sweet but adding ship movement would go along way. besides what kind of intelligent being would sit there as his ship gets blasted by a slowing moving capital ship that he could easily flank

last point... y am i seeing fighters n bombers flyig thru other SHIPS and PLANETS???
... n fantastic game by the way

Couldn't edit, as someone else posted.

So what was left out of the previous post:

Diplomacy:
A summary of current relations between the different players, something that shows who is allied with who and what not. This could require an espionage research or something. (obviously for a later patch)

And can we possibly give missions to factions?

Last but not least, could the NPC Colonies be diplomatically interactable.

Pirates need to double check their target on system arrivial. Last game a planet changed hands while they were in route and they killed the new owner instead of moving on to the next system containing the proper target.

One more thing, could we get the shift-click muliplier function for buying from the black market back? and an option to change the key binding for the menu

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not (and I really don't care to read 8 pages for it :p). But could you add the ability to disable the bounty system yet still have pirates active? Or even to make a roaming pirate fleet that used what it plundered to enhance itself? The pirate system as is does its job, but I really don't like the bounty system and would like other options as I do like the idea of pirates being out and about.

I'd like the ability to turn off unit order acknowledgments, those annoy me to no end and most games allow you to turn them off. I had to just turn off dialogue entirely so I don't know what else I might be missing out on.

Another option that should be added...
When the map is chosen, there should be an option that allows you to choose the maximum amount of players in each system. For example, if one wanted to play a map with 5 stars, and there were 5 players, one could theoretically set the max to 1 so that each player began the game with their own solar system.

Multiplayer Save Game Options

I would like to have more control of the save games, when loading in multiplayer...

1) Allow connecting players to download the save game file if they dont already have it.

2) Allow the game creator to place players in the different empire slots

3) Allow the game creator to turn the AI in a loaded game to an open human slot

At least I dont think you can do any of this in the current state

I really think that there should be more logistics slots for every planet especially your home planet. I never have enough logistics slots.