If you include AI surrendering....atleast give us the option on whether to accept it..cause back in age of empires....the ai would surrender and the game would just be over......i would like the choice to be able to still finish them off

Thanks for making a great game, I have been enjoying it very much.  I agree that ability to quickly phase jump out of a system should be adjusted. Here are a few ideas that may add to the game balance.
 
I think that the heavier a ship is the longer the phase jump recharge time should be. That would cause me to think twice before I risk my main fleet / cap ships in an attack. In any turn based game I would expect to lose some / all of my forces if I blindly launched an attack on a larger force. As it is now I can just turn around and jump away or worse, jump past them with little risk of loss. By increasing the recharge time for heavies you still would have the possibility to try to get a lighter force behind enemy lines to attack orbitals / disrupt trade but not really be able to threaten the planet/colony itself.

Also, a ship that is under attack and sustaining hull damage should have some type of phase jump / movement / combat penalty as well. A heavily damaged ship should not have the same ability as a ship with no damage at all. Again, all this should cause me to be a bit more cautious rather than blindly attacking and also give the opportunity to ambush or punish the over reaching attacker.
 
In general it seems that it is to easy to heal hull damage. I believe that damage healing should not be linear.  A heavily damaged ship should not recover health at the same rate as a lightly damaged ship (i.e. more severe damage requiring much greater repair). Also, heavily damaged ships should be required to return to a repair base to be fully healed, perhaps this should also have some cost attached to it as well.

Concerning pirates - It does not seem reasonable that pirates should stay and slug it out to the death against an equal or superior force (what good is the reward / booty if you don't survive).  They should flee once confronted with equal or greater force.
 

My current near-term wish list, in order of desire:
1 - fix the empire tree/pause mode display bug
2 - Some kind of (audible) alerts when a unit is attacked and/or killed in a non-big-battle situation. (Ie: I have a scout arrive somewhere and an enemy kills it.) It'd also be nice for a scout to maybe auto-flee in that kind of situation.
3 - It seems only 1 thing from either Mil, Civ or Fleet can be researched at any time. IMHO Mil and Civ use separate res. centers, so their res should be in parallel. Failing that, it'd be nice to know which item is currently researching so I don't have to hunt through the 3 trees looking for it. And it'd also be nice to somehow see the order things will be researched in, if I have a bunch selected
4 - fix the "longest trade route" behavior to actually find the longest trade route.
5 - bigger fleet cap, or better, cheaper, more effective defense systems
6 - make cap ships a more affordable in terms of research and supply. They're the coolest units but it's very hard to have more than 2-3 until mid-late game.

It seems like AI is a priority for you guys, which is awesome. I havent had a chance to experiment with Hard yet, but on Normal Random, I have found that as long as I can defend myself at the beginning, I can become basically unstoppable because I just build enough trade ports and refineries I dwarf the other players resources and I can just pump out units non-stop. I see the enemy maybe building one or somethign per planet but nothing to keep up with my resource rate.

the a.i. is always runnign away when your fleet is bigger, u guys should make it so that it doesnt run away as much

Fleet upkeep should be based on current number of ships, not your ship cap.

I suggests the following improvements to the UI:

Have an easy way to see the total number of each kind of research labs.

Have the empire tree auto-collapse, and only expand the planet in which you have something selected. This will make it clear up the clutter and avoid having to manually expanding and collapsing the icons.

Follow-up to the above, expand the planet if you mouse over the planet icon. If you move your mouse away without selecting something, it'll auto-collapse again. This will help quickly glance through the planets.

Ships that have been added to a fleet should not be displayed under the planet. Instead a small fleet icon is diplayed there and if you click on the fleet icon, it'll open up the root directory fleet icon and display the ship. This should clear up the clutter when there are a lot of ships on a planet. And this makes sense since most ships are used in fleets.

There should be a number on the fleet icon to help identify it as the first fleet, the second fleet, and so on. Also, 3 tiny numbers next to the icon to show the number of frigates, cruisers, and capital ships will be helpful.

A convenient shortcut key to scroll the empire tree up and down.

Instead of the little blips beside the planet icon, I prefer it displaying the planet name.

I didn't read through the previous posts. Sorry if I repeated something.

We were having a discussion in IRC again today about the PJIs and Siege frigates the idea of having whole grav well PJIs with effectiveness based upon the allegience of the owning empire. Something on the lines of double the delay of the current PJIs, but then with the allegience modifier applied to it.

From the kind of tweaks given by frogboy as examples, this would likely have to be 1.04 or later as working out a whether there is a balanced way of doing this might take quite a bit of fiddling.

Just my 2 small units of currency from IRC.

Press the Alt button when zoomed out.

Agree, pirates or more annoying than those wolves in AOE2...

Starting with the obvious, it's a great game! You are asking for easy changes for 1.03. OK! Without changing hardly anything else these defensive changes would make the game far more sensible.

1) Gun emplacements should have their ranges increased to at least 2x. Also their damage should be increased a little bit. Here is the specific reasoning:
All they can do now with their pathetically short range is attack the AI/pirates at the planetside itself because the computer is dumb enough to get in range. If the guns had a really long reach then a lot more tactical options become available. I might actually waste a ton of tactical points and credits at a choke point to build guns if I could really use them to cover a jump lane. The enemy jumps in and takes fire from their entry until their exit. This makes an enemy PAY for simply trying to bypass your main defense. It would work equally well on AI and human players. The other issue is that it increases risk for going deep into enemy worlds. If they get hit hard later on and then try to run away to their own worlds to repair and renew, they'll have to run back across those guns again and PAY again leaving. That's how it should be. Either slow up the fleet to destroy the choke point outright or take the risk and damage to bypass it.

I don't see this being abused, as the guns cost money and tactical points. You can't spend all your tactical points on guns or you can't research or maintain your military. So super gun heavy planets would only be scattered with the others. If somehow it becomes an issue you could slightly reduce the overall number of tactical points at all plants.

2) Make the jump inhibitors approx twice as effective so they do something usefull. As it is now it's not worth spending the points, money or time to build them. Also, add this ability on the cap ships that can inhibit, make it just as effective, and make it work on military ships as well as trade ships. One more reason to build a variety of cap ships instead of just the usual two.

3) Some type of fix for the fleet limits on large maps. It's possible that with the defenses working better as suggested above, you wouldn't have to make quite so drasic a change to this. I do agree with above posts that an empire should only be paying the penalty appropriate to the number of ships owned. So even if max logistics is researched the penalty is only applied for whatever level fleet points applies to you.

Thanks for such a great game guys! I'm enjoying this.

3) Just hover your mouse over the research tree button, it'll tell you what's currently being researched, how far along it is, and what is queued up after it. We still need to get mil and civ researching independently and fleet points researching independendently as long as there is a mil or civ research being unused.

6) Cap ships aren't supposed to be a dime a dozen, there supposed to be rare, and only committed to your biggest battles/most important worlds.

Carriers in today’s navy are just that carriers, they are not battle ships. There is a cruiser that is meant to be a carrier in Sins. In my opinion I think the devs meant Capital ships to be large juggernauts of doom, a force to be reckoned with. So when I see 5 of my Kodiaks annihilate a capital ship I see them as target practice not juggernauts of doom.

All the listed items would be good. One thing I would like to see fixed eventually is the problem with the empire tree not updating when scrolled while the game is paused.

Do not know if the GalaxyForge Tool will be updated anytime soon. But one thing I would like to see is a snap to ability. What I mean is, when you select one of the objects that you create in the tool's drop down list. It will automatically focus on that entity. The reason being, when you are zoomed way into the map to place objects very close to one another it is hard to find another object by panning around. So you have to zoom all the way back out to level 0 or 1. Then you have to zoom all the way back in. And since the zoom feature is not like in the game, in that it zooms in very quickly, it takes awhile. I'm trying to create some very different kinds of maps with a very unique style of play focused more on a certain degree of realism. By the way, thanks IC for making the modding tools so available and easy to use right off the bat. It makes it where you can create whatever type of game you desire, even ones where you do not have to worry about opponents or pirate bounties, only the occasional attacker when you first explore a planet or other object. Hence, you can really learn the mechanics of the game by taking as much time as you need without the other hectic worries until you feel ready.

Ability to give capital ship or other units as a gift to other Players(AI).

I like the population cap for large maps being tied to the amount of plantes owned. I think this si acutally a really good idea seeing as he who owns the glaxay should have a little more pwnability then the guy huddled in australia with all his guys in siam building up a massive counterstrike army.

Oh and fix the bugs associated with patch 1.02, I havn't downloaded it yet cause I'm a scared pussy.

i say u lower the cost and increase the income and also stop with the alliegance ok im tired of my capital planet falling each time.

and u increase the the amount of building built within each planet

Find the problem to that minidump issue...

I think it would be a good idea for PJI to completely stop a fleet from entering deeper into your empire. I dont know how they were in the BETAs since i've never tested the old PJI but from hearing what people have been saying they would stop a fleet? But here is my list of how it could work.

1. PJI would first limit jump or slow it down until you upgrade or level it to the fullest only then will it be able to completely stop an advancing fleet(This could be used as a trap for fleets if they are careless but a smart way to counter it would be to send scouts before entering the suspected PJI systems.
2. In order for this to work and not be so cheat, we would have to limit the building of PJI to say oh maybe 3 units per empire max, that way they could be placed in strategic areas of the galaxy instead of on every single planet.

How about some Voice over IP built in feature in the future?

k, its late and I have to go to bed, so I dont know if anyone else posted about this, but it would be nice if after researching Communal Labour with the Advent, the reasembly drones would start with this auto cast. Right now it isnt for some reason. also I noticed if you dant have fleet suply full researched, and you try to build a bunch of ships, it doesnt build any till the suply cap is no longer red. so if you have 56 suply, and you build ships that take up 60 suply, the shipyard only builds the first ship and then stops. ps great game

-- You should not be affected by the -% for fleet upkeep if you don't have that many ships! If you entire fleet gets destroyed, you shouldn't lose 67% of your income if there's nothing to upkeep.