What I want to see is Sins 2:) New engine, new stuff, the right proportions between the small and the big ships, and such. Enough expansions and exploiting of old ideas.

But for now, I would like to see all the problems fixed and a new races.

The difference is already pretty massive, and I think the balance of practicality (which clearly plays into the size difference between asteroids, planets, stars, and units) is more important here.

All great ideas Zombies.

Did anyone ever mention low res models for not so close up view like eve and x3 do? Must save a load of ram.

It will if Ironclad botches the job (not that I'm saying they will). If it's done right, the transition will be seemless.

Id ask for a Bugfix:

When you research fleet upgrades and then start building ships, you can get into a negative supply value (because you are already researchig the upgrade and therefore it will be sufficient, which is nice)

BUT

as soon as you enter the negative supply count (even if your already built ships do not exceed the current actual supply number) no ship gets produced until the research is done. That really bugs me!

Attention: monster post. But I think it is worth reading. Obviously, due to the difference to the current system, this would only make sense for a potential sequel. but since some sins 2 ideas are mentioned in the consolidated OP, I thought it would be a good place to post them.

For Sins 2 I propose the following fundamentally changed economic model, which is to some degree inspired by Civ IV and other TBS games. The proposal affect on the one hand the economic model in the traditional sense, what factors exist and how they are connected. On the other hand the proposal shows how the economy is steered, controlled and gives a few ideas as to a possible interface and manageability. Both parts can and should be regarded in their own right.

Building most stuff now does not consume resources like credits or metal, but just time, i.e. In a simulation of the turns you would have in a tbs. Furthermore, planets are in general managed mostly indirectly. This means that you set certain priorities where your production should be focused and this continues to be done indefinitely or until you change priorities. Thus, it is not so much a matter of whether you can afford to buy something, but when you get it and what else you are ready to sacrifice for it.

There are the following things that a planet can 'build' and which affect your empire:

• Infrastructure: This means that your planet invests in building housing, sanitary, educational base etc. In gameplay manners it increases the population of your planet.

• Industry: this increases the number of mines, factories, industrial complex etc. on your planet. In gameplay manners, it allows you to produce all other things faster.

• Science. This involves founding and funding universities, scientific foundations, laboratories and so on. It increases the science output of a planet.

• Economy: this increases the level of trade, banking and consumer products. It will increase your financial income from the planet

• Defense. This increases your planets capabilities to defend itself and withstand attacks. It loosely corresponds to the health upgrade in current sins with the notable difference that it also involves active retaliation. In order words planets gain tougher surface to space (and ground level) attacks the more you invest here. It is to some degree inspired by the fighting cities of CIV V.

• Fleet: This is the current sins equivalent of building ships, frigates, cruisers, whatever. Also space stations could be built from here.

• Culture? / Influence? / Supplies? Affects how far your ships can stray from the planet. Builds small stations and refuel points throughout the system?

Now, my idea is that each planet starts rather low on all categories and it is up to you to decide where to invest your resources. I would go for continuous development and benefits instead of a Civ like system where you have steps per each population point, hammer symbol etc. Also, there should be a cap on how far a planet can develop for a given category. This cap should depend on the planets' attributes, which I would like to see a lot more differentiated, ideally along MoO II lines:

Size: the more the higher the caps

Atmosphere: affects population. Could also affect other caps

Gravity: tends to correlate with size. Could affect efficiency of production. Could be different optimum for each race.

Natural resources, e.g. minerals, metals, etc. : I figure it should affect industrial cap.

Furthermore, I think the cap should increase via research over time so that planets keep developing over the whole game (or at least most of it) instead of maxing out forever at some point. These increases could then take the name of certain inventions like “domed cities” (infrastructure), “robotic workers” (industry), “neural networking” (science), “planetary stock exchange” (economy), “Arcturus missile system” (defense), etc. You get the point. It could be that at certain benchmarks some special effects kick in like the ability to build larger ships, to research more advanced technologies, but that might a) become too complex and would go again more in the direction of building specific objects. I purposefully try to abstract and simplify the whole thing here. (maybe special effects could come into play via side strains of the research tree). Behind any of the categories, you would find several individual projects in a tbs game that increase that aspect of a colony in a variety of ways. I try to mold it as one constantly growing factor.

Let me give you some ideas how these categories of a planet are connected:

Population increases your taxes and affects how efficiently you do all other things. The difference to industry is that population acts as a multiplicator effect. / population acts as an alternative capacity limit. For every point that you want to use in the other categories, you need one point in population to support it. If it goes below, then you start paying penalties for recruiting foreign work force. Certain techs or racial benefits could modify this relation of work input → production output, so that there is a choice involved. Otherwise, population would always have to be regulated so that you have 'just' enough workforce. Such automatisms are bad, because they do not confront the player with choices.

Industry affects how fast you can build all other items.

Science affects how fast you are able to research.

Economy affects how much money you get and how happy your population is. Money you need for research, buying items on the black market, bribing enemy empires, and pays the maintenance of your military. Happiness affects how fast your population can grow.

Defense and Fleet should be rather obvious.

At the beginning I said that I want to establish a more indirect economy model of a direct one. Let me go in more detail on that aspect:

Most strategy games are controlled by setting the target that you want to achieve. You want to build a forge, a factory, a science building. Once that is done, you need to specify something new to be build. Thus, it always requires attention. You can make build lists that let you take care of other things for longer, but that will also take more time to set up.

My approach is that instead of setting the goal, you set the direction (think of a comparison of e.g. Zelda III vs. Diablo. In the former you press the direction while in the latter you indicate your destination). You tell your planet in which way it should go and it will do so until you set different priorities. The simplest way would be distribute points, e.g. via a slider of bar charts. You say: spend 40% on industry, 10% in infrastructure, 20% on defense and ship construction and 10% on the economy. This way, it will keep going in the direction you want and your empire will take the shape you want it to without you specifying every single project and thus building your balance from the individual pieces. This I think is so essential when managing big empires. Once you have 15 – 20 colonies or even more, it is very hard to take care of each single one on the traditional level of detail. With this idea, you basically set the direction you want and can forget about it until something happens that forces you to adapt your strategy or if you discover that you do not like the direction you chose. Such an economic system should leave you with more time to formulate a strategy and fight your battles while still providing a relatively deep level of complexity and made choices through the entirety of a game.

My system presents another advantage: you can adjust your empire direction very easily, because the sliders could consolidate! First to solar system level, then to total empire level. E.g. you have an empire slider that aggregates all the choices you made on the lower levels. If you manipulate the empire or solar levels, then the subunits will be adjusted pro rate as well! If you prefer to adjust only specific planets, then you can do this as well. As such, changing your whole empire from peace mode to war mode production would be just one click in the most extreme variant!

For a further level (yet again adding more complexity) you could flag planets with certain attributes, e.g. 'this is a shipyard planet' or 'this is an economy powerhouse'. Then, on an empire wide level, you could manipulate consolidated sliders for specific types of planets, if you chose to specialise your worlds and do not want overall settings overriding local ones.

The big exception to the indirect system that I see is fleets. I somehow have the feeling that this would not work too well. One could define per planet what proportion of ship type x to produce and what of ship type y, but that would end up in too many layers I believe.

That said I would favor moving to squadron 'units' for smaller classes like frigates and cruisers. Simplification, yes, but needed to some degree on a game of these proportions. But that's another topic.

I was thinking of making my idea a bit more concrete and make sure the interactions of the categories are sound, but I will need some more inspiration. Maybe it's time to put the idea to discussion. I did include a few pictures to show some concepts and ideas for an interface. Give me your ideas, those brave few souls, that read the whole thing.

http://s231.photobucket.com/albums/ee259/Shadowhal/?action=view&current=support_sins_1.jpg

http://s231.photobucket.com/albums/ee259/Shadowhal/?action=view&current=support_sins_2.jpg

Sorry for the late update.... Holidays and all.

A few more good ideas.

The capital ship expansion is a good one.  research and ability enhancement on caps would be great!

Combat experience for frigs and cruisers is good too.  It would put more emphasis on

I think some of them stray from what Sins is though. 

This isn't homeworld or Orion, or X3.... its Sins, and SoaSE needs to stand on its own with its own character.

But the Sins 2 ideas are great!