mizeriq

I'm glad IC guys don't suffer from some strange superiority complex that some posters here do. Other than speed what will help speed up the games are maps with several planets colonised at the beggining to remove the very slow early game. Considering speed settings I would love a "faster" and "fastest" game speeds the latter of which 3 times as fast as the current "fast" speed. Even if I decide not to play at fastest I will certainly set the culture spread rate to "fastest", so it's no

Capital ship capturing should have it's bonus effect immediately, it's extremely annoying to have to sit there and wait for the % upgrade bonus. Also, the free mining facilities bonus can be abused against neutral planets by letting siee frigates raze the planet and colonise it again, it's first level where it has no bonus whatsoever is underpowered, too.

c/p ;) The upkeep system makes little sense, it should be based on the actual cost of your ships, while keeping the curret percentage tax(it's just going to be over 5-10 minutes and not every second, of course), because realistically bigger armies are not linearly harder to sustain, but closer to exponential progression, which doesn't really depend on your income. Maximum allegiance should scale with your empire size or map size(the former is more realistic). It currently drops off

Ship training should be based on the amount of experience earned(it's also a bit on the expensive side). You pay 1250 for 200 exp(6.25 ratio), 1500 for 300 exp(5 ratio) and 1750 for 400 exp(4.375 ratio), a constant ratio of 4 would be fine IMO. Training should also be faster if you have a small amount of exp needed for the next level and it should refund the experience gained killing enemy ships during training. Siege frigates should do less damage, they are way better than the supposed

Star Expolorer worked fine for me. After several tries I found out that Culture percentage caps out at 50% every game, so you can't achieve "Pop Idol", has to be a bug. Archaeologist needs the 9 different artifacts, so the map has to be pretty big, since there can be several artifacts of the same type on a map and you have to be lucky having all 9, at least from my experience.