SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Q]

Baron Munchausen said:
With the merging of cargo and facility space we'll be able to set the size of facilities! That means 'upgrades' can be smaller than lower tech Versions, effectively increasing facility space on a planet.

I don't see why the size of facilities can't be made different without merging the space for facilities and cargo on planets. I agree that different/moddable sizes for facilities would be good, but as I said the merging of the space for facilities and cargo IMO is bad.

[AgentZero]

Exactly. If facility space was calculated in kT instead of facility slots, it would make it very easy to have differently sized facilities. So a medium planet that currently has 15 slots would have 1500kT facility space, for example. If each 'normal' facility is 100kT, it's the same thing as in SE4, except we can have facilities that are both bigger and smaller.
I'd like to see Planetary Gun facilities. More or less the same idea as Weapons Platforms, but they're facilities and make up for taking up precious facility space by being a lot more powerful than anything you could put on a weapons platform.

[twilight]

Stellar Manipulation

In the late game it's a nice trick to build a Ship with the Ability to open/close Wormholes. Then your are able to teleport a whole fleet itself into another system. Problem: The Fleet cannot execute any Stellar Manipulations. You have to separate that ship from the fleet, you have to open the Wormhole, then to move both fleet and ship through the wormhole and afterwards you have to close it again (okay, not neccassary but when you want to clean up). So: 1. It would be great if fleets are able to manipulate Systems, now they are not. 2. It would be also great, if you add another stellar option the "Warp Option", or whatever you call it. That means, that the work procedure "open Wormhole", "go through wormhole", "close wormhole on other side" is shortend.

AI - Setting

We are able to give all AIs boni in all generated ressources, if I am right. I want to 1. give boni to special races (I want the Borg for my final war, but the pretorians are only cannon fodder etc., so only the borgs should have boni) and 2. give special boni to the races. So perhaps I want to give them all cool ressources, but no research points.

Furthermore it would be a good option to be able to set some start locations without working with the map editor. For example I am Star Fleet and want the Borg for a final showdown. Then it would be perfect if I am at the one side of the galaxy and they at the other. Only a thought. Perhaps not possible.

Game - Setting

Setting up a game with 20 players means hard work. You have to edit every Empire for that they are computer controlled. Afterwards you have to check every empire again if they are or not. It's possible to change that.

Flavour - Details

Without any changes for the game it would be nice to see the names of ship captains, cultures of old ruins, planet gouvernors and so on. No Stats, only names for flavour (But Stats are even more cool).

Savegames

Should show not only the time they were saved, but first of all the game turn (year, month).

Construction

The Construction is weird in some ways. You may multiadd objects to build, but you can't multi"subtract". I mean it's impossible to use 100 Space-Yard-Bases. You may need 20 sec to multiadd something so they all build but you need half a hour to stop them all.

The Repeat Function could also be improved. Now you can use it to repeat only the first item on the construction list. But it would be 1. more rational to repeat the complete List (first it builds 2 destroyer, then 1 cruiser and 20 mines, then start with the destroyers again) or 2. set some items not to repeat but then the rest (First it builds a research computer and then it repeats and repeats only research facilites - as in Moo2).

Facility Upgrading and Planet Gouvernors

There is an option "Automatically use Indiv. Ministers for
newly built vehicles". Why not for newly colonized planets?

If you upgrade your facilites manually you have a serious problem. There is a colony-list able to show you the planet types (research compound etc.). But from there you can?t reach the construction queue. So it's hard to go into that queues for each planet of that type. Perhaps an update-button would be nice. Press the button and ALL updatable Facilies will go automatically into the construction queue for that planet.

Galaxy - Map

We should customize the indicators. The red triangles for ships from other races are nice, but not more. We should be able to customize it that ways: planets from allies/neutrals/enemies/certain races, the same for fleets. Also for YOUR fleets. Perhaps some other indicators like Black Holes, Sphere Worlds and so on are also interesting or even the possibility of seeing own or enemies planet types (research facilites etc).

General Awareness

If we visit a system we see the colonized planets by another race. When we leave the system we loose all information about that. In other games we see the Last information about such a system and that is a much better way. Also it would be very, very good to see information about planets and ships in the normal view. AND to see DETAILLED information. I think we are able - without any intelligence - to visit Rigel VI and see that it's a planet with very much Factories. Even a very very secret factory world would produce enough signs to say "okay, that planet produces many minerals". No need of intelligence.

The "Next"-Function

Press Ctrl-F or N and you get the next Fleet or lonely ship. In huge games this is kind of hard and unneccassy micromanagement. Some Fleets do I place at locations to guard them. But there is no guard-option. Everytime I want to Ctrl-F through my empire I always get these dumb guardians. I don?t want to see them again, they guard something and should be not of further interest till I wake them. Also it's interesting why bases are shown in that way.

Bases

We all need resupply Bases. We don?t want them join our fleets. We want to stop at them and then we want to be resupplied (I assume I can write it that way: We ALL want them)

Automatic Orders

Very nice idea, however, we must be able to edit them, or they are quite useless.

Mines

Hundreds of wandering ships of all races laying mines in hundreds of systems in which the only presence of that race are exactly those mines. No, Sir! Don't know what you think about, but I think mines should be placed at locations owned by those races, or am I wrong? Should we're able to go to our neighbours to lay some mines, just in case for war?

Stellar Destroying Manipulations

The destroying of a sun should be a hard, a very hard thing to do. I am speaking about the political situation. It should be more like the use of Nukes in Civilization. A race doing this is an "evil" race. And first of all: It should count as a war declaration. I experienced a not very kind starfleet wandering around and destroying my suns without any war. Hey, they also killed Millions of Traders and Visitors from other races (all in that system at that time) but noone mind. Weird. Disturbing.

New Race Fature

What about a racial trait "good race", "Evil race". Some star destroying weapons and some others only for evil races, the good ones must have a bonus, perhaps better maintainance or whatever. It has to be balanced but so the good races don't wander around devastating the whole universe.

Intelligence

Some nice ideas, some not. For example I don?t know why we need Intelligence Level 2 for general information about a race ot the location of planets. Why we don?t visit the Klingon Homeworld buying a tourist?s leaflet (Welcome at Klingon Homeworld. The Klingons are a very old race ... 31 Star System ... 142 Planets ... a mighty race ... Kahless ... visit the Blood Sea at Rigel IV), that's all we need. We also know if the use Cloaking Devices and whatever, we dont not need Super-Special-Spys for such stuffs. It's enough to hang around in Bars, to trade with them and so on. Level 1 intelligence should be enough.

Customized Key Settings

I want to customize them. It's not cool to use two fingers for my favoured option "next Fleet". Furthermore it would be cool to give certain Fleets certain Keys. So my "Warfleet I" could be on the "1"-key. And so on. You know that from other games.

Diplomacy

Please write a new game from scratch.

[Fyron]

if you add another stellar option the "Warp Option", or whatever you call it. That means, that the work procedure "open Wormhole", "go through wormhole", "close wormhole on other side" is shortend.

The current method of waiting a turn seems like a good design for balance purposes. Gives the enemy a chance to react.

Press Ctrl-F or N and you get the next Fleet or lonely ship. In huge games this is kind of hard and unneccassy micromanagement. Some Fleets do I place at locations to guard them. But there is no guard-option.

There is the Sentry order. Ships on sentry orders will not be cycled through.

[twilight]

The current method of waiting a turn seems like a good design for balance purposes. Gives the enemy a chance to react.

Yes. It could be a new component that is destroyed after use.

Thanks for the sentry-Tip. It seems not to have any effect when I used it. I will try it again next time.

[Fyron]

twilight said:
Thanks for the sentry-Tip. It seems not to have any effect when I used it. I will try it again next time.

If there are enemies present in the system, sentry orders are cleared. It works better in simultaneous movement games, where the sentry order will at least not be cleared until the next turn, so it can be used as a "do nothing this turn" order when enemies are present.

[clark]

Sentry does that, true, but I think we would all benefit from a "guard" function similar to sentry in that it ignores (or even user defined) things like enemy, low fuel, damage.

I think it would also help from a micromanagement standpoint if there was someway to order a ship to refuel as neccessary as it travels to a set destination. Doing the waypoint dance can be aggrivating. Something as simple as "when ship has half fuel, refuel at nearest resupply base on the way to final destination". I want to conquer the universe, smight my enemies, burn their planets- not play traffic cop.

Since the combat is going to be more or less real time, I might suggest that self-destruct components be given a moddable failure rate. Sometimes the captian isn't quick enough on the button, and this would add a little more variety to the current situation. "If I try to board, I will lose this ship- as opposed to... maybe, maybe not"

It might also open up interesting possibilites where certain components can be given "if destroyed, ship explodes". Hello engineering warp core! Maybe that uber weapon would have a certain drawback... or, another way to balance out the religious shrine (the staff on board, saddened at the defilement of their holy ship shrine all commit suicide to appease their pagan god) You get the idea.

I think a resuplly capability for a starbase (similar to the ship yard) would be a good addition. This would go a long way towards solving the resupply issues because of routing (assuming that a routing routine as expressed above could not be met). Make it big, make it exspensive, but damn it, make it so we can resupply (via a base only component) at a starbase on a warppoint!

This was touched on above, but how about happy modifiers with the use of certain stellar manipulations or types of weapons. You use certain devices (destroy a sun for example) and it makes your peaceful people rather unhappy. Bloodthirsty of course revel in it. Whatever.

Perhaps this is one for the modders, and not a stock game option, but how about the ability to research alien tech- the catch is that you do so at an extreme disadvantage (thing multipliers of 10 or 100) and the end product is never as good as a race who has a natural affinity for the alien tech. So temporal space yards would produce less for a non-native temporal race (but they could research it!) compared to a native temporal race. You could over course mod certain things as unattainble even then (such as the religious shrine) but damn it, why can't I grow organic armor!? I got a vat, I got the research! Gimmie.

[twilight]

It would be good to be able to break through the facility families. Think about upgrading Organic, mineral and radioactive facilities to monolithes. That solves the problem with scrapping old ressource generation for creating a completely new one (the ai won't do that).

In the moment all three basic ressource generating facilities have different facility families. So if we change the monolithes' facility family to a value identically to one of the basic ressource generators we can upgrade those facilites to monolithes. But not the other two ones.

Even if not interesting for the basic game, please make it possible to mod something around with that stuff.

[TurinTurambar]

The intel thingy....

I love the ideas of the spy/agent/plant bugs stuff. But like Fyron said, that's pretty freakin intense.

My idea... someone of you supergeeks make an Intel Mod with that in it somehow. I'm actually playing in a game right now where out of 15 players, intel was voted completely out of the game. It is therefore obvious to me that quite a few players would not appreciate an in-depth intel program in the stock game.

Mod, baby... Mod.

Turin
The Master of Your Doom...

<edit> OK and then this ended up in the thread nowhere near the topic of the intel discussion... wtf was I looking at... sorry.
Turin

[TurinTurambar]

clark said:
damn it, why can't I grow organic armor!? I got a vat, I got the research! Gimmie.

LMMFAO!!