SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Trantor]

What I would like to see even as a patch to SEIV is a little clock to tell me what time it is, so when I need to go to work the next day I don't end up staying up until 3 in the morning. Could make it a little tool bar ditial clock. Help cure the "just one more turn" syndrum.
:-)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Well, judging by the screens, it seems that the two extra "moddable" resources were Research and Intel. Bugger

[Phoenix-D]

Its possible that you can turn resources on or off. Which would mean that they aren't being shown..or they could be used in the ground screen (workforce?)

[TurinTurambar]

Trantor said:
What I would like to see even as a patch to SEIV is a little clock to tell me what time it is, so when I need to go to work the next day I don't end up staying up until 3 in the morning. Could make it a little tool bar ditial clock. Help cure the "just one more turn" syndrum.
:-)

Lmao!
Turin

[El_Phil]

A clock wouldn't do any good unless it had a big audio-visual alarm. I mean the clock isn't helpfull for running your empire so why would you look at it?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

The ability to run it in windowed mode as opposed to the current "Minimized/Fullscreen" options.

Moddable diplomacy, custom treaties and the like.

The possibility of "Councils" or "Senates" or something which acts as an advisory board for the player, and can be used as target for intel.....

[Alienboy]

This may have already been covered somewhere along the way, but I think it would be nice to have more abilities using the Ships/Units, Construction queues and Colonies command buttons.
eg, you can "multi add" units and ships in the Construction queue command button. I think it would be cool to be able to perform other muilti tasks such as putting multiple queues on and off hold. That sort of thing. ???

*Being able to upgrade/scrap/analyze/mothball groups of vessels by going into "Ships/Units", then multi adding the vessels you need to upgrade etc, and from there being able to access the "Scrap/Analyze/Mothball" command from within "Ships/Units"

[AgentZero]

Given that the beta test is already underway, it might be a bit late to implement this suggestion, but here goes anyway:
I'd like to see a 'Points' system set up for diplomacy. This would be completely invisible to the player, but would have huge effects on diplomacy.
There would be two seperate points systems, one when you're at peace with another empire, and one where you're at war.
Each race would have their own individual Point Thresholds.
When you're at peace with another empire, before you have any treaty, you gain points basically just by giving gifts and accepting demands of the other empire, and a small number of points each turn for just staying out of their way. You lose points by making demands, attacking them, hanging around in their space, etc. Once you rack up enough points, the empire will be willing sign a treaty with you. Once you have a treaty, you earn say, two points per turn of the treaty. You can then also get points by being at war with your allies enemies, and lose points by warring with their friends.
As the number of points you have with a given empire goes up, they will sign higher and higher level treaties with you.
This would eliminate a few of the problems from SE4, namely, empires declaring war on you for no reason (if you're staying out of their space, the number of points keeps going up so it's more likely they'll offer a treaty), and also eliminate the practice of AI empires offering the next treaty up every single turn, until you get to Partnership 4 turns after you've met them.
Also, once you have a treaty with an empire, as long as you don't go zooming through their space, or blowing up their allies (or both!), your relations with that empire will keep getting better. Anyone who's played Civ or Alpha Centauri will appreciate this, since it's infuriating in those games that you pretty much have to give presents to your trading partners every single turn to keep them from hating you.

Moving on, once you're at war with an empire, they would have a defined threshold that must be met before they'll agree to peace. You gain points by destroying ships (1pt), capturing planets (10pts), and capturing systems(bonus 20pts). You lose points by letting the enemy destroy your ships, or capture your planets & systems. Once the point threshold has been achieved, the empire will agree to peace with you. Then the system switches over to the Peace Point system, albeit at a fairly low starting point number so it will be a while before your former enemy signs a Trade Agreement with you. A second threshold would be in place if you refuse peace and continue to attack, and once that one is met, the enemy will surrender.

All of these points would be more or less invisible to the player, aside from maybe a little tag under their name that tells you how good your relations are, and maybe a little arrow showing whether they've gotten better or worse since the last turn.

You would have a default starting number of points with every empire, but depending on their set up, they would react differently. ie: Your starting points are 500.
The Praetorians are set up to go as far as a Trade Alliance if points are 500 or greater, so when you meet them and propose a NA treaty, it is accepted.
The Xiati, however are set to declare war if your points with them drop below 600, so upon meeting them, they declare war.
There would be other things that could raise or lower you starting points, such as racial achievements, or research in certain fields. Also, every 10 points you earn with an ally gives you 1 extra starting point when meeting a new empire, since you reputation will procede you, as it were.

Maybe there's another way of doing it, but I think this is the simplest, most easily moddable way of getting decent diplomacy.

Using points, even Trade could be made to make more sense. Eg: 100kT of resources is worth 1 point, a ship is worth 5-50 points depending on size, a planet is worth 500 points, and technologies would be given point values based on their level. ie: level 1 tech is worth 2 points while level 10 tech is worth 20.
Then, when you propose a trade with another empire, it just looks at -We Get: 10000pts -We Give: 10100pts. and then accept, decline or counter offer, based on what sort of Trade Threshold they have. (ie: A race with a trade threshold of 500 would accept this deal, while one with a TT of 50 would not).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

As for the trade points, I tried to start something similar a while ago; I called it "Star Credits" (crappy name I know) and it also used "points" allocated to certain things. For example, a newly colonized planet with under 5 facilities and under 50M pop would cost, say, 5000 SC IIRC, while a developed world with over 10 facilities and over 100M pop would cost something more like 25000 SC. For ships, something similar; SCs based on the hull size, but also whether or not it had a colony module, whether or not it had Racial Tech comps, Stellar Manipulation, etc. I also implemented "patrols": i.e. you order one or more of your ships to patrol/guard an area for a certain number of turns, and you get paid based on the size and number of the ships and the amount of turns you patrolled/guarded the area.

But what you're saying is much better.

[Emperor's Child]

I've always thought that you shouldn't be able to kill ALL of the population by bombarding it from space. You would have to practically blast every square centimeter of the planet, and then find all of the populace hidden in mines, basements, etc. I have always thought that planetary damage should never be allowed to kill the last 1-2 million to represent this little point... you need boots on the ground to do that messy work.

Another Alternative is that you could consider a planet "killed" from orbaital bombardment as destroyed from the empire perspective, but then allow 1-2 M of the original race as automatically being added to whoever colonized the planet next (rather than needing to kill them). Basically this could be one way to implement the "bombed back to the stone age" approach. You could also use this same approach for automatically getting "bonus" population upon establishing a colony for Native, pre-warp cultures which could be seeded to planets similar to ruins (basically ruins that give you population rather than tech).


Another interesting thing I'd like to see is options for burning off a planet's atmosphere. Could be used by attackers as another type of planet trashing raid style of attack against stronger / parity opponents, or could be used by defenders in a scorched earth move.