Suggest - Features and Improvements

[nweismuller]

As things stand, Marauders consistently become the most militarily-powerful factions in the later game, and the major factions have a great deal of difficulty dealing with them. Given that the setup for Marauder factions, if actually examined as empires, would be extremely poor at research (being empires with no labs and with either zero or small free population), perhaps it might be a good idea to have the current tech advancement curve for Marauders be dramatically slowed or stopped so that they technologically stagnate relative to major factions. This might help the AI major factions, and leave us from wondering how it was that these isolated planets with limited mining capability and poor research setups managed to build multiple battleships with heavy railguns, primary beams, and high-grade defenses.

I'm all for Marauder worlds being too tricky to take in the early game, but I think, perhaps, barring dramatic influxes of resources and technology, that they should eventually become relatively easy prey for major factions as major factions develop scientifically and industrially. Given how badly Marauders currently bleed AI factions, this will likely have a good influence on the success of AI factions as well.

[bjg]

Certain bonuses in star systems are collected only if visited by ship with a scanner (scout). If you don't plan to change that it would be nice to see which systems where "scanned" and which where not.

[Chasm]

Perhaps 3 *layers * of scanning.
1 Entry into system (no special equipment on the ship)
2 Deep space scanner equipped
3 Deep space scanner and Science station equipped (not necessarily in the same hull)

[Chasm]

Looking at space marines, they are at best a minimally useful item. Only 2 early human ships can use them (Assault cruiser and CVL) and getting them into those ships is a nuisance at best (build it with assault shuttles, remove the armor unit, load the space marines). Perhaps in addition to unlocking a unit they should also upgrade human marine quarters? After all, if I have powered armor suits, why would I not equip my on board, dedicated, marine contingent with them?

[bjg]

Don't disable queuing up the "mining" project even if there is no metal production yet.

[zolobolo]

Please do not include unarmed troop transports in tactical combat against planetary defense the same way they are not included when attacking a fleet in a star system. As they do not have any combat purpose (expect to die in a flaming death), they will be pulled back anyhow.

And even if the attack fails, why would the transport need to pull out? If they are not attacked, they can stick around

The current scenario is made a bit worse by the automatic ship-placement engine which tends to put these transports in the flank of the fleet, and in case of large and/or multiple attacking fleets directly within planetary defense fire range and closest to their guns so that they are wiped out within the first turn - no time to retreat with them

[Arioch]

Please do not include unarmed troop transports in tactical combat against planetary defense the same way they are not included when attacking a fleet in a star system. As they do not have any combat purpose (expect to die in a flaming death), they will be pulled back anyhow.

Just deselect them from the attacking fleet before you click the "attack" button.

[zolobolo]

Please do not include unarmed troop transports in tactical combat against planetary defense the same way they are not included when attacking a fleet in a star system. As they do not have any combat purpose (expect to die in a flaming death), they will be pulled back anyhow.

Just deselect them from the attacking fleet before you click the "attack" button.

As a manual workaround this seems fine but:
1. If there are lot of ships hence tiny icons, selecting many of them withouth the possibility to select or deselct ships of the same kind is a pain and needs to be done for each invasion
2. There is no reason for unarmed civ ships to participate such as: colony, transport and outpost ships

What I am asking is to use the same mechanic applied when engaging enemy fleets. Civilian ships are automatically delestec there rights?
Can't we use the same protocol for planetary invasion as well?

[Chasm]

I will second that, I did not even realize I could deselect ships when attacking.

[username]

Allow us to blow up undesirable planets with the Stellar Converter without having to make an enemy colonize them somehow first. In pretty much all cases, there is no actual militarily legitimate reason to destroy planets, the reason to destroy planets is purely economical. Any uninhabited planet should be permissible for demolition. I REALLY don't know why games keep treating the ability to blow up planets as if it was a weapon. There's simply no legitimate military reason to do this. I have never destroyed a planet in any game like this for any military reason, the only reason you'd actually need to bulldoze an entire planet as opposed to merely extinguishing all life on it is to build a hyperspace bypass.

[blazenclaw]

Second part of notes in no particular order taken from a long game (first part is in bugs and issues)- some suggestions and useful tidbits I'd like to see (though most are pretty minor, sorry for such the long list!)--

• - Repeat should repeat entire queue instead of last item; if I want a fleet composed of 2 missile boats per PD cruiser, I'd like to queue 2 boats then a PD cruiser and hit repeat such that it'll produce 2 boats, then a cruiser, then 2 boats, etc, instead of 2 boats and then infinite cruisers
  - Give text explaining what the shield capacitor actually does (still not sure; is passive damage bonus upon shield damage taken? Is it supposed to be able to be activated somehow?)
  - There already are color-schemes for capturing enemy ships; could that be used once Quantum Decryption, Xeno-Engineering (the capture ship techs) or some yet-to-be-named additional one (Xeno Construction?) is researched to produce hulls of other races (with higher production costs probably)? Otherwise, is annoying to get tech for building ship hulls from capturing that are worthless. Other, easier, option; don't allow those techs to be accessable from capturing, and nobody will miss it
  - When hitting the x button on the bottom central bar to dismiss a battle viewed notification, if the summary is still up it should close as well
  - Some form of ruler for measuring distance between far away stars. This is more important for sparse games, where you may have to decide which way to expand in early game by eyeballing which stars can be traveled between. Maybe bring up the travel distance (like what ships use) when selecting a system and right click dragging, like for ships?
  - Make some notification when moving a colonist unit off-planet will remove all of them from the system. I still don't know where the cutoff is; somewhere around 1.3m+ and you can transport 1m away leaving 300k behind, but if you transport 1m from ~1.2m, none of that species is left.
  - Some method of queuing non-tree-restricted techs; for example select Small Craft, then select Ion Beams and hit queue, and then Market Theory and hit queue again, etc, would set research to be Craft -> Ion -> Market
  - [Difficult suggestion] Some way to mark ships to NOT be fired upon when they move; too often after weakening an enemy ship (but am not in range for capturing), it moves toward me and my own ships blow it out of the water existence.
  - When a ship orbiting a planet with multiple types of colonists/military units, selecting the up arrow to embark a unit should bring up a choice of which unit to embark (I want Marines, not space-bugs dammit!)
  - Make a "boarding shuttle" vs "assault shuttle" distinction if Marines are available; manually changing reg troops out and marines in is a pain
  - Make it more clear which guns have dropoff damage (most, I think?) and which don't (for example; railgun is specified as not having it which is fine, but stellar surge does not have drop off either, yet also also is not specified as such). I found it mildly annoying to have to outfit a prototype ship and test it in battle to see things like arc limitations, damage dropoff, etc. that aren't specified in the editor
  - Different types of automate, one for focusing each metal/money/food/production/tech (or some more text describing what automate actually does; all of my automated worlds built only markets and factories in roughly equal number, though, I only started automating after tech tree was completed)
  - This'll probably be more important once automate is more useful, but allowing automate to be queued would be useful (after building XYZ, then decide the rest yourself so I don't have to look at you again, un-transformable barren ugh)
  - I don't like Gaiads growing out of control - (But they are necessary, otherwise Gaia would be far more OP than it currently is, heh)
  - Somewhere on the page about staffing requirements, I'd like to see the function of how understaffed facilities behave (*See note below*)
  - Might be nice if the selection for whether or not to hide obsolete components is remembered upon exiting the ship design views; later, this has to be toggled basically every single time a ship is designed
  -- > On that note, a more involved suggestion would be to have the "compatible components" right bar auto switch to the appropriate type when the left slot is selected. For example; starting with a blank design and left clicking on a heavy weapon slot should set the right to compatible heavy weapons. Then clicking somewhere else (like on the ship itself, or outside the heavy weapon slot) should switch the right back to all compatible or whichever slot was clicked (why is "all including not compatible" there anyway?)
  - Some way to see the layout of enemy ships while in tactical battle
  --> Bonus if you can get numerical values for their shields, crew, health, armor, etc to display somehow. Sure there's no such thing as too much overkill, but I want efficient overkill
  - After something is purchased, refitting is disallowed; but what prevents refit queuing after purchase? Seems that should be allowed, though may be missing something (nice work on the refit overhaul by the way! )
  --> Would it be possible to make "repeat" work with refitting? Say I've got 10x[Battleship v1] and want to refit to [Battleship v2]. I can either mass refit if I have the money, but if not I'd like to set my production world to "Refit [Battleship v1] to [Battleship v2]", and hit repeat. As of now, it's basically required to spend coin to mass refit, because queuing the order to refit take 5 clicks for each one; with large numbers of ships, it's quite impractical, and I'd rather be spending my $$ on other planets.
  - Exiting out from designing a new ship (without saving design) should return the the new ship page, rather than the edit ship page; but probably keep it so that when you save a new ship, it returns to the edit ship page
  - I definitely saw this mentioned, but having an option to buy a planets current production from the list of planets (like transporting a colonist) would be quite helpful in the lategame (or maybe an option to auto-buy the remaining wrenches of a planet's production each turn? Probably should unlock with Industrial Replicators)

*Understaffing*
Basically, I'd like to figure out how the understaffing penalty works in order to optimize planets, as right now I'm pretty confused. For example, two tier 3 farms with 2.8 population on a highly fertile world produces 15 food instead of 22 (70% staffing -> 68% production), two tier 3 factories with 2.3 population makes 49 production (29% staffing -> 82% production), and two tier 3 markets with 3.4 population makes 17 coin instead of 24 (43% staffing -> 71% production). So... yeah. Huh?

[bjg]

Allow us to blow up undesirable planets with the Stellar Converter without having to make an enemy colonize them somehow first. In pretty much all cases, there is no actual militarily legitimate reason to destroy planets, the reason to destroy planets is purely economical. Any uninhabited planet should be permissible for demolition. I REALLY don't know why games keep treating the ability to blow up planets as if it was a weapon. There's simply no legitimate military reason to do this. I have never destroyed a planet in any game like this for any military reason, the only reason you'd actually need to bulldoze an entire planet as opposed to merely extinguishing all life on it is to build a hyperspace bypass.

Or better just allow to "build planet" on top of an uninhabited one (natives count as "habitation" even if not colonized).
BTW, user "username" is funny, but feels like an unpatched loophole.

[username]

It seems like building on top of an uninhabited planet would get confusing, since the game would have difficulty discerning which planet you wanted to overwrite. Besides, maybe the natives need bulldozing also. Some of them are pretty bad.

[zolobolo]

Please do not include unarmed troop transports in tactical combat against planetary defense the same way they are not included when attacking a fleet in a star system. As they do not have any combat purpose (expect to die in a flaming death), they will be pulled back anyhow.

Just deselect them from the attacking fleet before you click the "attack" button.

As a manual workaround this seems fine but:
1. If there are lot of ships hence tiny icons, selecting many of them withouth the possibility to select or deselct ships of the same kind is a pain and needs to be done for each invasion
2. There is no reason for unarmed civ ships to participate such as: colony, transport and outpost ships

What I am asking is to use the same mechanic applied when engaging enemy fleets. Civilian ships are automatically delestec there rights?
Can't we use the same protocol for planetary invasion as well?

Specification: This behaviour only seems to occur when assisting the attack of an ally against a planet.
As such, the workaround is not available as the player does not get a chance to select the ships to attend the combat but it is slightly less frequent occurrence + is probably dependent on the whole diplomacy affect when more then 2 factions are involved in tactical combat change

[username]

*Understaffing*
Basically, I'd like to figure out how the understaffing penalty works in order to optimize planets, as right now I'm pretty confused. For example, two tier 3 farms with 2.8 population on a highly fertile world produces 15 food instead of 22 (70% staffing -> 68% production), two tier 3 factories with 2.3 population makes 49 production (29% staffing -> 82% production), and two tier 3 markets with 3.4 population makes 17 coin instead of 24 (43% staffing -> 71% production). So... yeah. Huh?

What are you're seeing seems to be nearly straight linear scaling subject to rounding (70% staff -> 68% production), but with factories and markets, I think there are a few tech upgrades and planetary specials that give you "flat bonus per building regardless of staffing levels", explicitly, which is why you're seeing these buildings function at higher "efficiencies".