I think this is the right place to put this but I have been doing some thinking about the game and would like to offer my feedback and suggestions.
I have tried to keep this concise but there is a lot to get through I would really appreciate if you would read this and offer your comments.

Bug-fixes - There aren't a lot of these that I am aware of that haven't already been fixed but:

1 Ashdar Destroyers have cruiser armour, Ashdar Missile Cruisers have destroyer armour, Ashdar Light Cruisers have destroyer armour

2 Yoral Escort Cruisers are completely wrong, they are named and look like a cruiser but have destroyer stats

Balance - Stuff that could be done without messing around with too many new systems.

1 Weapons

I suggest weapons have damage and range balanced according to tiers e.g. coilguns are tier 1 kinetics
For example 10 damage for M coilguns, 5 damage (1/2) for L coilguns and 20 (2x) for H coilguns as rough guidelines
I suggest giving weapons 10, 20 and 30 damage for each tier 1, 2 and 3
This would give for example Primary Beams around 30 damage or around 15 for PD Primary Beams.
I would suggest giving beams better damage and kinetics worse damage to compensate for kinetics long range/beams damage fall-off

2 Weapon Tech There are a lot of obvious missing weapons in the tech tree right now

T2 Kinetics could be expanded with L and M Railguns, T3 Kinetics could be expanded with L and H Force weapons e.g. L Shard H Spike H Lance
Beams are mostly complete except for T3 H Primary Beams
I would suggest combining T1 Ion (Emp) weapons, T2 Disruptors (Lethal) weapons and T3 Plasma (En) weapons into a Particles tree
A L Lethal weapon and L and H Plasma weapon would complete the Particle Tree.
I suggest adding a T2 Launcher between Viper and Pulson
I suggest adding an EMP torpedo and removing Leech Missile and adding Neutron (Lethal) Missile and Torpedo

3 Weapon Modifiers Making weapons feel special

I suggest a penetration re-balance e.g lowering AP and SP to 50% penetration and making them innate to kinetic and beam weapons
I suggest adding Armour Negation (AN) 100% armour penetration and Shield Negation (SN) 100% shield penetration
I suggest giving primary beams AN and giving force weapons SN
I suggest changing EMP damage to damage shields
I suggest Beam Focusing should be changed to make beams high damage short range weapons

4 Defences

I suggest adding armour hardness (H) with T1, T2, T3 and T4 armour having 0, 25, 50 and either 75 or 100 hardness.
Armour hardness should reduce armour penetration
I suggest adding Shield resistance (R) with T1, T2, T3 and T4 shields having 0, 25, 50 and either 75 or 100 resistance
Shield resistance should reduce shield penetration.
I believe PD weapons are well balanced right now.

5 Ground Combat

I suggest making dedicated infantry stronger (+2) over militia
I suggest giving armour an extra +1 perhaps from personal shields
This would give a 4:2:1 ratio for 4 strength militia:6 strength infantry:12 strength armour in the late game
I suggest swapping the names of military transports and troopships
I suggest dedicated troopships and carriers should have space for ground units as well as strikecraft
I suggest light/escort/assault carriers have 1 ground unit slot troopships/carriers have 2 and heavy/fleet carriers have 3
I suggest giving strike craft air strength to help in invasions e.g. fighters 0.5 bombers 0.75 strike fighters 1
This would give an early game light carrier 2 or 4 ground strength and 3 air strength
This would give a late game fleet carrier 18 or 36 ground strength and 18 air strength

6 Tech Specialisations I think each faction should have 2 (usually 1 + 1 weapon) also specialisations should be nerfed to 50% discounts

Ashdar Imperial - Information (Ancient Archives) + Beams
Ashdar colonial - Construction (Shipyard Ruins) + Beams
Phidid Combine - Sociology (peaceful merchants) + Planetology (not weapons, coral bloom)
Gremak Empire - Information (Ancient Archives) + Particles (Weapons Cache)
Orthin Conference - Physics (SCIENCE) + Particles (Applied Science)
Yoral Khaganate - Planetology (Ice Age, Hardy Yoral) + Kinetics (flak cannons when?)
Tinkers - Construction (Tireless Cyborgs) + Missiles
Humanity - Military (Spess Mahrens) + Kinetics (not pew pew lasers) + missiles (macross missile mayhem)

I'm suggesting to give humans a leg up with weapons because they will need all the advantages they can get against superior foes

7 Tech Tree

I suggest consolidating many of the techs, weapons techs especially, and having all techs confer multiple effects/bonuses to help clean up
the tech tree and make current weak techs more useful
I saw this elsewhere but I would also suggest giving the strategic speed increase techs trade capacity increases as well
e.g. 50% per tech (1.5, 3 and 4) would give 200% along with containment so 15 per transport or 30 per armed merchant.

8 Stations Stations should be buffed, right now they are useful but orbital slots are too limited.

I suggest arming space stations to =cruisers in strength and buffing starbases to =carriers/battleships and fleetbases to =super-dreads
I also suggest making station cost about half the metal and/or production of ships to really tempt people to build them
I suggest making stronger stations, more station types and possibly removing the asteroid debris restriction for asteroid bases and replacing it with
orbital mines or something else that makes sense for a debris field building.

Future Suggestions Stuff that would be really awesome

1 Planetary Defences Split

I suggest ground defences that represent everything on the planet = armour + bunkers + garrison + hangars
Armour should determine the planet's resistance to bombing
Bunkers should allow pops to hide in safety
Garrisons should automatically build infantry for ground defence/riots
Hangars should automatically build strike craft for air defence

I suggest orbital defences that represent everything around the planet = shields + weapons
Planetary shields must be defeated before a planet can be invaded
A planet should create small weapons platforms on the tactical map that defend against attackers

2 Planetary Invasion

Combining my suggestions would make planet invasion more intresting/worthwhile for both attackers and defenders
Of course once you have defeated the orbital defences you can still just bomb everything
Planetary hull should be invincible to everything except my next suggestion

3 Siege Weapon Split I suggest splitting siege weapons into artillery (A) and devastation (D) weapons

I suggest a railgun artillery and a turbolaser artillery to go along with ion artillery as T2 artillery
I suggest a force spire to go with the primary artillery and the hellbore cannon as T3 artillery
I suggest making D weapons unique to the super-dreadnought and dread-star
I suggest buffing the D stellar surge beam to 600 damage and 60 range and changing it to AH, En, D
I suggest changing the AH modifier so the Stellar Surge Beam can hit everything between it and its target (wave motion cannon)
I suggest adding a Devastation (D) modifier for devastation weapons allowing them to blow up planets

4 Technology

I would like the game to have more unique techs e.g. Orthin Atmospheric condensation or Phidi Coral Blooming
I would like tech trading/gifting to be a more regular thing
I would like to see alliances come with some sort of regular/unique tech sharing benefit e.g. phidi ally allows temporary use of coral blooming

5 I almost forgot

I suggest roughly halving the number of weapons in each slot currently in the game and doubling their damage so weapons line up better with
hardpoint graphics.
The yoral torpedo destroyer especially needs nerfed, 800 damage in a destroyer is just laughably good.
I would suggest changing most torpedo slots to be 2x torpedoes and reducing the yoral torpedo destroyer to 4 torps

That's all folks, feel free to ask for clarification for anything that isn't clear.

Dragar wrote:I think the ship stuff is pretty deliberate.

It literally makes no sense though either all Ashdar ships should have weak/strong armour or none of them should, they already have weak hulls,
except the destroyer

Also if the Yoral escort cruiser is meant to be an escort destroyer they could just rename it.

Currently asteroid constructs see not much use. Maybe replace some tiny planets by asteroid belts at map generation, and allow asteroid construction at any colony in a system with asteroid belt?

PrivateHudson wrote:Currently asteroid constructs see not much use. Maybe replace some tiny planets by asteroid belts at map generation, and allow asteroid construction at any colony in a system with asteroid belt?

Yeah... we haven't figured out a good way to represent asteroid belts graphically in our display engine.

I don't think there is a good way to show an asteroid belt from the side lol. You could just get by with an asteroid field that's kind of flat and has a location for a large asteroid/asteroid base graphic.

Arioch wrote: Yeah... we haven't figured out a good way to represent asteroid belts graphically in our display engine.

What if the asteroid belt is a separate layer above or around the planet and not spinning?

Some individual (bigger) asteroid pieces could spin around their own access, none of the asteroids would move "around" the planet though but be basically in a static position instead. Their varying pace of spinning around their own axes would give the sense of motion instead: like the player would be orbiting the planet at the same pace the astoid belt does and hence the belt itself seems static to the observer

One thought that occurred to me was to have bitmap asteroids that float and rotate in a cloud; the problem there is that if they rotate, the lighting direction would obviously become wrong. So they'd have to be completely static. Maybe it would look okay... I haven't really tried it.

Another thing to do is to have debris rings be something that can appear on randomly spawned planets. Maybe we'll be able to add that as part of the terraforming changes. We'll see.

I personally think that Factories should have a modest bonus to planetary Coin output in the case where the planet is set to Trade. Not necessarily a huge strategic consideration, but in cases where planetary industries are set to churn out civilian commodities, you'd think that the added industrial capacity would earn some profits- and analogous to the modest profits earned by unused Food reserves. Obviously, when the planet is working on building ships or buildings, the industrial capacity of the Factories there is taken up by THOSE projects.

nweismuller wrote:I personally think that Factories should have a modest bonus to planetary Coin output in the case where the planet is set to Trade. Not necessarily a huge strategic consideration, but in cases where planetary industries are set to churn out civilian commodities, you'd think that the added industrial capacity would earn some profits- and analogous to the modest profits earned by unused Food reserves. Obviously, when the planet is working on building ships or buildings, the industrial capacity of the Factories there is taken up by THOSE projects.

I suggested something similar, the concept being that factory output is being redirected to produce trade goods to be sold for profit. However, Sven wanted to keep coin and labor separate. I think his argument was that it would make factories too good.

Actually, I meant star-belonging asteroid belts instead of some tiny planets, not planet-belonging debris rings. Some of those planets could be broken into asteroid belts at map generation, some by terraforming, some by biggest guns.
Probably, Asteroid Construction has to provide more to justify the hassle. For example, hull with cruiser firepower and destroyer cost, buildable without Space Station, but unable to fit shields, so it will obsolete quickly. Call it Monitor.

Arioch wrote: I suggested something similar, the concept being that factory output is being redirected to produce trade goods to be sold for profit. However, Sven wanted to keep coin and labor separate. I think his argument was that it would make factories too good.

Markets are already OP in the late game I already turn every 20+ pop planet into a mega mall and then instant build everything everywhere outside of my dedicated shipyards building ships forever. Factories being able to produce maybe even 33% Food or Coin would keep them useful in the late game.

PrivateHudson wrote:Actually, I meant star-belonging asteroid belts instead of some tiny planets, not planet-belonging debris rings. Some of those planets could be broken into asteroid belts at map generation, some by terraforming, some by biggest guns.

I understood what you meant. I'm saying we have discussed the possibility of having asteroid belts, but we don't know how we would graphically display an asteroid belt in our game engine.

Arioch wrote:One thought that occurred to me was to have bitmap asteroids that float and rotate in a cloud; the problem there is that if they rotate, the lighting direction would obviously become wrong. So they'd have to be completely static. Maybe it would look okay... I haven't really tried it.

Another thing to do is to have debris rings be something that can appear on randomly spawned planets. Maybe we'll be able to add that as part of the terraforming changes. We'll see.

Yeah lighting might be a problem then: how did you do it for the clouds on the planet?

If the asteroids themselfes are detailed and nice-looking, fully static might also be ok

Another idea: what if the part of the asteroid belt which is directly on top of the planet model is part of the planet model (like a false perspective) and can thus "float", rotate and recieve the same direction lighting? The rest of the astoid belt would be static but due to the distance and tiny points the asteroids are toomed out at that distance, it does not matter - all in all seems like a large amount of work. Would rather have space stations and new races with that kind of animation work

- Proposition for fleet panel: display all identical ships as one with plus button and counter on top. Instead of 20 troopships or space harpies display 1 troopship/harpy with [+] 20 upon it. Identical here means same components and cargo, so question mark button still can be used. Maybe even healthy and damaged should be considered distinct.
Don't know how it is for other users, but huge late-game fleets make my head spinning. Hopefully, contracted view will make it more observable. For example, may ease discerning fleet-defense carriers from strike ones without using decals proposed in Steam suggestions thread. Not mentioning tedious hunt for those obsolete 3 of 15 torpedo destroyers to upgrade them. Add an option whether fleet panels will be contracted by default for those who prefer it old way.
- Returning to asteroid belts theme, another incentive to have them is an obvious idea of mining outposts. I'd give them away as early as Modular Outposts to alleviate severe metal shortage in early game.
- I noticed that after obtaining Rapid Fire Lasers there's no use for non-RF ones. What if RF mod, doubling beam count, tripled or quadrupled their power requirement? Suddenly you once again have to think and choose, not click RF brainlessly.

Why after the Eye of Dzibix' loss all tinkers aren't instantly disconnected? Instant deharmonization would probably be too much of a punishment, pushing their faction into complete chaos. Would be nice if Tinkers AI put more emphasis on homeworld defense, more varied factional behavior is always good.
Discovered a suggestions thread. Please, move all posts from here to there.