I just finished my first playthrough, and I LOVE this game! I can see myself playing a ton of custom games, and finishing all the questlines. My husband is already commenting on how much time I'm spending playing =) These are a few of the ideas I had while playing that would make for a better or more customized experience:



1. Accessibility:

A) Keyboard shortcuts! Seriously needs keys for next city/army etc. (I didn't know games without keyboard shortcuts were still made =p Seriously, IMO this is a huge issue, especially accessibility-wise). I think this was my number one issue with the game.

B) In-game, searchable wiki.

C) Ability to sort cities via specific available/queued/built improvements (not quite sure how this would work, but I found myself thinking about it frequently once I got over 15 cities).

D) Available Constructions window terrain filters - for example, removing Irrigation Networks on a city with no rivers. Trying to remember which cities have rivers can get annoying when you have a bunch.

E) A mouseover tooltip that explains the scoring on the status screen.



2. Customization:



A) Ability to control which/where minor factions spawn.

B) Ability to select starting zones for each major player.



3. Heroes:

A) Option to fully spec all heroes purchased from the marketplace, possibly for an additional fee?

B) Ability to respec heroes for a set fee that increases each time you use it.



4. Units:

A) Ability to mouseover any capacities on selected units.

B) Tooltip on mouseover of unit attributes that explains where bonuses are coming from (for instance, if a unit is getting a bonus from standing in city walls, or being next to a friendly unit).



**EDITS HISTORY**

Switched 3 to 1.C

Added 1.D

Added 1.E

For number three, maybe cities could be organized in a list based on the amount of total industry spent on buildings, which would show the most developed cities in order.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
For number three, maybe cities could be organized in a list based on the amount of total industry spent on buildings, which would show the most developed cities in order.

Not quite what I meant, but that would also be a useful sorting option! I was thinking more along the lines of seeing which specific cities have, say, Town Criers built/queued/available. If that's a tech you want in all of your cities you'd be able to quickly find all the ones where it isn't queued and add it, or find where it is queued and perform a buyout instead of waiting (assuming you have the resources, of course).

I second OP's points. Especially the in-game wiki, keyboard hotkeys, and various added tooltips. Here are some of my own:



Feature Wishlist:

- Low level ruins explorations that award more than just dust. How about x amount of food or industry for a city, a single population for a city, x amount science, x amount of influence, a unit, an experience boost, bonus movement points, etc…

- WONDERS! I'm guessing they'll come in an expansion. They were very exciting to me in Endless Space. Was always a fun goal to activate them and find out what they do.



Technical Wishlist:

- More graphically discernible terrain in the battle view. Current version is very drab. City and forest tiles aren’t much different from normal tiles. Some 3D trees or city walls would help here.

- Ability to see minor faction empire bonuses before settling a region. Choosing which region to settle is dependent on the minor faction empire bonus, but currently this can’t be seen until after the region is already settled.

- Tooltip descriptions of what “moral” does.

- Tooltips in battle when mousing over terrain to see what bonuses moving there will provide.

- In battles, tooltips that show percent chances to critical fail/fumble/normal hit/critical hit, when a friendly unit is selected and the cursor is hovering over an enemy unit.

- A hard number describing the actual effect of both the hero skill and research technology that increases searching ability on ruins. Currently this is ambiguous and hard to know if it is worth getting.

- The technology that allows ruins to be searched a second time should reset graphically all of the previously explored greyed out ruins. Currently it isn’t possible (or at least obvious) to tell which ruins have had their second exploration or just one.

- Ability to chose exactly how much influence to spend on complimenting another empire in the diplomacy screen. This could be implemented similar to how dust can be traded. The current version of only being able to trade a fixed amount results in a tedious process of cycling through the menus when wanting to compliment an empire many times (for instance to achieve a diplomacy victory).

- Faster movement animations for armies moving around the map.

- Thin lines on the approval ratings bar that shows where content, happy, and fervent levels activate.

- In battle, units that have been given orders to move and then attack, should forget their move orders and just focus on attacking in the cases where they execute their commands at the end of the queue and their target has moved out of attack range. This is a big issue for melee units.

- Ruin quests that require exploring another ruin before a timer expires should make sure it is actually physically possible to reach the ruin in time. It is very frustrating to fail a quest line because it is impossible.



Balance issues:

- Add a large defense bonus to “founder’s memorial” that increases with city level. Capitols should be much harder to conquer than normal cities. This will help differentiate Annihilation from Supremacy victories. Also, (AI) empires reduced down to just their capitol region can still be players in the end game, even if just by helping to contribute to diplomacy and being pesky.

- Broken lord’s cost to buy population should be calculated based on both empire population and city population. Current formula that is solely based on empire population leads to mid/late game new cities being prohibitively expensive to grow. It is a poor investment to spend 600+ dust to buy a single population that increases dust/turn by about 4.

- Cultist’s converted villages should add to the FIDSI bonus from all 6 surrounding tiles, even if those tiles belong to another region. Currently this is not the case and therefor villages that lie on a region border (anecdotally more often than not) are much less profitable.