Just a quick idea, I always enjoyed naming individual planets and I think that would be good here, after all its not as if we named Earth Sol 4 or something, I think this would help in forming player attachment to a specific planet, especially in multiplayer, after all Stalingrad would not have been such a big battle if the city had not been named after the Soviet Union's leader!



Now, I know you can name solar systems but in all honesty I think its easer to form a attachment to a plant rather then the area that surrounds it.

Additionally I think it would an improvement to add more options into the tactics options, and I do realise this is Alpha so I might just be suggesting something that you guys are doing anyway but I think that considering the fact that you can change tactics mid battle I think you should be able to order a retreat if things go bad.



Other then that I love the games style and design, the battle graphics are superb and I love the way you look though your planets in a specific system. One last thing I should mention though is the ship design screen, It's a nice layout but I think a few more options would be welcome, perhaps even components you had having a visual effect on the ship not unlike Galactic civilisations 2 which used the same style of battle visualisation as your game.

Anyway these are a couple of my ideas on how to improve the game, It's been a privilege to do a little alpha testing for Endless Space and I hope the game does well.



-Hess

Good suggestion, should maybe be posted in "GAMES2GETHER - Design Discussion" I gotta add though that In other games following this style, for example like in Sins of a Solar Empire me and my friends had a blast naming our planets & capital ships different things. Also in versus we put random insults as name on our planet if we were about to lose it. So it has more than just practical uses, heh.