1) managing queues on dozens of systems is cumbersome

- governors are too dumb compared to player

- common tasks like "insert structure X to all planets queue as first item" are tedious to do

- lack of some sort of custom player "piority queue" which would let you define prefered order of general improvements to follow on systems (or even template for governors)



I agree



2) managing planets forces you to check every system manually almost every turn

- you need to go to system details to check on your planets

- you need to go to individual planets to change specialization or to scout moon or remove anomaly - this makes turn very slow

- it would be nice to have automated "virtual-improvement" like "scout all moons" or "remove all anomalies" (with variable cost of course)



I completely agree, this does need some fine tuning.





3) managing/merging fleets - there is no easy way to set rally points and so you have to go to hangars of lots of planets and order ships around every turn to send them to rally system



Rally points are needed



4) fighting battles on manual takes too much time

- there should be a way to define cards and skip the animation. Yes animations are great for new players but after spending hundreds of hours with the game you just set cards and leave for a toilet.



THIS! Oh my god yes. There should be automatic - Pick cards - and Manual. I hate losing some fleets because I'm lazy and I hit the auto button and the it picks the worst cards and I lose unneeded ships.



5) "idle systems" are hard to discover. They should use conver to dust or sci by default. Atm you can either go there from the news event or from empire list, but both suffer from memory loss. When you return from system detail you have to scroll down again.



Just like for science there should be an option to make the game remind you when there is nothing in production

Licho wrote:
things like food on moons are rarely worth it, clean sweep only with 2+ moons and AI can still pick them

The tooltip is misleading, those improvements actually give +3 Food or +2 Dust per population on the planet. So they are actually quite strong.

Renamed the title.

Some things that AI does in less optimal way:



Early colonization problems:

* colonizers - it should use colonizer with extra engine most of the time and expand more aggresively. With pilgrims it could use evacuate fleet and hero with +25production to expand.

* wormholes - basically your first goal is to get casimir and expand to "common" area to grab the best planets there. AI ignores that.

* spatial awarness - AI does not try to block key access points to rich system areas like humans do, thats probably hardest to implement, it could guard wormholes instead - even with simple scout. Rich planets too.

* hero switching - if rich system is identified close to plenty of empty planets it should assign its +25prod hero there and start colonizing from there

* initial planet setup - AI should focus on food on first planets initially and start queues with heavy isotopes



Tech tree problems:

* AI can be beaten by focusing on "economic" techs - which increase production or science. Things like +40 sci improvement are incredibly valuable early on to give you big bonuses

* AI appears to invest too much into warfare tree even before its needed. It should probably research that only if it plans/is at war or if it needs utility techs from there.



System improvements problems

* AI builds improvements that dont make sense or have only marginal returns. For example it can build influence or trade improvements on system where trade or influence dont make sense. Or defenses on planets which arent under attack.

* AI appears to try to specialize system. As a human who beats that AI i never do that. That probably indicates some problems with game design. What I do is focus on food first on all planets and when planets are near full i switch them to most efficient specialization for given planet type. At least until you have improvements like +30% +40% sci it makes no sense to specialize whole system.

* some improvements are almost never worth it yet AI can still build it - things like food on moons are rarely worth it, clean sweep only with 2+ moons and AI can still pick them.

* AI should insert into queue key great improvements when available - things like heavy isotopes or planetary institute. Basically if improvement can improve industry output and return time is short enough push that to queue first. Same with approval rating.



Diplomacy:

* the patch from yesterday is a step in the right direction, AI's now declare war on you when you grow too strong. However they should still do that earlier and swap target when someone else is strongest.





Also it appears that endless empire victory is too easy, because you have to explore that part of the tech tree anyway. You need the ship hulls, expansion disaproval fixes and planet improvements from the "Exploration and Expansion" tree so its usually very easy to finish the path by getting endless empire. What I also like to do is transforming lesser planets to desert (even arctic -> desert) and later to tundra.

Licho wrote:
3) managing/merging fleets - there is no easy way to set rally points and so you have to go to hangars of lots of planets and order ships around every turn to send them to rally system

I've been bothered by this myself, and it seems like it would be an easy one to fix.

Thanks for the feedback. Several of the suggestions you make are already under discussion since other players have suggested them too. Please look into the suggestion summary thread listed in my sig. In particular, I would love rally points and a way to preset cards for auto battle resolution.



Do you have any suggestions on what the AI should do, to be more of a challenge? We have collected a number of ideas here:



/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/9509-evidence-requested-poor-ai-decisions-besides-ship-design

I came here from playing civilization 5 and this game while being inferior in some aspects to civ 5 (in my opinion) still pretty much the same game. However I do like the combat and diplomacy of this game a bit more than I did in civ 5. Anyway my point is - all civilization games that I have encountered require massive micro management. If you don't like it - pick smaller map.