There are interesting ideas overall.



I appreciate the feedback.



Time to close the thread.

Small dialogues with the other races. More events and maybe even interactive ones.



As for the dialogues I would love to see them in the diplomacy screen and on first contact and from time to time when for example the relation to another race changed to a certain turning point or two ships meet in space or when the player gets to close with his newest colony and so on. Not all these alien races the player meets that are initiating such events must be living within the galaxy the player resides in. For the dialogues it would be enough if they just consist of small animated pictures with a few for this race typical words. For the flavor it can sometimes even be gibberish the player does not understand until he maybe has the proper technologies to do so. What I would love in this regard would be mysterious information's the player can get from these dialogues maybe even sometimes leading to an extremely good planet or revealing a great artifact on a planet. Making the aliens much more mysterious over all, something I would expect aliens would be in reality when we first meet them.



As for events I just would love to see much more of them. And these must not always have dramatic effects but maybe some of them could be interactive giving the player a chance to maybe fight back that plague that is coming. Going with this plaque event, maybe there is a cure out there on a planet and an alien race knows of that cure and can give information on the whereabouts and so on. Another form of interactive event could be some related to other races or even initiated by them, some form of small quests.



Have Fun

I think the following would help with immersion (most of these have been presented earlier in this thread)



1) More random events, with better description of exactly what is happening. It would be even better if some events could present you with a choice.



2) Different names for the same things among races (but not too exotic).



3) Dramatically different play styles for each race.



4) Minor civilizations/pre-space flight civilizations on newly discovered planets.



5) Scenarios. For example, a scenario where the Endless homeworld has been found and the various races rush to claim it...

A few nice addition things to add

1. Gal civ had an interesting planetary control battle, where you can see battles happening o the planets. Id like something akin to that, or at least be able to see battle on the planet surface or see ships bombarding the planets ( or vica versa, if you add ground to space weapons)

2. Components that change the look of your ship, as right now all ships have the same template, I'd like to see components that change the look of your ship, basically just modifications for ascetics

3. Have ships that carry fighters (multiple carrier ship templates)

4. Different fighters that carrier ships can carry. Like a support carrier will carry fighters that heal ships in fleet in and out of battle, attack carrier with fighters that attack ships ( laser fighters, missile fighters, mass driver fighters, and be able to make your own custom fighter) and have fighters that add defense bones to fleet or just carrier (Ex: fighter that gives + 5% missile interception)

5. Ship wrecks in battle. It look nice to see your wrecks floating in space and its unrealistic for the ship to completely disappear

6. Orbital structures that we can see if we zoom in to plant system that give bonuses to research/defense.influence, Moon bases ( actually be able to see them) And I would LOVE being able to build a star base, like a depot that repairs your ships, can build ships, give a bonus in defense to your ships if in the area around it (to avoid OP, make it expensive to build, need a tech to build, and require maintenance in the look of dust per turn and repairs if it gets attacked)

7. Ability too choose good or evil. By this i mean factions start out good, evil , neutral but can change their alignment, and have alignments have bonuses (Evil= military bonus, neutral= money or diplomatic bonus, good= Civil bonus)

8. Be able to change governments, like republics, dictatorships, theocracy, etc

9. An Endless system, accessible only through warp or by researching some tech. Be able to make peace with them and Allie with them and gain bonuses, or take their systems bonuses by force, but have extremly powerful ships guarding it

10. Maybe its just me, but the Galaxys seem so small, even at max. Im just asking for you to make the maps bigger.

11. When you have a game event, allow player to make choices about what to do, with both game play and moral consequences ( this should be linked with 7)

*disclaimer - overcomlicated foreign-english-speaking mind trying to express its thought*



2 Things:



1. For me a lot of Immersion would be generated by an additional register. Like The ones for military tech, feet... One that includes the different events that happen throughout the universe (yes also enemys, you know rumours spread). Include as many, in an as lorish way as possible(moo2 galactic news im eyeing in you, done by the genious devs that created that AWSOME ui you have -> and thus not beeing news but intellegence reports). Major milestones of other empires, declaration of wars. Extra spicing could be a presentation in a faction specific way.F.E.(not well thought of just to get the idea): Hissho report: A major Sophons Fleet was destroyed by a cravers Raiding party, as was to be expected from those whimsy labgeeks. Sowers report: A major Sophons Fleet was destroyed by a cravers Raiding party, but who cares. Horatio report: A major Sophons Fleet was destroyed by a cravers Raiding party, that wouldn't have happened to us, my mini-me's.



2. In the Faction selection screens as well as in custom generation, having a sheet telling you what unique TEchonolgys you have would add more visibilty to what is one of the core characteristical things of different factions.

Thanks for reading, what would such a thing add for you?

I think it would be great if the ship models in the galaxy map look closer to the ship models that are used in combat, because these models look amazing.

space_beaver wrote:
Quoting to agree. I don't know about the writing (haven't seen much yet), but a clumsy Portal reference is an instant immersion-breaker.

The biography won a G2G vote some time ago.



Edit:

PeaceMack wrote:
1. I'd like to be able to customize my name when playing. Maybe this is already possible, and I've overlooked how to do it. But I'm stuck with my Steam login name.

You can change your Steam alias, in the "friends" window, unless you mean something else?



Edit 2: Been following the thread - Quite a lot of customization ideas etc will be available through modding.

Diplomacy:

- Make the AI diplomat leave if you continuously ask for something they don't want to give (eg ask 3 times for a planet, make the diplomat leave, disables contact with them for 5-10 turns or something. May also reduce warmness towards you)



Ship models:

- Why do battleships not look powerful and deadly9exception - sowers)? I loved the battleship for Sowers (it reminds me of the Terran M2 from X3 Terran Conflict, looks gorgeous). But when I see the one for Sophons, it doesn't feel deadly or even look much different to the scout model (except larger)



Research:

- Give all technologies individual largeish images, your concept art has been fantastic. Why not extend it to the technologies? Doing this also makes the technologies feel like more of an achievement, and they currently don't.

- Better descriptions upon discovering technologies would help to. This sort of falls into lore based stuff.



Easier way to manage conflicts. Large fleet grinding definitely causes immersion loss.

I would love some race-specific voice acting a la Sword of the Stars.

Steph'nie wrote:
I quite liked this idea for instance: more sound, voice, and so on

Also, more text and art.

As far as I understand, text and art are cheaper than voice and video, and (for me at least) work just as good.

I would love to find minor civilizations, which are bound to a single starsystem. Not able to use interstellar travelling. You can trade with them resources and some minor stuff, like money for your protection treaty or something like this. and if beeing allied with them u will get bonuses like growth rate, trade bonus and so on. there could be possible ways to integrate them into your realm, like diplomatic, influence or invasion.

In the mapsetup you would be able to disable this "small civs" and decide wether there are more or less of them, but not a specific number.





Also i guess the influence of a starsystem should be able to turn other factions to rebellion and if not crushed down military or delivered with happiness from the owner, the other faction would loose this starsystem to yours. this would give the game annother possibility to rule the galaxy with influence, without heading out to war. but it would give some negative feedback on your diplomatic relations.

Why not have Pirate Admirals? They could add a bit of a challenge.

Could even add a little bit of lore about them? Like a Sophon rogue who decided destroying ships and rampaging across entire sectors would be better than researching how to plant crops properly...



There could also be an additional mission system where you can hand out missions to other factions and receive missions. Somewhat like the Sins of a Solar Empire system.



Notice the Archive option in the menu, That could be expanded upon with a little Endlesspedia style collection of data collected. Possibly a per game basis if you're looking at it during a game and an overall one when you're not in game.

To add on to what I said earlier, I would love to see artwork in the game. In Sins of a Solar Empire, the loading screens all had really neat looking artwork and I felt that it was a lost opportunity to not include them in the game. It would be neat to have artwork pop up when a new tech is discovered or a new colony is founded. I have always loved artwork in games, as it often looks better than animations and it withstands the test of time better.

Apologies if this repeats some of the earlier posts a bit.



For me, the gold standard (platinum, really) in immersion was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Each of the seven different factions in the original game felt like honest-to-goodness real factions, rather than a few graphic images and some parameter tweaks (which, all due respect, is pretty much what the ES factions feel like). Here are (IMHO) some of the reasons why:



-- The multimedia richness. Each faction had its own distinct, accented human voice, done by professional voice actors, with an extensive series of quotes that would be read aloud at various times (usually after researching a new tech) and that again tied into the specific emphasis of that faction. There were also animated video clips specific to each faction -- not by way of introduction, but typically when special wonders were built (IIRC). This is pretty much a function of money on your part, but I suspect there are some relatively inexpensive approaches that could be taken (e.g,. text-based quotes specific to each faction, particularly during diplomatic negotiations). As per some of the earlier suggestions, you could also use occasional notifications (claims, proclamations, threats) from other factions that you have already encountered.



-- Each faction had its own set of city names that reflected that faction. Of course, the game had the advantage of using meaningful English names (Gaia's Landing, New Jerusalem) rather than exotic (and largely invented) system names, but it still added to the immersion. You might consider having a pool of system names specific to each faction and assigning one to each system when a faction first settles it.



-- Each faction really played like a different faction. The Academy was always ready to trade tech, while Morgan Enterprises wanted money and the Hive just wanted to assimilate you. Don't know how best to do this within ES, but it might help to make the diplomatic screen somehow more customized for each faction that you're dealing with -- and allowing, in addition to the various items that you can offer (based on tech) some general threats, entreaties, promises, lies, etc.



-- The world (Chiron, aka "Planet") had a number of special locations that were worth the time, expense, and occasional conflict to lay claim to; there were a few that had some negative implications as well. Having a set of high-value or high-risk items that may appear on a given planet in a given system -- and only having a few random choices from that set appear in each game -- could add to the immersion.





It's interesting that the new factions in the subsequent add-on, Alien Crossfire, didn't have that same "this is a real faction" feel. I don't know whether that was because they just weren't as well done or because it just added too many factions, and the new factions just didn't stand out as much.



My second favorite all-time 4X game (and it really may be #1, edging out SMAC) is the Fall From Heaven II fantasy mod for Civ4. It corrected a number of Civ4's flaws and greatly increased its repeatability. Here are some of the things that FFH2 did well:



-- Again, the factions were dramatically different, not just relatively minor tweaks on each other (as the Civ4 standard factions were). There were several major races and 2-4 factions within each race; the overall game strategy was often quite different for a given race, and there were some real constraints on some races (e.g., one faction could only found a few real cities; everything else the faction set up was merely an outpost). Consider giving each ES race several subfactions with a few different aspects; this could also be used in situations where two or more random factions come from the same race (e.g., two Sowers civs) -- you could make each one a different Sower subfaction.



-- FFH2 replaced the relatively bland and undifferentiated religions in Civ4 -- it really didn't matter which one you picked -- with very distinct and different religions that had a significant impact on tech, units, and spells. Not sure how this would work within ES, though again you could have 2-3 philosophical movements within each race, with some inherent empathy/antipathy between certain movements.



-- FFH2 had options to not only determine how fierce the barbarians (read: pirates) were, but to seed the world with barbarian cities. Having an option that would set up an honest-to-goodness pirate faction that would seek to expand its systems, through colonization as well as conquest, but that would not negotiate, could be fun, particularly if there were a diplomatic option that allowed a call for a joint or universal war on pirates.



A few more thoughts.



-- The current set of random events just don't feel immersive; instead, they tend to feel a bit generic and arbitrary (and when they're negative, they are mostly annoying). GalCiv II really handled this in a great way, throwing up a big graphic and giving you options as to how you'd respond to the event with a subsequent impact on your good/neutral/evil rating. This area could really use some development and additional multimedia.



-- Currently, there are numerous techs that only have one module (instead of two), such as Xenobotany. Consider filling some or all of the blank modules with a special symbol (e.g., a question mark) and then creating a decent-sized set of hidden additional modules (some perhaps race-specific). When a tech is researched with a question mark in one of the modules, then there is a probability that one of those additional modules will be made available as well, representing random and unexpected breakthroughs in research. The additional modules could be ranked by level to avoid giving too powerful an module from too low a research level, though low-ranked modules could always be given at higher levels. Or, instead of addtional modules, these could potentially trigger certain random events tied roughly to the tech (or, at least, the tech tree), so that the random events are a direct consequence of choices rather than an arbitary, "Oh this bad/good thing happened to you."



For what it's worth. ..fritz..

I would love to see more life in combat. I am not asking for any new mechanics in the combat system. What I would like to see is more animation from the ships. Instead of watching two groups move past each other, I would like to see them execute combat maneuvers. For instance, the ships could fan out, trying to flank the opponent, or form a line and unleash broadsides into the approaching enemy.

Another way to add life would be to make the combat techs look different. When you upgrade ships with new techs, would it be possible to make the new tiers of weapons look different? The same would be true with shields and the like. A new armor module could change the color or certain sections. As it is right now, the animations are not bad, but the tech upgrades are purely numerical. The ultimate missile looks the same and has the same impact as the first level. It should feel powerful and look as though it is the pinnacle of missile tech. Again, I am not suggesting any system changes, but cosmetic changes. Seeing real changes as one puts effort into upgrading ships would really up the immersion of building a fleet.

Finally, it would add immersion to see the building you build appear in the system, but this may not be possible. Nonetheless, seeing that heavy isotope refinery orbiting a planet or star would make the galaxy feel more alive. It would also be neat to see interstellar tragic between planets, or to see colonies appear as groups of lights or something of the like, but this may be too much to add.

I already made a thread here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12230-an-option-to-send-heroes-to-enemy-systems-as-a-spy.

But figured I'd share it here as well.



Basically, giving you the ability to send your heroes to enemy systems as spies to sabotage production, steal blueprints for ships, steal research points (not actual techs, just the points) and contribute them to your own science point total. I'd see this working well with heroes who have the "Adventurer" trait, seeing as they don't have much use right now, compared to Admirals and Industrial heroes. The addition of system improvements to increase the chance of finding enemy spies in the system could be added, like security checkpoints could add a percentage to the chance of finding an enemy spy in the system. Even hero abilities could be added, which would be useful for system administrators.



Just an idea I had floating around, I'd really love to see this implemented.

marioflag wrote:
My preference would be to further improve the lore already present in the game.



- Unique homeworld for races like i explained in this thread /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12185-unique-homeworld-for-each-race



-I'd like the introduction of random events or chain of events specific for every single race which develop further their lore. For example Pilgrim could get a random event where they found an important monument of the Endless



- Planetary random events which are unique to a single planet



-Endless pedia or something similar where all the lore can be read



-In diplomacy i also would like some sound/graphic specific for races



-Cravers conquered planet which have a ravaged look

I like everything you posted, especially an in game wiki would be helpful and could serve as a platform to deliver more in-game lore as well as helping beginning players understand the game faster.

jam3 wrote:


It would also be really nice to have a victory movie for each condition

An end game replay to relive your story (like the old replays in civ)

Definitely agree with this one. I'd really like to see more post-game statistics in general. For example, it would be cool to see various line graphs for the amount of FIDs everyone collected over time, scientific advancement, stars owned by each faction, population, military strength points, etc. The post game info is cool, it would just be neat to see how it all changed over time rather than just the situation at the last moment. For example, if I was in last place in FIDS for a while but by the end of the game I was #1, it would be really cool to see where my turning point was.

Hey guys,

Just to make sure everyone's on the same page.

Valazzar wrote:
Animated dialogues (and sound!) would liven the diplomacy screen up a bit, Hissho squawking a bit while making gestures suitable to the situation, such a rejecting gestures when you offer something they dont accept. or welcoming gestures when a "call" is initiated.

That's cool, that's exactly the kind of feedback and ideas we're looking for...

Agr wrote:
My wishlist:

1. Ground combat similar to MOO2/MOO3/GC2/IG1-2 choose one as you wish and mix ideas. But no direct control of units please, limited options is good. May be you can develop something new, but the old ones are quite good.

2. Divide components and ship hulls construction. Produced components going into Empire Store, and you can equip existing ship hulls with them. Also you can trade theese modules with other factions.

3. Mosquito fleet(fighters, carriers).

4. Ship wrecks in battle. More visualisation to space maneuvers.

5. Ship model editor, accessible from main menu - similar to GC2, but you can't create models ingame.

6. Orbital structures, Moonbases, planetary defence.

7. Dynamic alignment bonuses and penalties. For example if you are conquerer you will gain military bonuses, but will lose some civil stats.

8. Governments, revolutions, AI uprising etc...

9. Space monsters.

10. Heavily guarded Endless system, accessible only through warp or by researching some tech.

11. Ancient enemy, who sometimes comes into galaxy.

12. Race population: xenophob, tolerant races, assimilation, migration.

...vs these proposals that are too general, not enough immersion and feedback oriented.



Thanks in advance for your precious help!

I know its not what you are looking for but I love the idea of random artifacts showing up. I also think dynamic planets would be awesome, like global warming reduces food, ice caps forming increases science. Maybe too much but maybe actually see trade ships traveling between systems, similar to SoaSE? Or at least visualize by color lane/ trade routes to see what planets are trading with whom.



Being able to color ships with our faction color would be nice (think DoW1/2, same basic model just adds a little something something to call it ours).