Well trading is broken, I never understood why only a few colonies will ever have active traderoutes even whhen I have cooperation agreemet with 3-4 nations.Be it as it may...



Either I'm a total noob and I missed the "build on all colonies" feature BUT THE COLONY MANAGEMENT...please, improve this,is ridiculous !



Why is it that there's a function to survey moon/reduce anomaly on all planets at once but not such thing for building whatever improvement I want? (or ship for that matter&filters for whenever it can or cannot be built bc of resources)

Whenever a new building is available and I want to build it on all my colonies because it takes 2-3 turns at most and I just want to do it...have to manually select and manage the building queue on each of my 30 sometimes more colonies (cancelling everything in progress??? but for 2 actions rarely used compared to constant new improvements, there's such a function !



And more of the stuff I still find it ridiculous in this beloved game.I mean come on,you have to agree with me on this :



Terraforming gas giants into actual solid ones, really ?? Then might aswell have a tech for creating a planet out of space-dust...same thing.



Terraforming costing basically nothing and done in 1 turn ?( I actually modified the cost ten fold just to make me feel it means something)



Terraforming and not even taking into account planet size,planet type, POPULATION? You have to assume ,you can't just terraform a huge terran overpopulated planet in 1 year into a beloved lava planet...MOREOVER buyout multiple such incredible projects in 1 turn/year.

Some people dont just buy these games because they don't care at all..they expect it's not free because it's different than the free crap.I mean there's more detail put into those race trade-cards that you get spammed with, on steam,than in actual gameplay.



Add a minimum of creativity on this part,please.Terraforming is something major,something big,not just a dull one click-one turn button to redecorate your planet,regardless of every other game aspect (approval effect is inexistent with all the approval modifiers/tech available parallel with terraforming).



If there is a high population present already, there should be an AI vote system or at least some consequences related to the race .Population drop,leaving,revolting(depending on race affinity,leadership,philosophy etc..SOMETHING) because terraforming it's something bigger than house redecorations.



I play terran/sophon/harmony and I actually in my last game turned most of my planets into lava because I wanted the industry...but made me realize how actually lifeless and dull is this game in some aspects.

And it doesn't even make sense.Why would lava covered planets be more productive than a fully developed prosperous terran/jungle/tundra world? conditions-wise...same goes for arctic for science.Rather a lava planet/ocean would be more fascinating for scientists to study than a frozen one because it's much closer in it's stage of evolution, to it's beginings and formation.



The absurdly easy level of customization offered through the one-click-one-turn-never consequences terraforming option takes away all the fun of discovery,mistery,deep-space exploration,finding,actually trying to inhabit harsh planets and gradually get more out of them or simply using them as outposts for spying on the routes.



Tech is so easy to develop that there's no point in specializing such thing.If you do it, you're just too far behind someone who thinks industrialist and steamroll you with superior fleet numbers and ...bye your scientific victory .



I never understood why the decision was made to represent population through simple dots ,which did make for some extravagant stuff to happen.Like having a giant planet fully populated and you build 10 ships with special modules...whoop 80% of your planet is empty.What am I supposed to believe that say out of 4-5 billion people, 1 billion took off on a ship ,used as figher pilots ???? Are you kidding me?

Turning such a big aspect of a 4x+rts into...dots fueled by food facilities, when 4x sims 10 years earlier respected much this aspect and cared to show some figures and why.



Endless wonders bonuses are simply useless and so small that I never care to have them.I actually,after a while modded the bonuses myself to make it feel like it means something.



And I didn't even mentioned the one-battle-per turn which I did in a few earlier posts of mine as so many others complained,but I gave up now because it's pointless.

I actually read a forum post of a dev responding to someone who was complaining about AI spamming bogus colonies/scouts blocking entire fleets from invading-accesing resources and the dev guy actually tried to argument that there's a reason for that...really? really....ok so I suppose I also have to make 30 incomplete fleets to deal with those of the AI because AI almost never tries to fill all the slots in his fleets...ending up with endless fleets with 30-40% free slots even when I setup every ship's command points to 1.

well then,

1. systems become depopulated when you build ships holding troops. realistically, taking a few billion people off of one planet isn't ideal, it should be more spread out but thats not the games fault. to take a heavily armoured and defended planet in reality would indeed take billions of soldiers to invade and occupy, with hundreds of fighters and bombers supporting the invasion.

2. specializing in science is valid but you will have to vary to get important techs like colonization and military. sophons can manage science victories fairly easily if they have enough territory and stay at peace long enough. and if you are going for a science victory and another faction is close to another victory you should fight them. though if you are going to specialize in a victory type, you should use the appropriate faction type for your victories.

3. to a certain extent there are benefits and negative bonuses to terraforming. terraforming into a higher tier planet will make your population less happy which can lead to the population dropping if system happiness is low enough. besides wouldn't you be happy if you had to live in some horrible lava planet and one year it was turned into a type you liked?

4. of course there are going to be discrepancies between real life and a video game but your logic is partly flawed. lava planets offer more production for a variety of reasons. foremost among them, easy to obtain mineral resources and geothermal power planet wide.

lava planets offer more production than well developed tier one planets because they have more access than tier one planets to the resources and geothermal power. there are not many places on earth where geothermal energy can be effectively used but on a lava planet geothermal power can be exploited world wide. also we have to resort to practices such as strip mining to obtain mineral resources while on a lava planet these resources would be found easily on the surface where the earth is exposed.

5. as far as terraforming quickly goes, in one year with enough money and high tech society, you could probably send millions of workers in large ships doing all the work. maybe even billions, im sure the tooltips in the research menu explain this sort of thing though.

6. regular wonders in the game provide absolutely fantastic bonuses for early and mid game. endless wonders provide much needed approval and varying other useful bonuses late game. they may be small, but approval bonuses are fantastic.

7. as for the ai spreading ships around, while it may be a game mechanic, is good tactics. small bands of forces harassing enemies is used all the time throughout history. im sure the vikings could have raised a huge army and marched on europe but they didn't, they attacked in small bands. besides, small scattered fleets will bog down your main fleets while there main forces strike elsewhere. it would be probably impossible for a colony ship to colonize a planet while under constant fir from enemy ships before they even began their descent to the planets surface. also, it doesn't take many warships to blockade a system, constantly bombarding it and killing all unarmed civilian ships in the area, grinding trade to a halt



just a few counterpoints to your post

Even so...the lack of rudimentary options to multiple select/automatically build/terraform on all/or a group of planets at once has no excuse whatsoever,for a 2012 game unless you count micromanagement as the ability to race-build stuff on a short-timed turn game,like timed chess. I mean just because it's a TBS ,doesn't mean that if I want to play a large galaxy ,It all becomes a dull repetitive task of going through 30+ systems/planets to build/terraform new stuff every 3-4 turns because in reality it probably is that hard to maintain a huge empire.If we are on the "very advanced race" thing that can buyout terranforming 6 planets in one year...then supposedly it's also very easy to manage a huge empire through telecomunications/robotics such...



This mix up of extreme abstractization in some parts (terraforming/population) and excesive realism through lack of basic features and ability to block huge fleets with one useless scout is simply...not proper and only an example of game creators thinking that mixing random abstract stuff with lack of proper management features will result in somewhat a great experience.



As a matter of fact I think it was intended that way ,as a filler to compensate for the feeling of lifeless space you get after a while,with all the population being just dots that will never complain of planet changes or conditions.



.Instead I have options to automate a system with a focus on a category ..wich is useless most of the time,really...I tried but the auto-management provided by the ai gave me headaches,I rather did it myself even if it's so boring.



That population less happy with terraforming ,I have not observed such thing.I actually increased the handicap for terraforming to less habitable planets and still I ended up with systems full of lava planets on 45% tax and 100extatic with harmony.Im talking about the end-game stuff.It seems that as you reach the end-game tech, every race becomes like soulless,mindless drones accepting whatever living conditions you decide,despite their affinity,lore ,with 100% extatic because of 4 approval buildings and a few overpopulation/expansion approval modifier techs.



Erm...

You should take a step back, and spend a few days writing up a post to articulate your points better. Better yet break it up into posts that focus on say user interface, game balance, etc... It seems like you have some good points to make, but the way you make them comes of as a rant and babble. Also you might want to consider that all the work you may put in to such a post will probably not yield any results. It seems Amplitude has a focus on getting some of their newer products out rather than improving the game at this point, at least through patches. Though that doesn't mean they aren't working on an expansion and that your ideas and thoughts wouldn't be considered.