Again, a thread with suggestions based on my experiences. This time, it'll be about fleets and combats



1. There are too much fleets soon. During the early game, things might be okay regarding the number of fleets per empire, yet there willl be tens of fleets later in the game. On one side, this will beneficial for the AI that will be able to send his ships before the human player can, which will also lead to reduced performance of the game. Also, I don't like to deal with that much fleets, it just makes things unnecessarily complicated. To reduce the count of fleets, one could increase the fleets maximum size of ships, although I would not give up on the current military system entirely. Ships could also be made more expensive, but I doubt this would be a good idea as the game could start to be boring when you'd have to wait 5 turns or so till ne ships are available.

2. Refiting ships is too experience in the early game. Actually, as long as you don't have quite a couple of planets, refiting of ships doesn't make sense as getting enough dust is too hard. Instead, I simply used to build new / additional uptodate ships, using the old as 'rocket-catchers'. In the late game, refiting the fleet is quite cheap compared to the early game.

3. Ships appear to be destroyed too quickly and races attidues seem not to improve much on how well ships will fight. Till yesterday, I took a double-plus on the ships cargo space to have more weapons and shields installed and also had a plus on weapons damage. It didn't seem like my ships would have been more robust that those of my brothers (although he didn't used as much shields as I did), nor did my ships cause much more damage than his. So where's the benefit? In fact, my ships where more expensive to produce thanks to the cargo-plus. Meanwhile, I designed my race to have a a plus on ship production and reducing the cargo-space plus to a single one instead of double to balance the production cost with the extra space. No serious fights occured since then, so no clue if it helped. Another problem is, that new shield modules take more space than the old one. I already had the situation when I had to reduce on the count of shields basically reducing the new shields plus to a minimum - that doesn't makes sense. In my opinion, the modules space should remain the same. Same might be true for weapons as well.

4. Defensive modules are hard to design. You never know what ships yours will fight against, so how do you know what type of defense module you should use? I mean, fleets of the AI seemed to be specialized, but different fleets use different weapons - so if you have bad luck, you'll attack a fleet or will be attacked by a fleet that just uses the 'wrong' weapons, so your defense modules might be useless. Also, things get more complex if fleets are mixed within. And now, I don't want to have three different specialized ships at all, it would make things more complicated (see large numbers of ships). I'd suggest remove the defense modules and focus on shields and maybe armory.

5. Very important to me although on the edge toui issues: remove the timer from the combat notification! I already had the problem several time that I was on tech screen, not noticing that I was attacked - very frustrating! What's the timer for? Also, better remove the timer in the battles for the approaching phase, too, simply give a button to notify you're done. No need to cause stress and neither to waste time.



Again, I hope these suggestions are of some use.

1: Fleet upkeep costs are being changed in an upcoming version.



2: I agree with this. But it has been mentioned before. That will probly be changed like fleet upkeep costs.



3: Having more cargo space makes a massive difference. Not sure what the problem was here.



4: You use scouts to find out what you are fighting against and retrofit. You put all the modules on your ships if you want to protect against all offences, we call it omni-tanking.



5: Removing battle timers is in the list of dead horse suggestions: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11286-dead-horse-suggestions-stop-the-abuse



It exists to make multiplayer games faster.



If you really want your suggestions to be implemented you have to post one thread per suggestion as per the rules: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/13097-proposal-submission-rules