Hi!



First of all, thank you for an already awesome game! When I first played it I could not believe that this was meant to be an alpha! I honestly have not had so much fun with a similar game for years...actually MOO2 was the last (still installed on my PC!). And I tried a lot of them: GalCiv, SWOTS1/2, Sins. Anyway, the bottom line is: Great game!



And now to a few things that I found might be changed/added - although I am not sure about the changes, I guess it is to late for this.



- Trading with other races comes into the game way to late for my taste (it might really be only me). There is a reserved area in the system scress for trade routes and it takes ages for something to show there. Would it be possible to move that tech up in the tree?



- There is no control at all over trade routes. It might add value to the game to offer this. On the other hand it might also add too much complexity. I saw a request for trade ships somewhere in the list, this might go in the same direction.



- What are the pirates for? It was not obvious to me if they were only sitting there in my system or if there were any penalties attached to having them there. A warning message might come in handy?



- The idea of limiting the research tree was proposed somewhere else. I think this would be a nice idea and could bring some real fun into the game combined with espionage. A way to implement in the existing gameplay could be to make the player choose the speific perk you want to research with this tech. Often you have more then one "perk" out of researching the tech, but I guess it also might to be too much work to include 2+ perks for the vast amount of techs available.



- The way terraforming is done is great. I also like that you cannot transform a lava to a terran planet in one step. Why can't I terraform gas planets or asteroids? If I have the tech to terraform a planet with high tectonic activity then the step to compacting gas to a lava is not that big. Asteroids on the other hand are shattered planets, so the material is there. You could impose limits on that kind of planets, let's say gas and asteroids can only go as far as barren,...but on the other hand, why impose limits. It takes time, that's all.



- Move population between systems. It is possbile to move population to planets inside a system, why not to other systems? Colonizing/Development of new systems could be sped up that way.



- Alien population: what is the thought behind conquering systems? Do you just eradicate the existing population and take over the infrastructure? Or does the population stay in place? Couldn't it be an option to choose between eradication and integration? Eradication would give you slower population growth because of the fallout (depending on whatever weapons have been used, but I guess killing a whole planet's population isn't that easy on the environment too) and integration would give you a running working system with penalties on production and happyness that get worse over time if not taken care of (this strenghens the case for population transports, your own civilians will not be that angry with you - or would they? (here come freedom fighters! OK, that's too much complexity)).



- This is me dreaming: wouldn't it be cool to be able to research the contruction of megastructures? Starbases have been mentioned already, but what I would go for would be something in the scale of a Dyson-Sphere (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) or it's science fiction child a ringworld (might have copyright implications?). You could make it a reasonably expensive tech, that would consume all a system's planets, possibly making your population very unhappy but opening up a vast amount of production capabilities. Naturally it would take a large amount of ressources and time to build, but wouldn't it be just cool?



Well that is about all I thought of after playing my first lengthy game until the end, congrats to the game and keep on the good work!

Cheers

zatras wrote:
- This is me dreaming: wouldn't it be cool to be able to research the contruction of megastructures? Starbases have been mentioned already, but what I would go for would be something in the scale of a Dyson-Sphere (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) or it's science fiction child a ringworld (might have copyright implications?). You could make it a reasonably expensive tech, that would consume all a system's planets, possibly making your population very unhappy but opening up a vast amount of production capabilities. Naturally it would take a large amount of ressources and time to build, but wouldn't it be just cool?

Mmmm, megastructures



Anyway, all that stuff has been used all over the place, its not just Dyson and Niven, but Banks (Culture Spheres, Rings, Orbitals plus various other megastructures in the books) and Halo just to mention a few, so it would be hard for anyone to take you to court about those unless you copy them with details and all