1. Balance fixes
- Balance diplomacy, which is extremely exploitable in player hands:
- Disable the trading of independent colony information, preventing the "trade>colonize" and "colonize>abandon>trade" exploits.
- Reduce Ruin information value by ~40%. Reduce ancient/story ruin information value even more (~60%).
- Diminish treaty relation bonuses by ~50%.
- Reduce the price of faction introductions for the player to be in-line with other empires' prices, to make them more reasonable options.
- However, raise the gifting relation cap from 10 to 30 and largely flatten the diminished returns curve (10 after 25k, 20 after 100k, 29.5 after 500k, or something like that). This will increase the player's control over relations at a fair monetary cost, yet base relations modifiers (like species) will still determine how friendly a neighbor can become. Even then, smart diplomacy will still win games.
- Balance Beam PDs with other variants. Increase the other types' projectile speed by 100-150% so they can actually hit things at range.
- Balance Blasters. They're overpowered due to high RA/SR penetration, massive DPSS, decent point-blank accuracy and good Energy/Damage. Reduce fire rate (thus DPS) by 20% without changing anything else, and they'll still be among the best, but now inhabit the niche of ripping through RA/SR. This would be the quickest fix for weapon balance issues, else all other weapons need to be adjusted.
- Balance T6-T8 Forge Railguns. The addition of Phaser technology makes them a bad choice. Perhaps give them 50% more range and ~3000 projectile speed (like real railguns), turning them into inaccurate sniper weapons.
- Allow ships in the process of boarding (not being boarded) to continue fighting, then reduce boarding strength by ~20% across the board (but not boarding defense). This removes the need and OP-ness of capture micromanagement, without making boarding too overpowered.
- Balance Hyperdrives. The slower variants should still be very close to the faster variant (~5%) as even a slight difference is important.
- Balance Novacore reactors, setting their power output to the same as Quantum Reactors (meaning 87 at T2). They're already extremely efficient. Possibly reduce Beam weapons' energy cost as they partly rely on Novacore reactors to be competitive.
- Balance hulls by reducing hull costs by 50% across the board, and make components more expensive to compensate. Larger ships should be better as a reward for researching them, not worse as they currently are. Base Frigate spam gets old.
- Increasing vector thrust on Thrusters by 50% and Vector Engines by 200%, making at least one of these mandatory on direct fire ships. Fast turning is useful, but vector thrust impact is tiny compared to base turn rates.
- Resource trading currently isn't significant in the game and treaty bonus cash appears magically for the Mercantile Guild. Instead, add a "Commodities" resource, not shown in the resource tabs but produced by populations. Have them be traded automatically via freighters between our colonies or other empires with any trade treaty. Profit comes in from the "household economy", determined by population size, which can only be interacted with via Commodities trading. Then, change Commerce center income rates to 2%, then 3% and so on, and treaty bonuses add another 1-2-3%. Now, trade makes sense. Optionally, give freighters doubled cargo hold size to keep the game running smoothly, avoiding the need for more freighters.
- If the above isn't implemented, at least nerf Mercantile Guild treaty bonus income and attach it to difficulty (this is currently not the case). 300/400/500 is plenty on max difficulty as the bonus can be used on funding, which is a huge advantage.
- Change "Race" to "Species", as that's the correct term.
- List species tech research names in the Galactopedia, for choosing espionage targets. This information is currently unavailable when playing other species.
- Change "Size" to "Weight", since that's what it appears to mean (size doesn't matter much in space). Also give Stations unlimited weight capacity, and more harshly limit their slot amounts instead.
- Change "Maximum Size" (ships/stations) to "Component Space" (max size minus hull size). Max Size is irrelevant. Keep "Hull Size" to help understand speed calculations. If "Size" is changed to "Weight", update these terms appropriately as well.
- Stop the "Flee" button from switching automatic to manual. Fleeing should be a "temporary" command, after which civ ships avoid the location anyway.
- In the New Colonies list, put those outside of colonization range at the bottom. It would then become a more useful overview of colonization options. Possibly, add the "number of colony hops" for those out of range, to further distinguish them from one another - no one cares about the suitable planet on the other side of the galaxy.
- To prevent save-scumming: Embed initial diplomatic relations, colonization success (at the current % plus/minus 3 or 4%) and spycraft outcomes into the save file. This would also reduce the urge to save-scum for perfectionists.
- Change troop templates to function like fleet templates, with absolute troop numbers. Let automation prioritize clones when available (I'm not sure if it already does that). The player can then edit the troop template whenever an up/downgrade is desired. Possibly separate defensive (garrisoned) and invasion (ungarrisoned) templates, and allow one of each to be selected per colony.
- Allow setting automatic funding to one of three presets: "Balanced" (current), "Maximize Research" or "Maximize Growth". Manual is too painful due to rapid fluctuations yet the default automation is wasteful because of the reserved funding, which should only exist in the Balanced setting. Put the preset selection on the Funding tab for easy access (not under Policy).
- Make Fuel Tankers competent by making Remote Fuel Transfer passive, for the same fleet and in a 5000 radius, then have them move with the fleet and allow them to refuel themselves (so we need 1 per fleet instead of 2). Currently, Tankers spend absurd amounts of time grabbing fuel even if they have plenty and sometimes switch to manual for no apparent reason, which breaks their functionality. Let them fill their cargo holds with the Refuel command. Also make Mining Engines optional in Fuel Tanker designs (keep as yellow text).
- Make Defense fleets refuel whenever there's no threat. There's no reason for them to be low on fuel while idling for hours.
- Make Resorts built from a colony a private expense. It's currently a state expense (likely a bug).
- For population policy, allow the player to see the entire list of species and automatically set only the best species available, plus all better species than the one available, to "Assimilate" (rename to "Populate") and all the others to Resettle. This process then repeats every time a new species becomes available, on all colonies. There's no reason to encourage less-than-optimal species to populate.
3. Additional
- Most importantly, improve the designs UI. Everything should extend on mouse-over or click but otherwise remain collapsed, except the summary and ship/station view. Fill unnecessary empty space. Components should be listed next to their respective slots, named "T2 Epsilon Torpedo" and "T4 Velocity Shard" for example, sorted based on Tiers, with categories graphically grouped together. Especially the categories should extend on mouse-over.
- Add "desperation mechanics", which gives empires cumulative income and build speed bonuses on their last few colonies, for two years after a colony has been conquered, depending on the galaxy's age - from 200% at first to 1000% midgame (that's not a typo - they'll need it). That way, losing empires can make a comeback and keep the galaxy interesting yet they still won't be able to counter a decisive invasion.
- Remove Countermeasures and Targeting from the difficulty factors. Not including damage/HP was a great idea, to let us verify build quality regardless of difficulty, which should be absolute.
- Detach difficulty from espionage success rates and reputation impacts. These unnecessarily change the game. Better yet, difficulty should only affect the player's sources of physical power: Resources and cash.
- Add DPS/Size (DPSS) to weapons for better comparison as it's the most important metric.
- For weapons, list "Energy per second" instead of "per shot". The former is important when comparing weapons.
- Let fleets with a Capture order only fire twice the boarding strength required to overpower the boarding defenses (and to mitigate PD losses). It's currently extremely inefficient. This also requires lowering boarding strength to prevent them becoming OP, perhaps around 30%.
- Allow sorting various ship/station lists by Design. This would make it easier to find LRS Explorers or outdated designs which need retrofitting.
- In the design summary, add "Total potential energy requirement". This helps correctly build stations' ECs, which aren't displayed graphically. Plus, the graphic representation doesn't allow for an exact readout, which is needed to match drain to EC capacity.
- Add a "Disable colonization research" option, to prevent long games from grinding to a halt due to stuttering. Then, detach the number of star systems from the galaxy's maximum size - let the player choose, whether to placate hardware limitations or leverage a high-end PC's potential.
- Add a "Disable research espionage" option, to make the early game more compelling on slow research settings and strengthen the uniqueness of species tech.
- Perhaps overly ambitious, so this could be a DLC: Add an arena mode. I find myself often hungry for battle due to the game balance's emphasis on peaceful expansion, and the arena would double as a design testing ground. The player selects a funds limit, tech level and species then selects designs to use. Difficulty should be governed by a funds modifier, giving the enemy -10% (Easy), 0 (Fair), +10% (Hard) or +20% (Very Hard). I'll happily submit designs of my own for this purpose. Enemy fleet setups could be determined via empiricism - run ~10 battles per setup to see which is best, then use the best fleet as an opponent template, and also add it to the base game to make combat more interesting. The backdrop for the arena should include stellar objects, like a black hole, star or planet. Also make a subforum just for arena-related discussion, which I predict will sharply increase community activity - especially if a monthly tournament is added!
