Matrix Games Forums

Population is the most important factor in determining the strategic value of a worlds. The galactic overview (keyboard shortcut is "g" key) does not have a filter to show the population sizes of my and AI systems. I currently have to click system by system to find the high population worlds.

It would be useful to have a population filter option available in the main game screen in addition to the galactic overview window.

1) Please implement an overlay to easily view the population sizes of systems.

[Discussion thread here: tm.asp?m=2954014]

My wishlist for Legends:

-Experience for ships (as Space Empires IV and V)

-Traits for each ship class allowing for specialized ship classes (size limit, maintenance reduction, power consumption, increase weapon damage, minimum components, as Space Empires IV and V). Huge maintenance reduction for space station (specialy defense bases).
a) ex; Torpedo boats - escort, bonus for torpedo weapons, max size limit of 200.

-Blockades should trap leaders on a planet and keep other ones from getting there.

-Imigration policies (I like to keep my empire with more than 50% of the original race)

-Trade policies with Subsidies (you can add a trade % adding to trade component on a spaceport or automated for the whole empire in order to increase your resource deliver).

-Planetary shields should protect against planet destroying weapons.

-Planetary militia: You can hire militia troops, hire faster, are weaker and with very low maintenance cost. Also they cant leave the planet. Useful for unrest control in great number and behind bunkers. Also useful on newly colonized planets. Extra useful since your auto transports cant take them from the planets.

-Ship boarding.

I will post more as remember.

One small thing I'd like to see is the ability to add/remove multiple components at once while in the ship design screen, perhaps simply using Ctrl-click with the existing buttons to add 10 at once or some new smaller buttons above/below to do the same, and if the latter perhaps a remove all of one kind would come in handy too.

Like to play around in the design shop but it can get tedious adding all the armour, cargo holds and similar to a ship/base.

A super handy feature I came across in another game called Sword of the Stars would have tremendous value in DW as well. 

A Notes feature, where you can pin a note on planets and locations on the map. You can scribble notes to help you remember stuff and on the overview map (perhaps at a certain zoom level) a special icon would be visible over the location to indicate you have written a note about it. 

I would like a choice of space creatures. Not only the chance fo appeareance (None, Few, Normal, Many) but the kind of space creatures. I like to play roleplay games and I have a hard time to declare a logical existance to space slugs... or Kaltors.
 
Sand snails on sandplanets or a hibernating jellyfish in a half frozen state or a silvermist are no problem in a roleplay game.

Another possible idea is random availability of certain techs.
Playing your game always relying on a certain Tech? Well, next game it might not be available for the whole game.

Moddable data files would probably top my list: Technologies, components( weapon strength/range, hyperdrive/engine speed/fuel usage, etc.), game setup( construction rate, # of star systems, physical size, etc.) and such. Might be difficult to allow new ones, but would be great just to be able to alter the existing ones for now. I'd also love to see some 'extra' components for ships, meaning something like the unique equipment you have in the MoO games; wormhole generators, subspace teleporters, cloaking, etc. Then some space buildings, like Jump Gates and such. Mine fields would be great too, as well as long-range( maybe even inter-stellar) artillery for more strategic options. Gah, could go on for hours.

Small suggestion here: An option in the message setting to turn off pop-ups for "I'm being attacked by space monsters" and "I'm being attacked by Pirates." In a lot of situations I want the other attack pop-ups, but not those ones.

How about when you click on the Military Ships button (on that long list of button to the far left), you can get it to sort on various fields (type, mission, name of ship, strength, etc). I do not use that button because whatever the Default sort is.., it makes no sense to me. In fact, the Fleets should be at the top (not have a separate button), and the other individual ships you should be able to click on either their mission, type of ship, strength, or name.

There is tons of information that pops up in windows and are within the many screens (all of these are great). But then they mention locations.., always have a link that either lights up the map or takes you there or something. Especially when they mention uninhabitable places.., because you cannot find them on the Colony or Expansion screen without searching forever.

Helpful tips for parsing info, Balto:

1.) Hold the mouse over any message, and it will usually show a pulsating yellow circle at the relevant system. Very useful, since I never remember any names.

2.) On all of the big sub-screens (like the military ships screen) you can sort the columns by clicking on the column header for the individual stat you want to sort for. Military Ships would be an unmanageable nightmare without it! Which makes me think maybe you didn't realize you could do that.

Hopefully those can help, although there's no such thing as too much information, as long as it parses well! DW: Legends has no problem throwing information at me, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to filtering it.

Hello,
I was hope that most annoying think in DW will be corrected in Legends - but it is not . And what it is? I usually plays DW with the same race and I spend first hour immediately after start by modifying Ships designs to my requirements. That is OK. Then I save designs because I want use them in new games and I do not want to spend time with redesign everything again.
But there is the problem - when I load that designs in new game, then there is not possible to remove all generic design first and I must manually delete or make obsolete every design one by one manually.

I think that this situation can be solved very easily (for developers):
1. Add into design windows button Obsolete and allow users to select designs (selection is working now but for example Delete button do nothing with selected designs).
So user can obsolete everything by select all, press Obsolete button and then load saved designs from file. Very quick, very user friendly.

2. Another solution (more complicated for developers) can be that during loading of design game will check if there exists design for the same subcategory (for example Colony Ship) and if yes then popup window "Duplicates designs found - Do you want to replace existing designs with loaded ones?" will appear with buttons Yes/No and user can decide what engine must do.
Very quick, very user friendly too.

Erik, can you please implement this in next path? Pretty please .....

I usual workaround this by deleting / obsoleting (don't remember which one exactly) all the current designs before loading my designs.

A single wish here. I'm a great fan of CJ Cherryh's work, particularly her Union-Alliance universe. One of the coolest parts of her stories are the carriers. I'm actually thinking of the ones from Earth Company and Union. Probably the most well known of them was Signy Mallory's ECS Norway.

What's cool about these carriers is that rather than being carriers in the traditional sense, with bays of very small spacecraft, these were more like cruisers or capital ships that carried four "riders" externally on their frame. These riders carried 15 crew and were extremely well fitted for combat. In CJ Cherryh's own words:

They are small ships with a crew of fifteen, each one equipped and instrumented to handle the enormous velocities of a carrier, up to the lightbarrier. They are very sophisticated in electronics and armaments and any one of them is every bit as much to be dreaded in attack as the carrier itself: they are fast and their firepower, while less than a carrier's, is sufficient to destroy a carrier's maneuvering capacity, or wipe out a starstation or reduce a planet to the stone age.

Not sure how this would be interpreted in DW terms, but it sounds like something bigger than a fighter. In game, an escort is around 100 in size. I suspect they might weigh in at 20-25. Also, there were four riders to a carrier on average.

Anyway, it would be cool to allow for patrol boat sized craft to "ride" on larger ships. They would be much more powerful than the average fighter/bomber yet limited to whatever local space they were in since they'd have no FTL capability. In fact, you might think of it being a candidate for special Human technology.

Finally, if this idea has already been forwarded by someone else, my apologies.

I know that I have written this somewhere before but.

The trade network

Stop doing small trades from point to point. Trade through the network. What is the network? It should be similar to what you see when you have a few spaceports and colonies connected to these spaceports. Even if each colony may have their own spaceport, some are the hubs in the trade network. If you have all large spaceports, some would still be hubs. The Capital should always be the core hub, which may give a proper use for moving it if you happened to start in the outside border.

The goods of a mine should be shifted onto the network - that is a nearby spaceport. If there is none, shift it to the nearby colony working like some sort on resource on the colony itself. The colony becomes a supplier. The resources on a colony are just a glorified mine in this respect.

When a colony wants goods for its construction project, it should ask its local spaceport for it. If the spaceport does not have it, it should ask the local trade hub. And if the trade hub does not have it should ask all its "local space ports" and if that fails, ask its neighbor hubs. In the case of a new rare resource available all colonies should scream for the stuff, and requests should propagate towards the source, each hub having the "needs" of all its local colonies, and the need of hubs further away from the rare source.

Imagine a world where small freighters mostly transport between a mine and the local spaceport, or a local spaceport and the local hub. Medium freighters mostly shift goods inside the local network. Large freighters are "always" full and fly between the trade hubs.

Imagine a large freighter in the northern hub. It decides to fly to the next hub south. It asks the target hub what it wants, and fills it hold with the available goods matching the needs until full. Imagine the amount of freighter traffic at the major hubs and the amount of docking bays required [:)]. It could be a world where the AI would want build more than 4 defensive bases, to protect the main spaceport.

Maybe there should be trade lines between empires as well? Of course, depending on trade status.

I become sad when I see a freighter leave a mine with 24k zentiba fluid with 14 of the stuff in hold.

The cons? You may be able to cripple the AI by killing main spaceports. But the network should be flexible and "promote" a new hub if the old one is dead (at least until rebuilt). If there are no spaceports it should trade between colonies.

And imagine getting a gravity well into a main enemy trade line [8D]

I think the ship building screen needs an overhaul. Right now we have only two lists of items, one for available items, the other for items in design. it is clumsy and requires you to navigate the whole item list to add items.
I'd like to request, at the very least, a filter drop down menu, so that we can see only X kind of item.
Additionally, the auto upgrade button needs some work, because mostly it uses latest item, that is ok, most of the time, but when you have options, like with mid game FTL... you should be able to configure your defaults or something, somewhere.

Course, you could turn the construction screen into something more MOO2ish, which would be even better, but I am hesitant to suggest you guys copy another game, specially if you don't own the rights.

The ship design system got a lot of room for improvement. Manually designing all designs is a major chore.

Take for instance my current game where new technology arrives. I get the final, fancy reactor. I could do "upgrade design", but I know that for some reason my titan beams will be replaced with shatterforce lasers.

A "cheap" way to make mass upgrades more controllable would be a new upgrade screen. Weapons are a bit special, but one could separate them into primary, secondary, etc. An alternative for weapons is to simply list a line for all weapons in use.

So, simple pulldown commands for things like:

Replace all shields with:
Replace all blasters with:
Replace all torpedoes with:
Replace all reactors with:
Replace all hyper drives with:

And I probably forget some.

Basically it lets the user decide what the "upgrade" button does. The main challenge would be in changed power requirements, but one can imagine the AI being able to offer automatic adjustment the number of reactors to balance the excess power against sprint and full weapons use.

Beyond this the traditional approach of micro managing designs should of course be available.

I would like to see the Theme customization function to include all assets.

Now, it only work with some images(ship, race and troop), music, race.txt, and name files.
It would be great if we can set galaxybackdrops, planet, weapon effect image, flagshape, message image, etc. No more meddling with the original game files.

I also wish we could rename stars(systems) without using the ingame editor. I want my Coruscant to be in the Coruscant system and not in the Abrigadu-Fos system.

1 easy selection. allowing us to select ships and planets from the menus by clicking on them and or go to them. from said menu.(Like factory) and being able to filter the ship list by ship type (like a "capital ship" filter to only see capital ships) would greatly increase the interface user friendliness.

2.a claim point system.  every day a constructor spends fixing something that abandon it gets a claim point. wen it gains 60? claim points it marked has yours. if you stop fixing it it loses 1 claim point per day. this stops the player from abusing the system and claiming full  fields of ship to himself. and (can be used to give priority to the constructor on which one to fix up first (if it has claim points higher then say  21+ claim points even if other race has claim points on it but not claimed> 20-0claim points > other empire claim points but not claimed). allies would simply not be able to steal it. and other races would have repercussions for trying to steal it. (say the same values has attacking a allie/friendly ship/planet)

so if your constructor has to leave for 5 seconds to refuel at the fueling station 5 feet away from it. your allies wont jump in and steal your planet destroyer you spent 3/4 of the game fixing up.

could add a spy mission to removes claim points on all things that empire has. (tought balanced so 1 mission wont make it so something that been claimed for a year wont be reset to 0 maybe -60-120 points? depending on the difficulty)

More robust spy capabilities [:)]

Character spies are an awesome game addition but I think the original spy system could have been kept as well. This would allow you to be more proactive in regards to espionage. As it is now you have to wait until fate deals you a spy to play with.

How it might work:

You would purchase a spy network (the same thing as a spy in RotS). These networks could be assigned similarly and with the same missions as the spies in RotS.

When you eventually spawn a super spy (character) you could assign them to lead a spy network. This would make the character spies similar to generals and admirals.


* Addition: also, besides the intial cost of spy network, there would also be an assoicated maintenance fee. (dedicated spy networks are costly ventures)