Matrix Games Forums

Instead of alraming player each time a ship encounter a space creature, instead of making alarm,
leave a mark on the map which tells the player the type and number of space creature observed there.

My god, this is the best idea i've seen yet.

Ability to quarantine planets/areas/systems to keep from spreading plagues, or to have ships avoid areas of known danger (space creatures). Could be done with a right click menu...bring up a list of choices like quarantine, blockade, etc.

I'm guessing it would be too difficult to implement firing arcs for weapons (would need a major rework of the design screen), but I would love it if the combat could be made a bit more visually interesting. Right now, ships fire all their weapons from a point in their middle. I would suggest that all ships should have a couple spots that are used to fire weapons from. For custom ships, this could be handled just like the placement of engine plumes and position lights - a single pixel of a certain color.

The Build Order Screen needs a Clear All function

ORIGINAL: Gelatinous Cube

Instead of alraming player each time a ship encounter a space creature, instead of making alarm,
leave a mark on the map which tells the player the type and number of space creature observed there.

My god, this is the best idea i've seen yet.

This!
Please remove the alarm sound it's too intrusive and we hear it 95% of play time when at war.

Client functionality:
-- A function (perhaps a keybind) to undo last "go To Location"  So I can go somewhere to see whats going on like after colonizing, queue some buildings, then go back to what I was doing earlier

-- Scroll bar for the Info window on the bottom left (Probably requested before!)

-- Add the troop picture in troop units summary screen.

-- In ship design: When holding down shift and clicking the > arrow to add a component you should add 5 instead of 1. When holding down ctrl you should add 10. Same thing fro removal.


Galaxy map:
-- Rogue planetoids: Planets outside confines of solar systems. Or systems where all planets orbit a large gaseous planet instead of a star

-- Binary and Trinary systems: Self explanatory

-- Wormholes: Offer a shortcut travel across the map. Go in one end come out the other

Lore:
-- Two new races: One Gaseous that inhabits gaseous planets. One Mechanical that inhabits Barren planets, and large asteroids. (Later they could become race families even ) [Similar thing already requested]

-- Explorer characters: Join exploration vessels to boost them and boost the rewards you can get from ruins. So can even minimize the negative effects. Also they increase a chance of a hint as to what awaits at a location beacon discovered at ruins

-- Add crews to ships: Based on the race of the planet where ship was built. Crews have special racial bonuses. Can maybe have diverse crews, where the officers core can be mixed if its from a mixed planet like: Captain is Human, Engineer something else, weapons officer like a Boskara with bonus to torpedoes. Other officers can be navigator and engineer or scientist (for advanced weapons bonus). We can also have an academy building for planets that ensures best crews on ships. Add also new type of command center modal that is an AI, where ships will not have crews and need to life support.

Planets and planetary buildings:

-- Gaia class planets: Extremely rare. Give great bonuses, make populations naturally happy. Can be colonized by all native types without research. Right now there is really no need to move your empire's capital. Having really awesome planets like this out there would give you an incentive to move your capital late game.

-- Mixed planets: Planets with two or more environment types. Can be colonized more readily, but to get maximum population you would have to either research proper tech or mix species of the appropriate native type.

-- Planet building: Missile silos: Launches best missiles you have against enemy ships. Suborbital torpedo launchers: Same thing but launches torpedoes.

-- More population policy, where u can actually do it by race. Also make it so you can declare the main race of a planet instead of it defaulting to most populous race. This can have a side-effect of unhappiness.

Tech and research:

-- Unique component paths that are triggered by ruins. Only one ruin for each component path spawns in galaxy, first ones that discover the ruin can begin researching this path. These would be kinda like the component equivalent of the bonus government types.

-- New ship systems: Tractor beams to hold or slow escaping ships. Repulsion beams to push enemies away. Self destruct modules.

-- Troop techs: Troops could be designed and upgraded. Many new techs available in botht heir own tree and branched off other techs. Troops would contain their base race [So once you design one troop, you can build it anywhere and the troop is filled with local population but has designated equipment], plus added equipment like combat suits, weapons, shields, armor. You can create a troop for each environment type. Like I would design a troop for continental planets for example: It would have combat suit, a personal shield, and phased rifle. Then you would design one for Ocean environment: It would have a pressure suit (bonus for Ocean environments), a personal shield, and a Gauss rifle (bonus for Ocean environments). Your colonies would in general create troops of their native environment, because they would be most resilient. But you would have option to create units of other environments. You should be able to tell your troop transports what kind of troops to load in priority.

Ships and fleets:

-- There should be a way when you other ships to be built via the hammer menu to set all the ships in the invoice to a new fleet, and have that fleet be selected after you hit purchase. This would make it so easy to create defensive fleets for new systems, or conjure up a quick attack fleet.

-- There should also be a button to create a defensive fleet when you select a planet, system or a base. When you hit that you get brought up an option to either construct new ships or use existing ships, and you select quantity. Then the game creates a defensive fleet automatically.

-- Menu option for enemy planets/bases: Assign a fleet to attack this. This will give you a list of current fleets, or you can select new fleet and be prompted to either create one from existing ships or build new ships. The new fleet will get an order to assemble first, then queued attack order.

I have many more, but I seem to forget them while not playing the game lol.

1. Allow an extra increase in the game speed, like 8x
2. Allow a way to increase max research potential, either via modding or in game bonuses

1. More realistic or adjustable (starting new game) passanger transports and colony ships. I think 36M people on one passanger ship and 100M on a colony ship are not possible. It's ok for a "fast game" - new colonies gets high population after a short time. But for anyone who likes a "marathon game" the number of passengers should be thousands and not millions.

2. Barren planets colonizable (it's more difficult to colonize a volcanic planet)

3. many more docking bays an constructions yards on planets (depending on planet development/population level)

4. Terraforming facility slowly increases the planet quality above the naturally maximum (100% -> 125%, 75% -> 100%, 25% -> 50% or something like this). The amount of improvement depends on the tech level

5. More planet defense facilities (missiles silos and bases for fighters and bombers - the number of missiles/fighters/bombers increases with higher planet development/population level - a very high developed planet should have enough firepower to fight several ships)

6. Settlement policy for planets to force immigration of the own race also when population is to high for normal immigration. And/or to control the moving of population (certain number and race) from any owned planet to any other owned manually

7. Experience levels for ships and bases

8. Bombers and bombard weapons (planetary shield protects) can attack defense facilities on planets

The constructors' queues should become one large unified queue, and the available constructors would take care of the next top-most construction when they finish their current work. I hate ending up with a constructor having 7 queued works and with another having 2.

ORIGINAL: Master_of_Orion

2. Barren planets colonizable (it's more difficult to colonize a volcanic planet)

I can tell you one volcanic planet - mercury - in our system which got a chance to live there without getting steamrolled by cosmic rays. He got a magnetosphere above 1km over the surface, our earths is even bigger. The rest is totally crushed by the sun. Most barren rocks are missing water or atmosphere because they get steamrolled by solar winds. Compared to Mars (Nearly barren rock) or to our moon (Rock) you could actually survive there with artificial atmosphere and a good air conditioner on mercury. On Mars and Moon you will die of cancer or cosmic radiation pretty soon. Therefore you have to build magnetic shields with a strong current or thick lead walls.
Most rock planets are rocks and without water and atmosphere because they lack magnetospheres. Hot, inner rotating volcanic planets got a higher chance to have a decent magnetosphere. Therefore your science argument is pretty much nonsense.
Both are hell to live at...

I recently bought "Legends". One thing (amoung others) I like, are the nice new ship graphics. They are awesome!

I have two proposals, concerning ship graphics:

1. Let the player choose his prefered design when starting a new game
As I dind't had enough time to explore the game, I don't know yet if every race has it's own design or if designs are given randomly, when starting a new game.
So *if* the designs are not race specific (but maybe even then!) I would like to be able to choose my own prefered design when starting a new game. (Flags can be choosen, too - even if they are race specific!).
I know it's possible to choose new designs when designing new ships. But to change *all* of your ships and stations is... oh well...

2. Implement a design-sets-filter in the "Ship Design Screen"
There are even more ships in "Legends" than there where in "RotS". That's great!
But the consequence for the design-screen is, that the scrollbar in the "design-choosing-window" gets really long.
What about having a filter (right at the top of the design visualization at the upper left) with the options "All", "Set 01", "Set 02",...

This would make it easier to discriminate start and end of a certain design, too.

--

PS: I hope, this was not proposed earlier, as I hadn't the patience to read all the 47 pages, to be honest.
And I hope, my proposal is not regarded as too mundane, as I know there might be more important issues.

ORIGINAL: Nedrear

ORIGINAL: Master_of_Orion

2. Barren planets colonizable (it's more difficult to colonize a volcanic planet)

I can tell you one volcanic planet - mercury - in our system which got a chance to live there without getting steamrolled by cosmic rays. He got a magnetosphere above 1km over the surface, our earths is even bigger. The rest is totally crushed by the sun. Most barren rocks are missing water or atmosphere because they get steamrolled by solar winds. Compared to Mars (Nearly barren rock) or to our moon (Rock) you could actually survive there with artificial atmosphere and a good air conditioner on mercury. On Mars and Moon you will die of cancer or cosmic radiation pretty soon. Therefore you have to build magnetic shields with a strong current or thick lead walls.
Most rock planets are rocks and without water and atmosphere because they lack magnetospheres. Hot, inner rotating volcanic planets got a higher chance to have a decent magnetosphere. Therefore your science argument is pretty much nonsense.
Both are hell to live at...

I know, what you mean but I think in game a bad plantet environment (also water must be imported) is shown by a plantet quality under 50%.
Venus and our Moon is an good example. It's better there's no atmosphere than one which is very hot and toxic. I'm sure, a colony on our moon is possible.
You are right, the cosmic radiation is a problem but it's not impossible to build a save colony (for example subterranean) and don't forget, there could be barren planets and moons, which are distant enough from the sun - the solar wind is no problem.
It's expensive to hold a colony on a planet with a quality under 50% and therefore it's in deficit.

What do you think about that?

I would like a way to tell systems that I have visited from those that I have explored (for resources) completely. Would it be possible to have a different colour? Currently I find that I have to write down the name of all systems which I visit but pass on before exploring entirely in the search for colonisable worlds. I end up with lists of dozens, perhaps hundreds (depending on the map/conditions) of systems and I'm sure I forget to write the odd one down. Perhaps a pale yellow or pale orange colouring on the system name?

ORIGINAL: qqqqqq666

The constructors' queues should become one large unified queue, and the available constructors would take care of the next top-most construction when they finish their current work. I hate ending up with a constructor having 7 queued works and with another having 2.

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

I would like a way to tell systems that I have visited from those that I have explored (for resources) completely. Would it be possible to have a different colour? Currently I find that I have to write down the name of all systems which I visit but pass on before exploring entirely in the search for colonisable worlds. I end up with lists of dozens, perhaps hundreds (depending on the map/conditions) of systems and I'm sure I forget to write the odd one down. Perhaps a pale yellow or pale orange colouring on the system name?

+1 on both of these. Good ideas!

ORIGINAL: qqqqqq666

The constructors' queues should become one large unified queue, and the available constructors would take care of the next top-most construction when they finish their current work. I hate ending up with a constructor having 7 queued works and with another having 2.

You mean: it's not like that already?? *gasp* I thought it was! Seconded!

Please please at least revamp the crappy Ship design window ! It wasn't in RotS, still not in Legends ... 

ORIGINAL: qqqqqq666

The constructors' queues should become one large unified queue, and the available constructors would take care of the next top-most construction when they finish their current work. I hate ending up with a constructor having 7 queued works and with another having 2.

And extending this, we should be able to re-order/delete the items in this super-queue when needed.

Better allocation of passanger ships. They make a (instead of flying to different colonies) colony almost empty (76M - short time before 2500M) and there are still 160 ships waiting. And now these 160 passanger ships are blocked for a loooooooooooooooooooooong time.
The capital planet has maximum population but there is no passanger ship
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ORIGINAL: qqqqqq666

The constructors' queues should become one large unified queue, and the available constructors would take care of the next top-most construction when they finish their current work. I hate ending up with a constructor having 7 queued works and with another having 2.

Not sure about this one. What's to prevent the constructors from spending most of their time (and fuel) criss-crossing the map from one job to the next?

For efficiency there needs to be a balance between constructor availability, location of job and location of required resources. I would hope that the AI already calculates the optimum choice of constructor for each job based on these three criteria, and that's why some constructors have more qued jobs then others.

I don't know if that's actually the case though.

The constructor decision making could certainly do with some work, Currently the constructor goes to the spaceport nearest to the build location gets what resources it can and then goes to build. Sometimes you get the ridiculous situation where a constructor ignores the spaceport (s) on its route with all the resources it requires to fly past the build location to another spaceport (S) which lacks some of the resources and then flies back to do a partial build.

c---s----b--S



You can micromanage your way around the problem (give constructor order to build base near s and then cancel and reassign to real location once it has loaded the required resources) which is fine at the start of the game (although a PITA) but later on with 20+ constructors and stuff happening all over the galaxy it becomes next to impossible.

As for the original queueing problem, how about manually selecting the constructor you want to queue? A little effort but solves the problem.