Matrix Games Forums

Probably the most important thing first: I just have the "RotS" expasion right now. I apologize if something mentioned below is already in "Legends".

1) Update AI of private freighters: they can tend to kind of "blockade" freshly invaded planets which not have directly a space port ready. Once the space port is build they should recognize it and move onwards to it instead of still waiting to dock at the planet itself (see attached picture - my troop carriers are waiting WAY too long to load the troops for further conquering with all that passenger ships and freighters transferring passengers and cargo ahead of them).

2) When shields are down and a ship is hit the fired weapons should not be stopped
2a) Repair bots should work in parallel, so that pure armor ships (no shields) are possible.
2b) A "repair priority order" should be settable. I'd like to control which things should be repaired first.

3) Add a technology that - build in as an additional ship component - increases the shield recharge rate ability.

4) Balance the weapons: concussion missiles should use less energy or almost none as they are self-propelled. This would make them a more interesting choice in early games when reactor energy isn't in abundance. For late game they currently lack of dmg-potential.
4a) Technology upgrade that increases the firing rate of missiles - when build in as a component on a ship.

5) Upgrade the tactic / behaviour settings in the ship design screen
5a) "Flee when" should have the possibility to set a manual number. E.g. I'd like my ships to flee when shields are at 68% or 31% or 78% or ...
5b) Targeting priority: first hunt down escort/frigate/.../capital ships
5c) After escaping only get back into battle if shields are back at x%

6) Technology upgrade "miniaturization feature" or something similar: If I stack multiple types of the same component they should use less space as they could share synergy effects (same energy supply cables, electric control, large scale reactors, whatever seems logical).

7) If the energy is available to support both, full speed and hyper jump, ships should flee at maximum speed.

8) Add technology that makes Caslon worthy to consider even in late game. Though it is an inefficient way of energy supply reactors with such type of fuel could throw out way more energy than hydrogen supplied ones. So you are thinking about saving space and put in a caslon driven reactor, noting that you would need more fuel cells and/or more often refueling. Or invest additional space for hydrogen reactors, but with much better energy efficiency.
Since Hydrogen is a ressource which could "flow around" in the deep space there could be an add-on for hydrogen driven reactors which collect the hydron "on the fly" to even make such ships more independent of refueling - which wouldn't be available for Caslon so that such ships MUST refuel at some time.

9) Targeting systems with manually controlled priorization on what components should be targeted first once the shields (and armor) are down.

10) Special reinforcment possibilities to protect specific vital components from beeing disabled or damaged, respectively to make it less likely or harder that they will such.

11) Chance that ships will explode when the reactor is damaged. Damage of the explosion blast could even be dependand on the amount of fuel left in the fuel cells.

12) I don't see a point for adding Trace Scanners or Jammers right now against AI which is a pitty. I just don't care wheather they know my ship design or not (unless they would be able to use it and try to rebuild my design if recognized as superior. It would be both fun and scary to suddenly face my own ships or almost similar ones in future battles).
If I would play against humans I would consider adding them.

Here is what I suggest to change to make them more interesting:
When facing an opponent there should be NO information at all. No shield strength, no weapon strength. Just the size as the only indicator. If you want to have proper information and hence want to take full advantage of your tactic settings (see point no 5) you then need to add such components.
12a) Cloaking devices should be able to "cover" the real size of a ship somehow and make even this information unreliable.

13) It would be nice if advanced cloaking devices could fully cover ships until they decloak and start to attack. On the other hand they should use exponentially more energy when the ship size goes up, so that it is only reasonable to build in on smaller ships (or maybe a caps to ship size: tech level 1 cloaks ship up to size 150, tech level 2 up to size 200, tech level 3 up to size 300).

More Feedback please...

Instead of the game just indicating in a pop-up message what should be done, also include the reason WHY the suggested action should be done. For example, before:

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should trade of Zentabia Fluid with so-and-so.

Well, why should we trade with them? After:

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should trade of Zentabia Fluid with so-and-so.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp This would promote better relations and maybe lead to more trade or possible a free trade agreement.

Other messages such as:

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should [end] trade or X with Y...
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should build ships...
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should send spy to do...
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should research...
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp We should whatever else...

This would add more personality and atmosphere to the game, even more so if incorporated into another request I had about adding advisors to the legend characters, like economic advisor, military advisor, etc... So the military advisor would be the one who would make recommendations to build ships, attack this target, and so on.

Another facet of feedback would be when you give orders and the orders cannot be carried out such as unable to attack or move due to no fuel. Or a ship cannot refuel at a location due to no fuel of that type (caslon or hydrogen). In this case, some message in red to appear in the item’s selection panel. Maybe a pop-up message (configurable via options menu) could appear, for those who want more upfront feedback.

Ok, my wishlist :
- Improved private sector feature. Like the emerging of giant corporations. The reason is that the private sector have their own money, but it just there without any purpose in the game (well, maybe for buying some ships, I don't know. But if it is, we can still expand it to make the cash more useful). Giant Corporation is an independent semi active faction that emerge within an empire, just like pirates. They have their headquarter, and their own fleet (Freighter fleet, not Military ship Fleet). But they pay tax to the government. A giant Corporation will emerge when the private sector money has reach some point (for example 10.000k or more) and they can interact with the government just like pirates. Sometime, they will give some business deal, like buying or selling military ship with the government. The government can't do anything to the giant corporation just like private sectors, but they can make some regulation to them.

- More character face pictures for each races. I bored seeing the same face for every characters in the game.

multiplayer, multi-cpu-core support so the game dosent slow down even though you have the newest beast of a computer available.

Scaling Economy!

Planets should consume more luxury goods as they get higher population and development levels. More population and richer populations want more stuff! One game near the end, I had my entire civilian fleet mostly idling as all the planets weren't ordering anything anymore.

Mod options to increase luxury goods cap on development levels would be nice too.

I saw on the main page that a suggestion was 12. Multilateral treaties and alliances but I was hoping to expand upon the idea a bit or at least give some clarity of detail.

At current it reads:

12. Multilateral treaties and alliances: The ability to create free trade areas or defensive alliances, with the option to either have a faction leader (i.e. the strongest faction in a defensive alliance against an outside aggresor) or to have an equal voting system (i.e. to decide when to admit new members or seek peace terms etc) - SilverRocket

I would like to see this labeled or possibly labeled as a "Federation". Such a Federation would have to be heavily discussed amongst the potential founding members before it is established, such as:

(These selections can be optional whether or not to include in the proposal on your Empire's behalf when establishing/proposing the Federation)

Leadership Establishment- Will the Federation be lead by an individual Empire or run as a collective or Council-style setup?
Political Policies- Similar to Empire Policies, but all member 'Empires' will need to abide by them
Defenses- Which member group(s) will be placed in charge of warship production
Federation Fleet Command- Who will command the fleets now labeled as being part of the Federation?
Separate Fleets- Allow member groups to maintain their own personal Fleets and divert XX% of warship production to the Federation
Voting Policies- What Percentage of votes must be cast to pass a new policy? (Must be > 50%)
Colonization Proposals- Will a member Empire need to request a vote to build a new colony?
War Proposals- Will a member Empire need to request a vote to declare war on a non-Federation Empire?
Federation Member Expulsion- What percentage of votes must be cast to forcibly remove a Federation Empire from your ranks? (Must be > 50%)

This could be expanded further, but I wanted to provide the ideas that were on the tip of my tongue...well, fingertips.

As I stated in another post, This could provide additional political depth to the game in the long-run, allowing for one large Federation, composed of numerous Empires to seek out mutual co-existence. Every XX number of years new elections could potentially be held (If the Federation is run via a council style setup) and new characters could be brought into the Federation, potentially changing that member Empire's stances on various issues, OR there could be no elections and you'll have to lobby various Federation members to vote your way in the upcoming voting on XYZ policy.

The potential for a system like this is great, I'm just curious to see if anyone else agrees with me.

More Government type, like Communist

This is my first post here so hello @ all.

I´ve been here, sniffing around the DW contents for about 2 months now (no connection before). Playing DW since ... 2 or 3 years and started with modding of some game parts two weeks ago. Long story short, here my wishes for the next updates (nice to have: all contents and scripts modable =) looking forward to the announced patch after shadows):

-A- Engine:

1. Multicore, multicore, multicore! Please let the program use multiple CPU cores of the system. It´s absolutely horrible, even on a high-end gaming PC, to have such a fps hit in mid/late game

(btw. seems like invasions cause a massive fps hit on the system, ver. 1.7.20b)

2. At the moment there are two values to add some specials to the images. yellow for running lights and blue for engine exhaust. Would be great if it would be possible to add a third one for weapons. Currently all weapons animations come from the center of the image. Looks bad if you use a ship shape, like an U with transparent zone in the middle.

3. Is it possible to add hdr or even gloom into the engine? Maybe at least bump mapping for nicer look?

4. Menue options for FSAA and other stuff. Currently the only possible way to adjust the game visual quality is directly by the system graphics hardware driver.

5. "Scaling issue of ships" - I think this was discussed enough since the last years, so you know what I mean!

6. ship/base/planets Animations? - (gif instead of png)

-B- Diplomacy upgrade:

1. Please make it possible to show trading items (bases/planets) on a small infomap if they are content of a trade!
- Optional (nice to have): make it possible to choose them via this infomap (like the galaxy overview map with button: jump to object)

2. Adjustments of the info view of the diplomatic relations. Currently we have to move down every faction to see the relations to the others. Maybe as a "cycle web" with the player faction in the middle and the foreign at the corners, so it´s possible to see the relations of the foreign empires to each other in one single overview.

3. More treaty options like:
- allow allies to station troops on own planets (they will still pay them, but fight against invasors)
- time bounded non attack pacts
- time bounded alliances
- time bounded subjugation
- different sub types of alliances. (supply only, supply and attack, ability to see scanning results and/or exploration, sharing of industrial and or scientific bandwich to make it possible for the alliance partners to build ships at your yards (for cash of course!) or boost up the research by using a given percentage of available laboratories, etc.)
- Optional: cooseable stations/facilities you "never" want to share informations about. (like hidden yards or stations in deep space you don´t want to inform the others, even the alliance partners, about)
- chooseable rate of tribute ( 5% / 10% / 20% / 30% of GDP -> relations and reputation hit)
- Possibility to force an empire, to change relations/treaties with an other. (like: I give you a planet and you stop trading restricted resources with empire xyz, etc.)

4. more trade options like:
- free colony trade (not only if two empires own a colony in the same system - this way the AI and the player can manage it directly via diplo, without invasion, to shape the borders more... naturally: more compact empire spaces, instead of spreading around like cancer.
- free station trade (not only if they are in foreign territory)
- more clearly trade options of star-maps. (like above, maybe I don´t want them to know about some systems or stations.) Also possibility to "choose" the contents of the map like: 10/20/30 systems nearby, or only sector B4, etc.
- Optional: ships and troop trade (maybe someone has a lack of ships/troops and I build/recruit hundreds per day - why not selling some of them) Troops will sit at the colony as long as the empire collects them. (maybe after war declaration it changes promptly to invasion status =) )

5. single trade relations for goods:
- Allow trade with loros fruis "AND/OR" korrabia spice.
- Ability to mark/unmark strategic and luxury goods to allow or disallow trade with them. (maybe you don´t want to supply steel to someone, because you want to squeeze the production rate of ships, or you just want to bleed someone out, etc.)

6. Make it possible to adjust tourism and migration politicy via diplomacy screen with ability to choose the settings for each "RACE", not only for the race family! (no-one likes the damn bugs, and maybe I only like one sort of them)

6.1 Ability to enslave/resettle, etc. only single races instead of "all others" in your colonies.

7. small info-box for each diplomatic act with information about the changes (reputation, relation, migration, down/upgrade of tourism or private and tax income because of sales of mining stations or colonies, etc.)

8. Create sattelite states. Maybe you have a couple of Systems in the last corner, far far away from your homelands which you don´t want to manage.

-C- Agents:

More skills to build up than only 4. (Maybe up to 6)
More skills and treats overall. Diplos for example with positive or negative effects on some races. (Diplo XY hates Kiadians; -20 % with Kiadian empire(s))

More ways to interact via agents like:

1. Intelligence Agents:

- force a colony to join your empire. (currently it´s a gamble if a psy-opped colony rebels and gets independant or joins an empire and if so, you have no chance to influence their decision)
- (like in the galaxy history in the shakturi report written ...) blaming empires for something to force war declarations of others against this empire. "seed counter information"
- destroy ships (not only bases)
- sabotage ships/fleets (entire fleets have to refuel because of sabotage of the fuel cells or fleet electronics sabotage so they loose the boni f.e.)
- Steal profiles of foreign agents like admirals or generals. Also the possibility to watch them in a "foreign agents"-window. Currently you get into your empire agents overfiew when you click on a foreign agent.
- optional: treat/force foreign agents to get bad characteristics like "drunk" or "disorganized"
- create faction report. Gives the ability to get a small overview of the current status of research and blueprints/designs of currently used ships.
- Sabotage of communication. The enemy looses the long range scanner ability for a couple of days and doesn´t get attack signals. (could be done by "ignoring" scripts for such cases for several days if possible)

2. Diplomats:

- force empires to go to war or sign peace agreements with others (via Agent influence, not via trade in diplo menue)
- send special gifts like needed resources or even ships

3. Admirals/Generals:

(maybe "shadows" will solve the most issues here - so i leave it blank)

4. Scientists:

- Specialisations. Not only skills on the 3 science corners. Maybe "ground defense specialist" or "Hyperdrive Specialist" which adds additional research boost on some different research parts.

-D- Ship/base types and roles:

1. Please make it possible to create "subroles" or even the ability to add more different types than the current 6.

2. Maximum ship sizes for some roles (escort max 200/ frigate max 400/ destroyer max 600/ cruiser min 700/ capital min 1000 etc.) <- this would also fix some scaling issues in my opinion.

3. Ability to add some "special skins" to each role. The regular one with camo or slightly color changes for use in design screen. Would be great to be able to choose a different paint of the ship to indicate fleet support electronics or even for leading ships/ special ops ships etc.
Folder creation could be: familyX/escort_A, escort_B, escort_C

... to be continued

(have some more but this was enough for tonight)

Looking forward to shadows and the new ground combat abilities - yay!

Greets

One thing that would make the game a lot better for me would be the ability to auto reinforce fleets. This would be very useful for fleets used to defend and area of the map. Fleets and stances are there to reduce micromanagement, but as it stands now after every battle the player has to check his fleets to see if any ship was destroyed.

What I would like is that when a fleet has a ship destroyed it automatically puts a replacement ship into a build queue with the fleet automatically set to itself. When the ship is built it then should join its fleet, wherever it is. This would remove a lot of the ship management busywork that isn't fun. I don't want to automate all shipbuilding, just the reinforcements

Perhaps this could be an option you turn on at the fleet level so only specific fleets could be set to auto reinforce, but I think it would be sufficient to have as a global automation setting. T

1. Starting Options and event after Shakturi defeat:

My first open sandbox game was endet by the Shakturi defeat event. I want open sandbox till sole survivor and the Shakturi events for flavor.

Please change the options to include the Skaturi event chain without it being a Victory and without the unbalancing enheritance of the gaurdian positian (all the ships, planets, research).

A small gain in reputation and some compensation for the Aliance e.g. 70% of the loses in fighting the Shuktari would give a real posibility to play on.

The Guardians leaving the universe with their posessions and only ruins left behind would be nice.

2. Democracy (and similar forms of government) elements like elections and influencing the choice of Leader. Events maybe with choices could be added to all kind of government forms.

3. Dismissing leaders in a democracy needs fixing (maybe a revolution like hit). After a very good leader died or wasn´t reelected
with no player influence the player can dismiss the new leader every month until he has a useful leader.

Please find a balanced fix for this cheat.

More option in the Fleet Screen so I can micro manage them better. I want to upgrade some of the ships in my fleet. The problem is that I have two type of design for each roles. So I need to upgrade every single ship in my fleet and it is hard for me to do so in DW.

In adding for more option in the fleet screen, I also need a feature that enable me to transfer my ships in Fleet A to Fleet B easily. It is become annoying to enter the Ships windows and look at hundreds of Ships list there just to relocate and manage my ships.

Military Dictator is lonely. Everyone hate them without no reason (except for the fellow military dictator). It make me feel that the democracy and their fellow government type love to bully this type of government rather than them bullying around. No worry for now, as I manage to stand alone in the galaxy and I rather lazy to do diplomacy around. But maybe adding Communist or facist type government can balance the galaxy a bit.

I think, it is better if every single races start with the same type home world (for example, swarm or continent) so the colonization technology become relevant even after I have a collection of species in my empire. Or erase the capability to colonize a type of planet before you research them to avoid rapid expansion without proper research. For example, you are human and you get a species who can live in ice planet. Rather than you get the ability to colonize the ice planet, you should stick to your human colonization rule.

Well, I know that this problem can be resolved with mod, but can you give two character portrait instead of one for the characters in the game? At least give us male and female version of each race picture. It is weird to give a human male with female name.

For ground force : Give us the ability for form a army version of fleet for them for better micro management. For example, I want to make a group of army and name them "Space Marine", then the other "Republican Guard" and each group will feature different type of arsenal; like the Space Marine will get elite infantry, while the Republican Guard get more armored vehicles etc.

I like the idea of automating the 'Assign Mercenary Smuggling' to improve the gain of resources but I would like the option to assign a time period for the contract; maybe 6 months or indefinite. It is a bit annoying to have to go to every planet every 20 minutes and tell it to again assign the contract for smuggling.

Research Ships
&nbsp;
From a role play perspective I'd like to see some real* use for ships with research labs on board.&nbsp; Could they perhaps deploy at research bonus locations to get half of the bonus?&nbsp; Or be sent to ruins to extract an amount (limited?) of extra research?&nbsp; Or be able to accumulate some research into alien tech when stationed in enemy systems with advanced tech?&nbsp; Or need to be deployed for x amount of time to 'unlock' bonus locations such as Torak?&nbsp;Or be useful in curing plagues? Or speed the reduction of the 'we are disturbed by your strange alien way' relation (cultural research)? Or...?
&nbsp;
Or any combination of the above... Bacially I just 'want' them in the game.&nbsp; [:'(]
&nbsp;
* I remember on AAR where they became a neccesity.

I'd like to see the editor get some love. I like to use it to try and set up little mini scenarios for myself at game start. Nothing fancy, just tweaking starting conditions a bit and setting up systems a certain way.

1. I would like it if the editor allowed for granting or removing individual tech items. Right now it's a slider for broad tech levels, but I'd prefer to be able to grant or remove specific discoveries, including the ability to grant race-specific tech to other races. To use an extreme example, I may want a race to be propulsion masters but not have even basic weapon technology, or vice versa.

2. The editor is a little sparse on what ruins you can add. I can't, for example, add the ruins that grant bonuses or penalties for specific races having allied with or against the Shakturi in the distant past. I seem to recall there were a couple other odds and ends in there that I don't have handy off the top of my head.

3. I'd like to be able to manually add Gold and/or Dilithium Crystal asteroids rather than trusting the luck of the draw when placing an asteroid field.

4. It would be nice to have a choice of pre-configured "home" systems for the various races when using the place system option. Ideally we would have a standard planetary layout for each home system, but at the very least it would be nice if there was a generic "home system" option that would stamp out a system with the usual starting resources and/or planet types. This would be especially useful for Shadows' pre-warp games to make sure the minimal necessary resources are available to carry the empire along until they can leave system.

In the continued interest of allowing players to construct mini scenarios for themselves or to share, I'd like to suggest a game option of locking tech at a certain level for all empires(with the exceptions of Ancient Guardians and Shakturi). Nothing higher than the level lock could be researched normally.

This lock could be bypassed using the editor to(as suggested above) grant specific tech discoveries as desired, broad levels, or adjust the lock for that game session. Additionally, discovering the Archival Refuge, finding technology in ruins, stealing technology from the Ancient Guardians and Shakturi, disassembling found ships, or taking ownership of the Ancient Guardians could boost an empire above the tech limit.

- A change to the theme loader so that if an error is thrown it won't crash the game but instead re-load the default theme. Makes modding a lot faster due to not having to re-launch the game constantly.

- More moddable files in themes. Let us mod just about any graphical file found in the game's structure. This way people can have their graphical overhaul mods and avoid contaminating vanilla files.

Oh, on my wishlist... intelligence agent mission: steal money from other empire. [:D]

- Forcing the AI ship designer NOT to obsolete designs that it isn't allowed to retrofit anyway. (Ties in with the "Obsoletes only possible design for a ship type after a new tech is researched)

- Give the player the ability to force the character AI to leave specific characters alone. (It keeps moving my best fleet admiral from my primary fleet to a defense fleet - turning it off would mess up the other character types)

New genre / scenario for the Distant World. Now after we got pre-warp era, Pirate, Shakturi, Legendary Characters, it is time to introduce new form of game play. great civil war. It is about the great galaxy Empire in turmoil and breaking apart, and you will be one of the contestant to reconquer the galaxy. So in this scenario, you don't need to explore and colonize anymore. You just need to capture your opponent's planets with your fleet.

I don't know if this idea is do-able. Make another layer of galaxy / world. In the games like Age of Wonders, we call it underground; but in Distant World, we call it Hyper Space. In reality, I just want to put submarine type of starship to this game. So, it is about a sneaky starship that capable of entering the hyper space and do surprise attack to the enemy. Because of their nature, you can't navigate this layer without special equipment, and it is not just one equipment. To make a hyper space Ship, there are a lot of equipments that you must put, to force the player make a specific ship class for the job. Well, consider them as the submarine in the galaxy.

For the limitation of the hyper space idea, Maybe the developer can limit the ship size that can enter the area. For example, only a ship with special equipments and smaller than 200 kton can enter the hyper space. The limitation will have technology level. The better the level is, the bigger the ship you can put into this dimension. But it won't be able to oversize "normal Ship". Maybe the good limit is 100 for hyper space ship for 200 KT for normal ship. This way, you can't only depend on one ship design, as you will need ships with the capability to detect these submarine, etc.

With ship capture in Shadows, I think we need self-destruct functionality for ships. This functionality would need to be tied to ship capture with a percentage chance of success tied to tech level of the ship's control center/bridge.

With the ability to transfer ships to other empires in Shadows, I think we need black box technology. Ideally, black box tech would be an overlay of some sort on any component, perhaps using a checkbox in the ship design screen, that marks a given component as exceptionally difficult(percentage success or fail, or reduced research points/progress awarded) to learn anything from when retiring a ship. It would, of course, also increase costs and/or decrease performance of the component. Additionally, the black box overlay could have an optional percentage chance of self-destructing the ship when it is retired(possibly damaging/destroying the spaceport), that is scaled up with tech level.

However, the latter option would require an AI adjustment, I would think, so the AI could recognize that a given ship has black box technology and would be reticent about retiring the ship at valuable spaceports. Perhaps with the self-destruct functionality of the control center component, the AI could evaluate the option of destroying ships instead when they've outlived their usefulness so they don't drain their coffers with maintenance.