I think, that I have an middle ground for Onicrom and Shadowhal about the government thing.

Most tbs games have a system of government, which even for the most advances games only is changed one to three times in a 100 turn game. So let not focus on the type of goverment we can have in the game, but on its inner works. So here an Ideal that I think both Onicrom and shadowhal will like. Let say that you are playing TEC for a second. In the TEC goverment they have a assembly where senators vote on the us of "WMDs". Ever ship you lost gains you Bribed , which you can use on senators to change there minds on the us of wmds.If it pass, you can use super powerful WMDS. If it does not pass, then you can all ways "persuade by force". Which result in a civil war, in which some ships fight for the senators. Now this is  just an ideal, and we can change any part of this.

This would allow for Onicrom to have a system of government, where you don't choices the type of government, but control the inner workers, and would all for it to still effect military game play as you can gain super powerful WMDs.

I got this ideal from turn based tactical role playing game called Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

here is the wiki link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laharl#Characters

But here is the main part that you have to look at.

 Dark Assembly

In order to perform specific actions outside of combat the player must address the Dark Assembly. To create new characters, improve the inventory of the castle store, or unlock new maps Laharl or other members of his party must present a proposal to the Dark Assembly, who will vote on whether they should or should not provide aid to Laharl's party. Prior to voting, senators in the assembly represent their predilection toward the party visually, glowing blue if they favor that character or red if they do not. If they are glowing red, senators can be bribed with items from the player's inventory to sway their vote in the player's favor. If a proposal fails to receive sufficient votes, the player may attempt to pass the bill anyway by choosing to "persuade by force" and attempting to defeat opposing senators in battle.

The proposals available to place before the senate depend on the number of promotion examinations completed by a character; these examinations consist of a battle between a handful of monsters and a single character on the floor of the Assembly. Each proposal to the Dark Assembly costs "mana", which is built over time by individual characters as they defeat enemies in combat. The amount of mana gained depends on the enemy's level.

have to say i first posted here with out reading all the other posts, sorry for that but all the ideas here are great.

One other idea is that i made a hafe fast mod my self that i enjoy where i made things a lil more relistic so i think where all races ahfe ALOT fewer hull points and great sheild points henc you would think your sheilds fail u have to run fast or u die fast as an exp. i also feel that have 3000+ ships fighting in nearly the same grav well is a little odd i personal find that much smaller fleets tend to be a little more strag involved so haven a realistic/arcade option of some sort i think would be good as well

Cursed

Edit: also civil wars of any kind would be great when a planet begains to lose alegences "bad spelling" so many of the ships in the grav well join the plane in question and the remaining stay with ur faction give you so much time to destroy the planet ships and restore order rather than losing that planet "would also add to the psi super weapon hitting a planet with large cultue could cause a revolt and mabey civil war ect " jsut and idea

@ ready man: researched items already do appear different. they have silver lineout and a little silver embellishment in the lower left corner. for not fullly completed icons it gives you the number/ level currently researched.

as for the list: great idea. I'm not sure, if it's not even doable over string file, after all, that one controls all the text in the game as far as I can determine. never seemed to work for me though.

the rebellion/ civil war idea is very nice, but I think it goes a little too far. what you would need is a) planets that go to 0 allegiance should not be destroyed, but be independant and thus recapturable and b ) you'd need a lot more factors to determine allegiance or rather change in allegiance (since that is tied to resource gain there has to be a maximum). otherwise there are just too few ways to combat the whole thing and it becomes way too mechanic. you can use local fleet strenth as a factors, but that is the only thing currently in that I can see adaptable to this purpose. and implementing so many changes would involve quite a bit of components imo.

homefleet: a tempting idea to go via a set of proposals with varying benefits and needing to convince your government to agree on it. nevertheless, the way to gain support does not make me happy and on the whole, the system you describe does not sound so much simpler than the other stuff. I mean characters, inventory, maps, parties, mana? that's a whole range of new elements and sounds a bit confusing. besides we are talking two different things: I was talking more of what type of government to have which has a drastic impact on various factos. I'd say we have more than enough real life examples to see that communist, fascist, democratic, monarchic, etc. regimes act quite differently in terms of military, freedom, markets, research, religion and more. so while I was discussing more what impact the government had on the nation as a whole, you were more assuming a set government and how it reaches a decision.

my whole point is, I would appreciate more empire wide decisions. the only area really where the whole empire is concerned is research (and, in its limited state, diplomacy). what do I want to do? which path do I want to take? more civilian, higher econmic output? more efficient military, larger military, more advanced ship type? the other decisions are planet based, though have some impact on the rest of the empire. where do I strenthen my defenses? where do attack? where do I place my labs and trade ports? where do I need a resupply and constraction base? but, as I said, decisions that affect all planets alike are fairly rare and I'd be happy with a few more of them.

Players are too easily disconnected requiring the game to be restarted from the last auto-save. I would like to see the following:

Save Frequency – give control over the frequency the game is auto-saved. The default is 15 minutes; I’d like to be able to set the timing and number of auto-saves to keep before recycling.

Player Disconnect – I’d like to have control on whether a player is disconnected. In Company of Heroes the game will display a voting dialog. At a minimum when I’m hosting a game I know the players and would like some control over whether they are disconnected.

Hosting the Game – I can and do host games at ICO using alloy with little problem. When running the test it says that my IP is hidden. I’ve tried opening TCP ports 6000-7000 with no success. My guess is that it is trying to ping/access my LAN IP rather than the router IP. I would prefer to host the game on one of my systems rather than use alloy. One of the best examples of this is how Supreme Commander implemented their game hosting. A play joining enters my router IP and password and they’re connected. As the host, I have to port forward the appropriate ports on the router and steup the game and we’re up and running…very simple solution.

I'd like to see a simple addition: an upgrade percentage. It bugs me to not know how much research I've done, as well as most games i forget to completely research something.

you know they say Chuck Noris has no chin under his beard, there is only another fist.

lol

Definitely YES on the Mother ship.

Ramming speed?  Brilliant!  Terrific idea!

RM

Well Shadowhal, right now as it stands you only use higher economic output to build more warships. Until there is another way of winning other then destroying your enemy, everthing you do will lead to the same point. Sending the other guy down in a ball of fire.

I think that the main thing that they need to fixs is the capital ships first. How many of you see them as over sized support cruisers.

there I agree fully with you. so long as military is the only road to victory, all economic structure will have to oriented towards it. which is not to say that it will always stay that way. but yeah, you're right on that one.

I think the combat side is evolved enough, especially considering entrenchment is mostly military stuff, even if defense. I'm not too keen on uber ships, ship commanders or other stuff that's been thrown around.

I don't think that most people are asking for an uber ship, but for a capital ship that is just that a capital ship. Like I said before, almost all the capital ships in the game are over sizes support cruisers, even the battleships. I did a test on the ships and found that in order to to even come close in terms of 4 heavy cruisers (i.e. 48 support points) you need your battleship[ to be around level 4 and 5. This would of been o.k. if it was around levels 1, 2 or 3 , but 4 and 5? The fact is, you can replace 4 heavy cruisers faster then you can a level 4 or 5 capital ship. Capital ship needs to not only win the fight ,but be alive after words, in order to reach those levels. 4 Heavy cruisers come out of port battle ready and more powerful then any capital ship coming out of port.

I also don't like how the super weapons are used in this game. I know that they are being used just like any other rts, but that the problem. The point of super weapons in all other rts, is to force you to come out of behind your defense system and forces you to attack be behind my defense system. If that make sense to any of you? This is why I'm for the Endwar type of WMD ( super weapon) system, as it makes it so that your enemy can come back, and therefore keeps the game from turning into a 2 hour long, mop up the enemy type of game.

good idea

Oh I just remembered something very minor that I've been thinking about for a while now. I have no idea if this has been mentioned before but here it goes.

When it comes to Capital ship debris the Vasari seem to have special debris from there dead capital ships (or at least a couple of them). The one that I notice the most is the Vasari Carrier Cap. When it is destroyed there is a large and very distinctive chuck that is left as debris. This is very different from the TEC and Advent Cap ships that when destroyed only leave larger chuncks of the same debris Cruisers and Frigates leave behind. I think it would be cool if more Capital Ships left their own distinctive debris.

Edit and Note: What I mean by "distinctive debris" is a piece of debris you can look at and say "That debris is from 'x' part of the cap ship." Like the Vasari Carrier I mentioned ealier. Its distinctive debris is pretty much the front half of the ship, as if when destroyed the Cap was snapped in half with the back half exploding leaving the front half floating as debris. Each Cap ship could have it's own distinctive debris.

More ship classes. 15 for each race is way to few. Also, all carriers should have a flak cannin of some kind, especially given the number of them that everbody builds.