Waging war in GC4  my .02 $  worth.

Playing on Normal with version 77b (not the test), I managed a fairly dominating (? I thought) lead on the rest early on (turn 153): first figure shows the summary.  The second picture shows the galactic layout of the various civs.  I think it is fairly reasonable to suppose that this game is well in hand;  it's at this point that I wish to make a few comments.    I played for another 100 turns or so, and the situation, in terms of the summary and layout, is much the same, although my number of worlds and size of empire have expanded somewhat.  At that point I had 41% of prestige required for a win and second place was 28%.  So for a prestige win I was looking at a LONG time.  What did I do during this extensive period?  First I filled in my area and grabbed the little that was left untaken.  Then I decided to take on one of other civs, I chose the Iconians because they were easier to reach.  I had some problems though.

1. Taking control of colonies that I had surrounded and had dominant influence over was exceeding slow. I thought, I will get these doing nothing so why bother? But it was painfully slow.  It should be slow, but this slow?   I think one planet flipped of several that had (foolishly?) been placed inside my empire.  This just seems a minor tweak, though.   The AI shouldn't do that and the punishment should come within the player's lifetime.

2. The mechanics of attacking planets and successfully invading was/is quite mysterious to me.  I put a transport each in stack of ships and attacked Iconia all across the board.  Not knowing what the mechanic was other than that I need transports to invade a core world, I tried to attack with mulitple stacks against each target planet.  But at that point I got confusing feedback about what I should do and what was happening.   If I tried to attack with a second stack I got the message "do you want to stop the siege against xxx?"   Huh, I was just piling on, I thought.  After clicking a lot I couldn't seem to advance the turn because there were always stacks that wanted more instructions, and more clicks didn't solve things.  A couple times I saved and restarted the game and that seemed to help.  But although eventually some of the target planets fell, Iconia and others just didn't seem to give up.  

3.  Eventually Iconia asked me for peace....and here I have a major problem, because the game doesn't tell  you what the consequences of accepting a peace will be.  Will there be a negotiation?   No, just a white peace.  That was a rude shock.    Of course the Iconians were wrecked, but it seemed a very unsatisfying and mysterious process.  The game needs to explain what will happen and what the player can expect.  Will it take many more turns to take over a capital, a core world, or a colony?  Should I expect to have to siege a planet for 20 turns to invade successfully?  I dunno!   Meanwhile the prestige ticker keep creeping along at a snails pace.    

Summary of Combat:  The Player needs a little guidance on war mechanics, and on how to end a war in the various ways a) capitulation with a negotiated peace with the loser throwing in some stuff c) a peace in place as of the peace treaty.  These are quite different.  Finding out by trial and error is frustrating and clumsy.   How does the player shorten a siege?   Does clicking on an attacking stack and then on the target reset the siege timer?  If I add another transport to the attacking stack?  Don't know.   Too many questions.  Tiny red icons seemingly were trying to help  me buy I couldn't figure out what they meant..exactly.  Making the attack proces quite a bit more transparent seems in order.  OK, I am sure that eventually I will figure it all out, and I will do a bit of head slapping, I suppose.   But do I really need to go through that?   

For comparison, because I found a let's play from Quill18 and then I bought Master of Orion very cheap.  This game gets very complex but here's the thing... I never had a question about the mechanics that I couldn't solve very easily or figure out for myself intuitively.   Every research was a process of discovery but I didn't scratch my head wondering what stuff meant.   I think GC4 wants to be very transparent in terms of mechanics and let the player have fun figuring out how to do things for maximum effect.  That's the essence of the fun element in strategy games, to me.

So maybe the 2000+ hrs I put in on GC3 including beta testing actually had me expecting things to go a certain way and was not very helpful, in a way.

4.  The messages from survey ships get awfully repetitive after a while.   There needs to be more of them or maybe a random element ($?) 

5. Is there a limit on core worlds?   I bought some leaders and there were no worlds for me to place a governor.  And I had grabbed at least one core from the iconians.  I could still use them because of the other slots that were available, of course, but still.

6.  Something positive.   I have 32 gb ram, i7  9700K cpu, GTX 1050 ti graphics (4gb) and SSDs for storage.  The game ran smoothly at all stages of the game.  No slowdowns or hiccups.   

Please note I am hardly giving up on GC4, I think it is a huge improvement on GC3 and just needs some smoothing out.  I just didn't like putting in a lot of time and then being bamboozled by something that should be straightforward.