Gunner 243's idea.
The idea of the different leaders and controlling different leaders over time was influenced by Europa II.
On the elections thing, how exactly is a system by which your party stays in charge even if totally flattened in an election a democracy?

I think you would just lose your leader's benefits and parties benefits if you (the player) lost an election. But since it is still a game, the player would keep things actually running.

By the way, who ever said there was real democracy in space games?

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I would LOVE the ability to raid trade routes in addition to just being able to blow them away. Also, the ability to back freebooters and pirates much like the major sea powers during the 18th & 19th Centuries.
Right now, the Pirates are everyone's enemy; wouldn't it be cool to be able to feed them ships and support in exchange for some booty. (Pirate treasure, not nice behinds) LOL

The ability to pay the pirates to raid other civ's shipping lines would be cool.

Also the ability to produce your own pirate ships (no civ identity attached) would be great (eg Civ III). You could raid with no colours flying with a percentage chance of being caught. This percentage could be based on the spying abilities of both civs.

Lets face it spying in Galciv is one area that could be improved.

I both agree and disagree! (Hey, I could be a Politician!)
I think more goes on with spying than we see; so I think we should see it.
It would be nice to be able to break an Alliance between other Civs; and I think we should get more info about what is happening due to our spying.

Exactly!!!!

Espionage
I agree with the point on spying needing to be improved. Maybe you could actually look into alien-controlled planets and see what they're doing at the moment if you'd spied on them for long enough.

Counter Espionage
A civ can spend money on counter-espionage. Counter espionage allows you to reduce the effect of enemy espionage. If an enemy is destabalizing you though, it's possible that their efforts are discovered, this hurts relations with that civilization, but allows you to counter their destabilization more effectivly.

Destabilization
Destabilization hurts morale and drasticly increases the speed at which disloyalty is generated. It is most effective against civs with many foreign citizens. It is expecially effective against civs that have your race under the rule of a foreign oppressor.

I enjoyed the space marine battles (ship to ship and/or ship to starbase) of MOO2. It would be cool to take over someone's elses starbase, especially the resource type. Taking ship's is also good especially if they are ahead of yours techwise.

If these have already been suggested in the myriad of Gal Civ2 threads, then my apologies.

Some of this might sound familiar but here is some of what I’d like to see / add:

New system wide Projects:
An Achivement that can only be build ONCE PER SYSTEM, like:
- a system wide force fields
- Star Fortress (huge, in system starbase).
- Mining Facility (that mines gas giants, asteroids and uninhabited planets)
- System defender (fighters that support system defence only and cant leave the system)

Improved Colony management:
- being able to set up an “individual” build orders per planet
- Governors for each planet, with special, individual boni

Fleet Combat:
Improved fleet combat feature, making use of “parameters” / “cores”
- “Scouts” / Fighters (low attack but fast and manoeuvrable)
- Outer defence / “frigates” (“anti-missile” and fighter stopper)
- Defence / “Cruiser” (standard combat ships)
- Main Force (“Battleships” and Carriers that provide the main combat capability (firepower) of the fleet)
- Boomers / “long range” (ships with strong, long range weapons e.g. torpedoes, “power beams”)

- Capability to set fleet behaviour and thereby its main layout (defensive, neutral, offensive)
- Usage of “long range weapons” over more then one “field”
- Weapon / System improvement / upgrades when the ship already exists
- In system fights, for each planet
- The possibility to add, in late game, a “short range” instant neighbouring travel between
systems
- a more "worked out" planetary combat system


just my 2bc

Methinks a micromanagement step too far, but definately give distribution sliders to the governors. I've given quite a bit of thought as to how this could be implemented so to help both the micro and macro managers and this is my proposal:

The overall spend would be set in one place, each governor would then be free to distribute his or her funds between mil:soc:sci. The number of governors would depend upon the government, say 2 for the first then 3, 4 and finally 5. Also as large empires need more management so an additional governor for every 10 or so inhabited planets would sort that problem.

Plainly some playtesting would be required to get the balance spot on, but this would eliminate the problem of wasted production, allow quick development of planets aquired late in the game and obviously permit the use of a few planets as primary military producers.

An argument against this is that it would be hard for the AI to utilise, but that can be solved by creating a large library of governors for the AI to select from.

Some thoughts about morality:

One should have to keep being good or bad to maintain ones standing, what I suggest is that every turn a players morality should adjust by a tiny percentage towards neutral. So to stay saintly or demonic a player would occasionally have to do something suitable.

The outcome of an action shouldn't be so obvious, each event could have many possible reactions but only a random choice of 3 or 4 of them would be available displayed in a random order. This would mean the alignment of a player actually reflects what they do, rather than their always selecting option 1 (or 3).

Well, it is almost the case actually: the events are the occasion to do something suitable with the morality you want. When an event arise, you must take a choice and any choice will have an impact (greater or lesser on your morality.
Since it can be currently difficult to achieve saintly status, having a constant shift toward neutrality would make this achievement more difficult.
And I guess that if the events were more frequents, some would be angry at it.

More, I disagree with the fact that morality should shift continuously toward neutral. Morality defines the philosophy of the civilization. I don't see why it must change to another philosophy if nothing appears.

Yes but currently once you are saintly (or demonic) you can then take as many neutral choices as you want and remain saintly or demonic, surely this also goes against the "philosophy of the civilization" as you eloquently put it.

There is only 1 feature I have always wanted in galciv, the ability to play ALL the races or even to create your own (i.e moo2)

Seriously that was the one of the BEST features about moo2, every game you could use a different race or even create your own. I'm getting really sick of playing the humans.

There is no difference really between the races not counting what you can change in the menus, other than appearence. I have never seen how the game would be improved that much by being able to play another race.

~SDC~

Then you have obviously never played master of orion, being able to play many races forces variation, it detracts from the experience of the game to have cookie cutter races all exactly the same, even variation in graphics and basic stuff like research rate, population growth, etc makes the game vastly more interesting.

Its not a complex feature and all the modern space empire games have had it, there is really no reason not to include it, it adds to the experience and realism.

Well the graphics in GalCiv has never been that important, as for the research rate, population growth and soforth you can introduce vast varience already by changing the political party and by your choice of picks - how would calling yourself "Yor" be any different?

There are a HEAP of things I'd love to see in GC2. I'm sure most of them would have been covered already in one way or another, but here are a few that come to mind.

- Much more advanced fleet combat with a combined arms approach for different sizes and classes of ship. I also think its strange that as you progress up the tech tree, bigger ships become available, yet right at the beginning of the game you're assumed to be capable of producing colony ships that have about a bazillion people onboard. I think that the player should be able to built at least mid sized ships such as cruisers from the offset, but that it is the components such as engines, armour and weapon systems that make the ships more effective as the game progresses. This would mean that Empires could wage decent wars from the beginning with their 'primative' fleets of fighters and supporting ships, rather than sending fleets of bees at each other till the mid-game.

- Politics. I'd love to see a more detailed political system, including more detailed factions/parties and agendas. Id like to see an expanded notion of democracy, where if you get voted out of power, you're out. If you're suppose to be playing as the guiding spirit of sorts for one faction, it seems strange that you should still have total contol depite being butchered in an election. The player of course needs further options to stay in power, or regular elections and things to do between them should the player's party lose power. For example, supporting and opposing policies of the government through a senate or making policy promises in order to gain further support. This also leads to me next and final (for now) point

- Civil conflict. Empires by virtue is being an "Empire" encompass many different peoples and ideas. I'd love to see a game where these differences lead to serious and far reaching fractions, like civil wars rather that tiny rebellions that force building an entertainment complex will fix right up. It would be awesome to see empires torn by war become different states, all of which can still have major power status. This fractions could occur across political (such as sector or district) borders, or along ideological, or ethnic (stable mutations causing new ethnic groups? ) Democratic processes and rebellions should also give the player choices of which faction to play as, or cause the players empire to shrink as dissidents form splinter empires and 'vote with their feet'

Thats all for me for now, pardon the essay, im new to this. Do tell me to shup up if you so desire

~SDC~

Well, I'm so bored I thought I would come back and dribble some more ideas, plus GC is such an awesome game, its easy to think of so many things that would make it the ultimate 4x game. Games are always like that I think, its the ones that come so close that always make you think of how they could make you want to quit Uni or work or whatever relationships you may have just to hide in a hole with your PC and maybe some pizza and coke. Anyway, heres another idea from me

- Events, there need to be more, they need to sometimes respect and be caused by current civil or galactic events and the options and responses need to be dynamic, meaningful and practical. For example, you've just colonised a new world, everything seems to be going smoothly, till about a million thousand google insects of death pop out of the ground and start eating everyone. if this happened in GC, the 'good' options would be using up money to send in imaginary troops to protect your civilians, but the system could be so much more inventive and fun. In this situation, u SHOULD be able to send in the troops to kill the nasty bug monsters, but you need to have some troops first, you need to know where they are or where they're going to come from, and then you need to accept that some of them are going to die. This is all part and parcel of solutions to a problem such as this (I guess, having never seen it actually happen ), and I think there could be a whole heap more examples where options need to have more effects and more consequences. I'd think some up but I'm sure at least some of you have better things to be doing than reading about my gaming dreams LOL . On that note, tata again! Feel free to ask me scathing questions to get some discussion going, such as "How come your ideas suck?", or even better, something more constructive

~SDC~

Damn right, but perhaps a range of ±1 to ±5 rather than the current ±1 to ±10, but unlike now where you'll get 20 x ±1 to one >±1, a more even distribution would be better. Now this will make me as popular as leprosy but how about the colonization event happening about a year after colonization, after all it's going to take a while to investigate a whole planet!


Watch Starship Troopers to get an idea of nasty bug monsters

Hmmm...
I know I am focusing on something quite unpopular to the hardcore GC fans, but... I see that most of the suggestions here do refer to the "core" of the game, while nothing was related to User Interface, Graphics, etc.

My 2 cents on the subject, at a first glance, after just 2 days of play:

- all the frames must be resizable. I mean, in poor old OS/2 we did have the game running in a window where you could resize the Galactic Map, the Sector Map, Graphs, the Selected Ships, etc. This will really help the player, as you have different needs as the game evolves.

- when you select a ship, if the AutoPilot is on, instead of deselecting the AutoPilot it should show an arrow on the Galactic Map with the direction (like the one you see in the Sector Map).

- you should be able to activate several ships at a time working with the ship list... for example selecting multiple ships, clicking with the right buttom should open a menu with the available actions

- the difference between the ships (and their belonging to different races) must be clearer. Better color-coding is needed.

- music and pictures are in most of the cases the same (or very similar) to the ones used 9 years ago. A refresh is definitely needed here. Even if we may now use playlists, something better can easily be done.


Please do not misunderstand me - the essence of the game is in the AI.
This is why I rebought it, but it needs some more on the UI.
Btw Stardock develops Object Desktop... so they know what I'm talking about!!!

~SDC~

Thats not a bad idea, plus it gives more time for the player to get a false sense of security and then BAM! All the people are dead! Or in some cases, all the people are rich because a mining operation found a bag of moon saphires! Or something more practical, I just wanted to reference Futurama, I loved that show I think events are a very important part of the game, and I appreciate the humour in them too, some of them crack me up, especially the boil juice one, classic

~SDC~

Something I'de like to see is to allow the players to write directly onto the star map!

Arrow lines, territorial circles, and text notes. And in the multi-player game, these things could be sharable with allies, or made public, on an individual basis.

"Reinforcements from HERE to HERE; ETA: Turn 12"

The diplomacy part to me is to bland, we need more ability to discuss things. If you have an ally you can share secrets that your spys have found. The ability to target a single world to change their loyality to your or go neutral. Neutral worlds where you have to convince them to join yours.

my 0.02 worth

Other 2 cents from the other side of the ocean... (2 Euro cents actually).

Why not move - literally - to another dimension for the next version of GC?
Something that would be a real quantum leap...

I mean, what I always wanted is a 3-dimension space strategy game. Today all the decent games in my knowledge are 2d-games.
I really think that only Stardock could be able to manage the added complexities.

For sure this would require to have some 3d modeler to visualize in 3d the sectors - and we could have also some cool-looking, 3d shaped ships and bases and stars... but this is not the point.

The real consequences in GC would be other ones. A 4x4x4 space has the same number of sectors than a 2d 8x8 space, but the distances are halved.
A 16x16x16 space will have the same number of sectors than a 64x64 space, with relative distances reduced to 1/4... so you can have a huge galaxy to master where in reality the "space" between the sectors is not so huge.

This would require some tweaking of all the major factors, or even a redesign of some basic component, but - why not?

After all, space is 3d (at least)!!!


~SDC~

Well, the computer screen is 2D. So it could be really annoying to view clearly the influence in various sectors, like the tactical map (F9) can do.
Or it could be really difficult to choose a particular star system: some rotating, translating would be necessary to do it.

And I am not sure that it will help the fun factor: if the interface is too cumbersome, the game won't succeed.