I've been having a great time with ISG so far, and it seems like the reception has been quite positive overall. Very happy for the devs! In mt recent playing, a few things have popped up in terms of either balance or functionality, and a few others in terms of new features/content I'd like to see down the road. The following is in no particular order: More Engaging Galactic Senate I'd love there to be some galactic UN-style policies that could be enacted. A big one comes to mind which is making mass destruction bombardment be deemed atrocity, and hence hurt relationships with everyone in the senate. Other laws could be explored of course too. Something to make it more interactive and frequent. Minor note on the senate, but it doesn't tell you how/when the next vote is coming. There are also no diplomacy options to ask your friends/allies to vote for you in the Senate, which seems strange. What determines what empires are nominated? Population Migration Creating and balancing multi-faction/race empires can be a good thing. I'd love to add the ability, using freighter fleets, to be able to move population between planets. It would open up interesting options for using mineral poor planets as growth centers to send off colonists to high production worlds. Would give more variety to empire management and growth opportunities. Armada 2526 had a slick system of being able to setup automated transports / freighters to move population around. It was a little clunky in the implementation and could've been simplified. But even setting up a freighter connection between two worlds (like with asteroid mining) that directed a portion of the population growth in planet X to growth in planet Y would be a simpler way of handling it? Customizable Starbases Why can't starbases / battlestations be a customizable unit? Is this possible? Deeper Stealth and Detection System I'd love to see more nuance and depth to detection. Getting really powerful scanners takes all the mystery out of fights and makes it easy to exploit the AI. I think it would be cool if the amount of information provided by sensors declined over a distance, so that only within 25% of its max range could you see the full details of a ship. E.g, Scan level 1 (detect fleet only) would go out to the max distance, level 2 is number of ships (to 75% range), level 3 is ships and types (to 50% range), level 4 is full ship details (0-25% range). Then, if you could also have varying levels of stealth modules on ships that would reduce the effective scan level by the stealth amount. So a ship in scan level 3 (detects type of ship) with stealth level 2 would mean that the ship was only viewable as a generic "fleet". Higher stealth level than scan means the ship is invisible. Improve Map Paths/Lines Visually I'm referring to the movement lines, wormhole lines, asteroid mining lines, etc. Right now, these are all just solid lines of different colors. It gets messy at times sorting out what is what. Asteroid mining should have a distinctive style (string of dots that slowly move?). Wormholes should have a specific style (line is a wavy or double-helix looking line?). Fleet movement paths should be colored based on your diplomatic relationship. A player's own fleets should be solid green. Neutral should be dashed yellow. Peace should be dashed blue. Hostile should be a heavy dashed red line, to make is abundantly clear what movements are hostile or not. On a related note - it would be great if all hostile assets (fleets icons, star system name) were outlined in a heavy red to again make it clear to tell where the threats are. I think it would help the map be more visually engaging too and better reflect the diplomatic situation. Diplomacy & Vassals I'd like to see more diplomatic options added down the road. A system for turning conquered worlds into vassal states instead of full conquest would be cool. Might be as simple as disabling direct control of the colony in exchange for allowing greater happiness / liberty within the colony. You'd get a portion of their income and could request ship construction, but otherwise wouldn't have to manage it directly. Combat Fleeing Maybe I missed it, but is there a ship module (not planet building) that allows you to inhibit or restrict ships from fleeting? It would be nice late game to have a way to better pin and lock down hostile forces that just flee on the first turn each time. Victory Conditions & Galactic Threats? This is my bold vision / idea, but I would love there to be a more narrative-based victory condition that provides a unique way to win the game as well as creating an interesting galactic threat. My idea is that exploring ruins could give you clues (in addition to other rewards) of key sectors to explore for remote exploration. You would then be able to explore and find some unique mega-artifacts that would provide benefits to being held and perhaps even function similar to the Age of Wonders 3 seal's victory system. As these get discovered, they awaken some galactic threat that starts to spawn across the galaxy, which tries to retake the artifact sites and attacks the different empires directly. Could be pretty awesome I feel. That's it for now. Phew!
That was a great feature in MOO2 as well. Often it was a crucial to send a colonist or two to a newly populated world, it boosted its production dramatically. I've pointed out this to Adam Apr 23, 2017 so quite a long time ago, maybe we will get this in DLC
A lot of good ideas here. I think we will see quite a few of them show up in some form or fashion in future DLC or expansions.
Great ideas there @Mezmorki . I would like to add for what we need right away is an "auto turn" feature. NOT FUN just hitting "end turn" for 5 or so turns in a row. An auto turn feature when the turns stop for something for us to do I think would help a long way. We asked for this in the MOO CtS forum on Steam, and the dev's gave it to us eventually and it helped out playing the game, at least the first few turns when all we can do is wait.
Great stuff Mezmorki! Some of this is actually already envisaged, others we could certainly consider as I like all the ideas you propose. Awesome! And, thanks. The reception has been great. We're very happy with the feedback we're getting from the fans through many channels. You read constant mentions to "MoO2 2.5", "this is what MoO3 could have been" and "this is what MoO4 should have been". On that feedback alone we can say mission accomplished, as this was what we set out to do. Going forward, I believe Praxis Games has a great future ahead and we count on everyone to make it a brilliant one! Let's go one by one. I also like having more options in a Senate-type mechanic. Having laws being passed is a great idea for one of the expansions. I took note of this to be considered, and I'll add it to the Community Feedback List (CFL) as well. Correct, but it will as this was something we had already detected. Could be fun to surprise the player, but in the end it's more useful to know when the senate is convened. True. It's likely that a friend will vote for you, definitely an ally. Asking for a vote could be an interesting option to explore. I'll give it some thought. The two empires with the most votes are nominated. Several factors contribute to the number of votes. You can see which by inspecting the tooltip on one of the voter little faces. These are: POP numbers (1 vote per POP), strategic resource sources (2 votes per source), galactic wonders owned (5 votes per galactic wonder) and ancient artifacts owned (10 votes per artifact). Yes, we plan on offering multi-race empires. The game code alrerady supports that and we wish to make it a reality. I understand that the ability to move POPs around using freighters is a popular request, if not a must. I'll consider that for the expansions. We will have a migration-type system, we just need some time to figure out the exact way we're going to implement this. You read our minds We want to offer customizable starbases. Everything is ready and can support that, it's just a question of doing it. So, it's very likely to be a feature in the first expansion, if not before. Seems complex, but doable in some aspects. I agree that we could improve the current stealth and detection system with a bit more nuance and depth. Part of it will be to expand what the combat side scanning can achieve depending on the scanners tech levels. We can also think in further ways to conceal and counter from scanners, like having anti-scanner/stealth tech. The Cloacking Device is in the cards, for example. I took note of this and will give it some thought for a future expansion. Absolutely. We will definitely improve the looks of all the lines in the starmap, as it can get messy pretty quickly, we're aware of that. We basically run out of time on that one, so we could focus on other more critical aspects of the game for the release. But, we will address this I can guarantee you this. All those lines will be much more clean, pretty, unintrusive and we plan on giving the player full options to disable what they want. We also want to offer that. I love Civ5's puppet system, which is more or less what you're suggestion if I understood correctly. A puppet colony would manage itself and provide some benefit in exchange of lack of player control. This helps solve late-game micromanagement in a satisfactory way. As for a full-blown vassal states feature, that is something we may consider but probably only for the 2nd expansion, if it is to be put in the game. I have my personal likes and dislikes about having a vassal system, but overall I favor it, although I think it would be a challenging system to implement. Still a possibility though. There will be such a system It was designed, but ended up in the list of systems to offer in expansions because we run out of time, and these suckers are time-consuming to implement. We'll offer this and plenty other special systems in the expansions. I'm pretty sure we will be offering some version of what you're describing in the expansions. At the very least we wish that, and it's a strong possibility. Stay tuned! The universe of Interstellar Space has just seen its origins, and more mysteries and unknowns await! Awesome suggestions Mezmorki. Keep them coming. Thanks!
The idea would be to design the game so that you didn't have to have an auto-turn feature Sure, there can be dead turns, like 5 or so, but is that really an issue? I mean, do you remember how many turns you had to press in MoO1 and MoO2 it the beginning? It was a lot. I mean, when you went with the colony ship it could be like 20 or 30 or more turns doing nothing but pressing that button. In ISG we offer remote exploration and somewhat fast early research. You also have the infrastructure specialization that requires your actions. You also have events popping, leaders desires, leaders levelling up. Contacts being made and you receive a notification. All this was mostly absent in MoO2, at least for most part. MoO2 really needed that auto-turn feature. So, do we really need it here? Personaly I'm ok without it, but I may consider it if enough people think that is really necessary. Again, the idea is that it shouldn't be needed in the first place because the game should always have something for you to do or check between 3 or 4 turns, even if that's just checking where your fleets are heading or should go next. And this is only applicable in the first what, 50 turns? After that point you probably don't have a dead turn ever since, or only one dead turn once in a while. If the time to process the turn is part of the issue, you can disable the autosaves for the first 50 turns or so, and I assure you that turns will process like a breeze Let me know.
I'm also not seeing many dead turns during a game. Even early on it's pretty tight. And I almost always have stuff to check each turn even if there isn't a lot going on as there's usually some news on the right side. I wonder if some people just haven't seen all the things you can do yet. I am getting a little bit of slowdown on Huge at turn 350 but that's probably just my lack of memory.
Thanks Adam - glad to hear that my suggestions are all inline with your future thoughts as well. Can't wait to see how these things shake out in th the months (hopefully years?) ahead. I've been recommending this game to quite a few people as well.
It shouldn't be a memory issue. The autosaves can slow you a bit because the game saves every turn by default. This can be especially slow in hard disks that are not SSD. Try disabling autosaves, or set them to every 4 or 6 turns. That should help you process your turns much faster. Let me know.
Do I need it? No it's not a game breaker but would make the game better. Maybe it's my play style. One game I clicked like 10 or so turns for something to happen. The beginning of the game was so slow. Now that I found out I can put a setting for myself as Magistrate. I think that is what is called, the "easiest" setting game goes faster but there is still 5-10 turns of just hitting end turn. I have no idea how easy it is to implement. I don't know how much it would cost and be worth to do it and if it would be worth time and money to do so. I don't know, maybe it's a physiological thing. It's we hit "end turn" and then when there is something to do, the game stops. This way it feels like we are only hitting end turn once, and not 5 or 10 times or more, if that makes sense.
I'm not sure I understand, Davor. You know you can just hit the <ENTER> key to end the turn, right? I don't find that cumbersome. If it just passed turns automatically until something was built, you'd miss the opportunity to respond to the appearance of enemy fleets, etc.
Population Migration should copy what stelllaris did with race policies so have choose a race to be slave,free and it will have a bonus,etc but will automove to other planets.Manual movements of pops is a micro nightmare I don't want to see.
Well, as long as we are making wishes, I may as well add three of my own. (for now) I would like an option that gives the ability to set equal starting distance for the factions in a new game. Currently this is random, and more often than not, the races start clustered together in one area of the map. The drawback with this is multi-fold. For a new player, it can be challenging to survive in such an environment. For the seasoned veteran, it is too easy to rush a nearby neighbor and gain an early insurmountable advantage. Lastly, early contact tends to make the game map “feel” smaller than it is. In my opinion an option that allows the player to put maximum distance between factions at the start, would be most beneficial. I would love the ability to close borders, it would be a great addition to diplomacy and introduce a new aspect to the existing game. Right now both the player and AI are free to not only transverse through someone else’s territory, but actually explore the systems within. Closing borders would mean that neither of these cases would be possible as they would be considered a hostile act. Ideally it would be best if violating borders did not trigger war instantly, (like an attack does), but rather triggered the option of how to respond (do nothing and the borders become open again, or declare war) Another area I would like addressed is the cost of picks when creating a race. For example, a small HW = -2 picks, a large HW = 4 picks and subterranean =6. Think about this for a moment, in the first two cases you either lose or gain 4 maximum population capacity on the HW, yet the costs are not balanced. In the last case, you gain extra population capacity in every single world you colonize, including the HW. Perhaps it’s just me but it seems a bit off. There are other instances as well where the cost doesn’t seem to justify the benefit, but I understand this is a tricky thing, many of the current races would be affected by adjustments made here.
This is how it works, or should work, at the moment by default. The placement algorithm tries to give equal starting distance as much it can between the players' homeworld. It may not always succeed at that but from my understanding it does succeed more times than not. And then players start nearby, it's only in a rare occasion and usually just 2 of them, not all close together, at least from my understanding. That said, I could have a look at this to see what can be done, as by default this is supposed to be the way it works, at least most of the time. I also feel the occasional close neighbor could also be an interesting thing for game variation. Yes, a close/open borders feature in diplomacy is an idea I entertained for quite some time. It's tricky to get right but I feel something more could be done here. I took not of this and we'll see if something along these lines can make it in at some point. I see what you mean. It is tricky to change the picks around, but perhaps 4 picks for large homeworld can be a bit too much and something could be done about it. I'll think about this, thanks!
I tend to favor a more automatic approach to POP migration with policies that are set over a manual one, as well.
That's disturbing to hear, I must have had a string of uneven starts as it seems more often than not, the opposite is happening. If the game is already set up that way, perhaps my own experiences will even out over the course of time. I do understand the appeal of randomness, but at the stage of proficiency I have reached with the game, it is too tempting to not quickly conquer an AI when it is near. The consequences of doing so tend to make things easier. No matter then, I'll observe this more when 1.05 releases and see what I find out.
There is a good reason for increasing the size of the homeworld to cost a high number of picks--it has a head start on all other colonies, so is the natural place you'd want to build empire buildings that take up building slots and benefit from increased population. I regularly take the pick for that reason, but I'd gladly spend even more points for a huge home world--I'd take huge home world over subterranean any day just to know I can build my capital buildings early and get the most of that them. I'm not saying that's necessarily a rational thing for a min-maxer to do, but if large was 3 and huge was 6, I'd take huge. Maybe even if huge was 8. I just like my capital to be--well, my capital. @Ashbery76, what size map are you playing on, and what difficult? The algorithm has a lot to deal with because it's trying to insure starting conditions match difficulty levels, etc., and the medium sized galaxy really isn't *that* large. The closet I've started to anyone was 3 sectors if you count diagonally, usually 5+. The only thing I hated about no closed borders in other games was the AI putting a settlement right next to my city. The zones of control prevent that. I was a little disturbed seeing AI fleets using me as a highway my first game, but now I kind of like it. And remember closed borders work both ways--you could end up completely blocked in and unable to explore with an unlucky start. Though I suppose that would give more of a reason to declare war. Maybe as an option down the line--but that will also take a lot of work on the AI to handle it and the hemming in tactics that come with it.
The fallacy of that argument is that subterranean also affects the HW, along with every single colony you will ever create, and increased building slots are fairly easy to come by through other means. The cost is not in line with the benefit, or with other picks. It is also not in line with a small HW netting -2 picks. Yes, all true, however I would love to see it as a diplomatic choice, it is too realistic to leave out. Making it an option only affects the AI as a player could choose to exercise this or not. Speaking of the AI, I've played ISG enough to know that it could actually be beneficial as right now it tends to expand in a manner that can makes defending itself difficult. As far as being boxed in, it is almost impossible for this to happen early on as the "zone of control" (or if you prefer color coded territory), is rather small in the early game. War would be one way to deal with it if it happens, good diplomatic relations would be another.
