Spidey
Posts: 411
Joined: 12/8/2013
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I'm not sure what sort of games I'd blend together. To be honest, DW is sort of unique to me in what it does and I'd really like to keep it that way. That said...
1) Make the galaxies feel bigger. 1400 systems is, while on the low side for an actual galaxy, plenty of systems, but it's too easy to move between them. A scout ship, even early game, can easily move to a whole bunch of different systems and it can do so within very short in-game time. Late game it makes sense that moving across half a galaxy is piece of cake but early game, the galaxy really should feel a bit bigger.
2) Better AI that can do more things reliably without needing me to babysit it. I'm not asking for a game that plays itself perfectly but at least something that can do what a human player would want it to do in terms of exploration. Human players vary, however, so please also add configuration options instead of just having the choice to enable AI.
3) A better ground facility model. I'd love to have configurable "stereotypes" that you could assign planets to develop towards. That way we could have player focus on different capabilities on different plantes. Some might be population growth centers, some might be mining oriented, some might be industrial powerhouses, and some might be more heavy on commerce or research or "culture".
4) More detailed racial control. I'm fine with having a few Sluken colonies for foot soldier production, which they're really good at, but I don't want them all over the freaking place. I don't want to wipe out those bald monkey thingies from Sol entirely, but I don't want them freaking everywhere. Why can't I assign colonies as "racial resorts" or what have you? Why can't I be open to other aliens without having everybody everywhere?
5) Race-specific morality. As it is, there's a single code of morality across all the galaxy that applies to everybody. No matter tha race, it's bad to invade independent colonies. Why is that? All the insect races see it as the natural order of things that the strong enslave or annihilate the weak. Why are they disappointed when I do just that? Why are Sluken citizens disappointed by poor reputation for doing just that? Why are they happy when their government is doing hippie peacenik things like not wiping out potential enemies? Evil should be "good" for evil races.
6) More detailed economy. Yes, it's already nice but it can be taken even further. Particularly in terms of boosts and limitations. Corruption is a very, very harsh penalty on everything that you practically can't do a thing to fight against. And civilian economy is just there, regardless of what's going on. Are you going to be going on as usual when 25 big capital ships are hovering over your planet and shooting merchant shipping to bits? I know I wouldn't be. I don't want more micro but I would like a more dynamic system that can be manipulated a bit more. I'd like to have more economy boosters than two wonders and three added regional capitals aside from raw population factor.
7) More control over military ship behavior, particularly the AI aspect of it. I don't want ships to flee because an armor plate took a pounding and I don't want the fleet I've positioned over a world I'm invading to scatter away because there are targets elsewhere in the system, causing me to lose that nice +25% space control bonus, and I haven't found any way to absolutely guarantee that no matter what, the ships stay on top of the frapping planet, aside from personally babysitting the invasion.
8) A bigger requirement of ground support for big space fleets. As it is, it's very easy to do a surgical strike deep into enemy space and that detracts a bit from that awesome feeling of having fronts. I'd like to have frontier worlds and core worlds and I'd like to not have to defend everything like it's frontier.
9) Make independent colonies more bashy. Heck, make all colonies more bashy, but mostly the independents. As it is, a pirate surfboard can dominate an entire planet with ease and there's sod all the indie will do about it. It also won't do anything whatsoever to repel the pirates. That gives pirates an enormous lunchbox if independent colonies are abundant in a galaxy. And players must then either take the reputation hit and invade everything or play a never-ending game of wack-a-station as ridiculously well-funded pirates just keep building stuff with barely any end in sight.
10) Modability. Things like presets for galaxy generation (shape, resource availability, planet type frequency, amount of dud systems, size of potential clusters, and so on), dynamic AI build and research priorities, ship type priorities, planet types, facility types, racial behavior... Those are off the top of my head, but they're things I'd really like to play with.
11) Bigger freaking fonts! Please? Or just make the fonts part of point 10? Just do something, because some of us don't have 20/20 eyesight and don't read grey'ish gnarly fonts on a black background all that well.
12) In-game support for note-taking. There are already 1000-1400 systems. I noticed a pirate presence in one but the game gives me zero ways of putting a note on that specific system so that I can remember that I need to send the navy in. Same thing with kaltor-infested systems. Sword of the Stars has system notes though of course they went ahead and overdid things by also causing an exclation mark to flash if there's a note, which gets really headache-inducing if you've got notes in 25 different systems. Somewhere between those two would be nice.
13) How about an option for scouting systems out a bit ahead of time? I mean, if we can see the star in those systems and we've developed warp drives then surely we have some knowledge about those systems without having to move right into the center of those systems? Shouldn't we at least be able to see some indication of the number of planets from beyond the solar system? And speaking of scouting, how about making the exploration a more emergent thing rather than a simple race to get a ship into as many systems as quickly as possible? That would also detract from the current micro nightmare we have if we want to optimize.
14) Please do allow us facilities that actually modify systems. Okay, so at first glace there wasn't a whole lot of iridium in this planet but it turns out, after a few years of mining, that there's a crapton of it a long way into the core of the planet. Turns out that there are also volcanic regions of the planet rich on certain crystals.
15) Please make planets less binary and more graduated. A planet isn't just a big volcano or a big desert or a big bowl of water, it's likely a mixture of these things. Here on Earth, we've got continental parts in Europe and the Americas, we've got icy areas in the arctic areas, we've got desert areas here and there, and some 70% of the surface is covered in water. So there's a little bit of room for an ice planet race, a bit more room for a desert planet race, very little room for volcanic races, lots of room for continentals, and freaking oceans of space for full-blown aquatic races. SotS does it by assigning each race a planet rating and then displaying planet quality as an offset of this planet rating.
What I'd like is if planets had a rating for each type of setting so that a planet could be awesome for volcanics and marshies at the same time, instead of being one or the other. And since there wouldn't be set planet types anymore, this would go a long, long way in making it harder to quickly finding and claiming the super luxuries.
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