[Magnum357]

Ok, here are three things I would like to see in SEV. Actually, they are features from SEIII that were not included in SEIV.

-First, Bring back the old "Armor/Outer Hull/Inner Hull" of ship design that was in SEIII. I thought this was a far more interesting ship design concept that the one in SEIV. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the three hulls worked like this. In the Armor section, you added your main armor to this part (you could add other components too the Armor section if you redesigned them in the outside mod file). All damage was applied to the Armor section first. Then their was Outter hull and the Inner hull. You had the option of placing your components in etheir section, placing components in the Inner hull gave greater protection from incoming fire (ie, outer hull components had greater odds of getting destroyed first). The disadvantage to this was that you where only allowed to place 10% of all component space in the Armor section and only 20 (or was it 25, can't remember) in the inner hull tops. The outer hull housed the bulk of all your components with the rest (70 or 75%). This was a really neat system and with the addition of outside .txt editing files, I could see some people making some really interesting desing concepts.

-Second suggestion, I would really like to see the return of ships able to leave dock even if they were not complete or damaged from a previous battle. For example, you could have a DN being constructed in a Space Yard that was going to take about 6 months to build. Now SEIII had a different way of contructing ships then in SEIV (you could actually see the components of the vessel being contructed each month as time progressed) but it was cool to be able to lauch that dreadnaught only half or 3/4 complete into battle as an emergency. Heck, in SEIII you could have several ships under construction and if an enemy attacked the ship yard, the could target the partially constructed ships in Dry Dock and try to destroy them! Very slick feature SEIII had here, and I always thought it was more realistic then the mechanism used now in SEIV where ships are just aloted time in the ship construction Q.

-Third request, I would like to see the return of the old Tactical combat selector from SEIII. SEIV's is basically a copy of SEIII's, but their were some other stuff in the thrid addition that strangly where not added to SEIV (very odd). I can't remember exactly how it worked, but the interface for fleet control was much more percise where you could tell what ships you wanted to attack by "power points" (or something like that). Like for example, you could tell your fighters to engage at optimum range against the enemy's fighters only if your strength was >1.25 (if your strenght was greater then 125 percent) higher then the enemy. If was was lower, you had a secondary objective which could be "if greater then 1.25, engage capitol ships at Maximum range" etc, etc. Anwyay, its a little different then this, but if you ever get SEIII you will notice right way that the the Fleet tactical options are actually better in this Version then in SEIV in my opinion.

And a forth request, bring back disengagement please! Or at least have it as an option. In SEIII, your ships where allowed to disengage a battle if it reached the edge of a map. Granted, this resulted in Colony ships for example always out racing warships and never able to catch them (this was a big problem). A way to keep this in check could be to limit a ships disengagement where you can only disengage once per Strategic Turn. That way, a persuing force could still chase the enemy even after they did a "Hit and run" engagement.

Just a few suggestions I wanted to post.