I agree with Arc.Smiloid about network play. It would be great to play a game (turnbased or sim) over network and fight the battles in tactical mode. I'd just love to dazzle my friends with my ingenious designs and tactics.
I also think it should cost to repair components. Something seems kind of strange when a ship that has one working component left is repaired to full operational status in one turn with no cost. I mean, it's practically building a new ship that's happening. No biggie, but still.
And I want multiple buildqueues on planets. One for the space yard when built and one for the planet proper. And I want to be able to decide which ships get repaired first if more than one is busted up. SE3 had a quite good system of queues for this. I wonder why it was changed.
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Come to think of it, I find it strange that a ship can be built on for 4 turns and then the design can be edited and the ship being built will have the edited design when finished. Or a ship that's been built on for 4 turns can be replaced (reorder queue) by a completely different shipdesign and all the work done on the first ship is transferred to the second ship. Also something that couldn't be done in SE3 with the way construction worked there.
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I have some ideas on advanced trade, advanced missiles and advanced damage models, but I doubt it's anything we'll see in a patch so I don't know if it's any idea to post them. Would probably require heavy modification of the code.
[This message has been edited by Jubala (edited 07 December 2000).]