unit design rant and planet management in SEV

[klausD]

Hi all,
I would like to express some ideas for managing units and planets in SEV.

1. Planets
- SEV should have generic athmosphere types (moddable) and generic planet types (also moddable). If somebody wants to play with a Jungle Type planet with helium athmosphere, then why not.
-planet types should have an impact on the pregeneration of beginning resources.
-amount of inhabitants should have somtimes an impact on the number of available facility slots.

-Additional facility types should include
-facilities which cannot be built on every planet oder athmosphere type
-facilities which generate additional empty facility slots (eg. underwater, subterranean or orbital habitats, or representing just an improved city-infrastructure)
-facilities which need a certain amount of pop to be fully operational (if not they are effective only at a certain %)
-facilities which cost maintenance

Additionally racial and planetary features should include: Corruption/Crime percentage. This %amount reduces income. Some facilities and intelligence operations combat against this.

All these options are for enriching the management of colonies.

2. Planet interface
-the facility window like it is in SE4 if one clicks on a planet icon. if you are lucky there are no ships in the orbit and the window goes up and you see the planet, but not what you have built. You have to click up to 3 times untill the cargo of the planet goes up. This seems very tedious. I would like to have a info-window appearing with all the vital planetary data (cargo, facilities etc) if the mousepointer goes over a planet without clicking.

-scrapping should be possible if I left-click at a facility icon.

-auto-launch for satellites/mines after building

-little unit icons over a planet should include the number of those units stored at the planet too.

-Get rid of these population bars over the planets. Better would be say 3 pictures of each planet type. First pic portrays an empty world, second level is a colony with some small structure layouts and third level is a busy hiveworld with traders and orbiting sats etc. I would make the planet pics larger (about 2 times the size or even larger) and the amount of available planetary objects per system smaller. Of course I would add many more systems than 255 to insure real epic games.

3. unit design rant
Maybe I am alone with this opinion, but I liked the units in SEIII much more. In SEIII you had all these handy units with fixed values - no fuzzing around with unneccessary designing.
I see no major tactical advantage in designing troops or mines in SEIV. Unit designing is for me just adding useless micromanagement. My troops are everytime the same (1 or 2 shields and the rest ground cannons - so whats the design?). My mines are always the same (max Warheads - so no tactical design at all, just clicking around) My weapon platforms are the same (main weapon, big mount, shields - no design). My fighters are sometimes a little bit different but the most time not. Only my sats designs are worth the designation design.
So I would suggest for SEV, either reducing units as they was in SEIII to reduce micromanagment or making the game options for units more interesting so that it is REALLY important to have several different Troop, Weapon platform or mine prototypes.

tschüß
KlausD

PS sorry for my bad english