Excuse me for returning to topic in this hijacked thread
Fog of war is nice, but it should not just increase micromanagement. Forgetting given informations in not fogging, but forcing to micromanage. So, if you get informations about a system it is ok that you do not get the latest info every turn, but you should continue to have access to that latest info known to you. Disadvantage: this would create a lot of additional data per result file. But in times of Gigabyte HDs and DSL this should be tolerable.
There should be far more levels of sensors, revealing planet and/or ship details in increasing detail and ranges. Ownership of a planet and number of population should not be known instantly when you enter a system, but a sufficiently cheap scanner should allow you to get at least the "colonized" info from a large distance. May make the game more realistic, but much to chancey if your colonizers only get the "already colonized" info when about to settle down there. Data like number of colonists, and even number / type of facilities should be revealed only by better, more expensvie scanners, though.
I think ship names are fun. But they should not be given automatically revealing the class and the serial number. Especially when constructing new ships it is really bad that everyone seeing them built instantly knows how many other ships of that type you already have if you do not micromanage and instantly rename every ship. Ship names should be left blank and should be shown to everyone if you choose to name your ship. The classes should become visible when you have scanners to detect a ship's components. Too much micromanagement to manually write down a list of components of every ship encountered, compare them, and keep track of classes internally.
[ May 08, 2004, 12:07: Message edited by: Roanon ]