Things we'd like to see in the next patch

[Zanthis]

I really like the crew xp ideas floating around. I'd like to add that I personally feel crew should be treated as a resource. You just cannot instantly train the crew for 10 baseships every month. Combined with Baron Munchausen's global crew experience system, you could do something like:

You have X crew in your empire. You have Y experience evenly divided among them. Each crew quarter carries 1 (moddable) crew. Whenever a ship dies, your total experience becomes Y/X*(X-n) where n is the number of crew that ship carried. You total crew in the empire obviously becomes X-n.

Training facilities add crew every year. The base experience of these new crew members varies based on the level of the facility. Lower ones add 0 xp crew to your empire, reducing the overall experience. You could also have the ability to draft crew, which requires no facilities but the drafted crew have negative experience and therefor more strongly reduce the overall experience of your fleet.

Further, you could still track individual ship experience. Say the system worked just like now. Only every year, each ship has its experience "harvested" out of it to add to the empire pool. So any given ship's actual combat ability would be determined by Empire Experience per Ship plus the ship's own Experience. Losing ships before their earned xp could be harvested out could obviously be rough.

[capnq]

In Tactical Combat, I'd like to be able to set individual ships on auto, rather than it being all or none the way it is now.

[Baron Munchausen]

I've wanted to have auto-movement and auto-fire as seperate options, like they were in SE III. Still ask once in a while. You never know when MM might actually do something. I asked for the hotkeys to disable or enable all weapons at once for months before he finally did that.

Being able to individually tag ships as AI controlled is an interesting idea. I'll add that to my list.

[Q]

This would be probably for SE V not for a patch but anyway:
1.) The possibility to give a weapon one or several families of component/facilities as target. You could then expand dramatically the special weapons you have now, e.g. a weapon that destroys only allegiance subverters or religious talisman.
2.) For every weapon a line of the shield level they can skip: 0 = no shield skipping; 1 = skips shield level 1 and so on.
3.) Introduce shield levels: you could create a almost never ending race of research for higher shield levels and weapons that can defeat them.

[StarJack]

I'd like to be able to research a small tech tree that enabled additional population growth on a planet that had reached it's maximum based on planet size. Super Skyscrapers, Underground or Orbiting population habitats, etc. that added a percentage increase or a fixed # of additional population...

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Q:
This would be probably for SE V not for a patch but anyway:
1.) The possibility to give a weapon one or several families of component/facilities as target. You could then expand dramatically the special weapons you have now, e.g. a weapon that destroys only allegiance subverters or religious talisman.

In a similar vien how about a way to aim a weapon. You could select targetting priorites for your weapons. ie aim for the engines or weapons. aiming could be done such that your chance to hit would be less but would increase your chance to hit a certain component

[Zanthis]

I'd like to see a "Shield Damage Multiplier" added to every weapon. So if you wanted to do quad damage to shields, set it to four. Want to do 20% more, set it to 1.2 . That would allow the new Weapon Damage Types to be removed and let us use various levels of shield damage along side special Weapon Damage Types. You could make an engine damaging weapon that did half damage to shields, etc. Easy change too.