Where are the Civilians?

[Steven-n-Donna]

I don't think there should be any maintance cost for murchant fleets. If it's based on any type of economic model, the only reason there would be murchants is if their were a profit! The 'owner' of the ship would be responsible for upkeep. Unless you got into the different economic models that I mentioned before (example: Communism-government owned ships, and Capitalism-murchant owned ships).
I don't really like the idea that you must build the populations ships, to much MM. What would be next, designing the layout of their colonies for 40 planets? No thanks!
I think trade should be great enough to partially support your protectorate fleet definately. Make it worth doing, not just a feature in the game to forget about.
The population of a planet should dictate how many ships are murchant ships per planet, the planet should also be required to have a fleet yard (to build the ships) and the space port. Maybe even a resupply station (to give the facility more use and importance).
I don't know if I like the idea of the ships shown on the map or not. The map would need some sort of filter to hide particular types of ships.
As the game progresses, I'd much rather it focus on a more realistic game play style, rather than what seems like playing chess with options.
Any and all features should definately be allocated in the ministers dialog weather or not you want to control a certain aspect of the game, some players prefer different levels of control over their game!

Steve

[Jason2]

I personally hope this level of detail would be optional. I, for one, feel it would take away the fun of the game. It already has enough to keep track of and I feel (imho) that this much detail would take away the joy of playing. Just my opinion

Jason2

[Urendi Maleldil]

How about handling population similar Sims in SimCity

population goes where it wants- aboard civilian starships and such

alien attributes could be given to that population by altering the sim code in one way or another

When I move population, I want it to stay put! I move to get construction rate and productivity up. The only thing I would like to see is automatic move of new population from planets at maximum population already. Now THAT would be nice!

[jc173]

Interesting ideas about the shipping lanes and etc. I personally wish you could raid enemy shipping to disrupt resource allocation and resuuply of their forward forces. But how do you design a shipping lane map/graph for a race with the Natural Merchant ability since they have no need for space ports?

[ZeroAdunn]

I'm glad somebody liked my idea.

Normally, unless you were moving something along the shipping lanes (pop, fighters, mines, etc.) they would just appear to be lines. If you moved something it would use your largest available transport picture to represent the movement of stuff.

To raid shipping lanes is all one would have to do is place a ship along the lanes and select a "Raid" option. Then every turn the resources produced by the system would be transfered from you empire to theirs.

Making resupply depots in that system useless would be an excellent idea, I think.

(In reality this system requires no extra work by the player, in fact it would simplify things, imagine no longer needing to have all those useless transports lying around to move you population and cargo, instead, just transfere them via the shipping lanes)

A natural merchant race (space port on every planet) would get kind of crowded with lines.

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Captain, I found your pants.

[Gimboid]

Imagine the intelligence operations you could have with trade routes!

Your ignorant neighbour is moving some WP and fighters from one of his homeworlds to one of his fringe colonies. When u successfully perform a 'Trade Route Mimic' on them, and steal his new toys, depriving him of defences and possibly picking up some new weapons designs