SE4 Wish

[Kimball]

I'm with you guys, staring tech levels would be great.

[BeeDee10]

Well, you shouldn't be able to smiply pick a fixed number of tech levels to have at the beginning; if starting-tech was handled that way, everyone would always pick the two other colonization techs first and then there'd be no point to having three different planet types. It'd have to be something based on research points; you get a fixed number of bonus research points to allocate immediately.

The game already works like this, to a limited extent; players start with 20,000 research points to spend on the first turn (I don't see a line configuring this in settings.txt, is it based on the starting resources for the game instead?). As far as I know, virtually everyone puts that into researching frigates.

Cranking this up to a much higher limit would allow a player to research multiple new technologies on the first turn, essentially giving them initial tech levels. The only limitations I can see with this would be that you could only research a maximum of 12 "initial" techs (four for AIs), and you can only research one level for each one using the starting research points.

The latter restriction can actually be somewhat useful; we could make colonization techs impossible to grab for "free" by adding a cheap first level to those tech areas that doesn't give the ability to colonize that planet type just yet (not sure what it _would_ give, the ability to colonize a planet is pretty all-or-nothing). Unfortunately, though, it also means that one couldn't skip straight to (say) nullspace cannons by dumping all the starting points into astrophysics and grav tech.

[Nitram Draw]

But you can only research one level per turn so no matter how high you set the initial research points you can't create a very specialized race.

[djconklin]

I'd like to see:

1) a bigger universe

2) let us input the number of computer players and its AI capability (0-100)

3) supply ships! and/or allow us to transfer supply in space

4) a search feature in the manual

5) robots which benefit ship and facility construction

6) being able to salvage from ships that were destroyed in space (in one space game you could even benefit technologically occassionaly when you did so)

7) it would be nice to "know" if the trade we are offering a computer player was doable before finding out that "yeah I'll take your technology and give you what you already have!" Or, if it doesn't have the resources you want why let you ask for it? It rarely ever comes back and says "Can't do that but how about (x or y) instead?"

8) be able to trade specific pieces of equipment

[Lucanos]

1) Bigger than 255 stars?
4) Try windows search engine.

[meshuggener]

I think it would be cool to have the planets orbit the stars every turn.

[Master Belisarius]

>3) supply ships! and/or allow us to transfer supply in space

Hey, but you have it now!