A favor...

[PsychoTechFreak]

More abilities to finetune the AI. Something like scripted events. For example, if you encounter this schemer race then replace everything from research slot #2 on with counter intel. Or if you count more than 10 mines, focus on minesweeping. Scriptable special attacks like planet invasions, blockades.

Programming the AI could be more user-friendly and intuitive.

More than 255 Systems maps.

Better AI use of training facilities and other planet-wide facilities. Or change them to system-wide if the AI is unwilling to park their fleets over training facilities (and similar facs).

[dumbluck]

I'm surprises Fyron or SJ haven't spoken up. they have modded enough to know most of the guts of this game.

One that comes to mind is ship/fleet experience. ATM it is completely hard-coded. Being able to mod what happens at what experience level would be very nice.

[Ed Kolis]

This doesn't have anything to do with an open-source project started by Ken Musante, does it? "SE4.5" is his codename for the project, until we can come up with a better name... and I never heard anything about his contacting you!

[Suicide Junkie]

Additive modifiers must be purged.
50% and 50% should equal 75% (or 25%) not 100%.

The additive XP scheme is the one thing that sticks out with a sharp and unfixable point to me. All the rest of the additive stuff I was able to fix with mods, external apps and social rules, but +50/+50 hardcoded to an entire fleet kills the game after a few hundred turns.

[Xrati]

Multi-player capability is a MUST over the different modes (PBW, email and Head to Head).

A scenario creator for pre-game editing so the security features would kick in AFTER a game was started. This could allow for the creation of scenarios or setup for "What if" games.

A better map editor and map generator. One that doesn't freeze up for no apparent reason. This will allow for better galaxy's to be randomly generated based on player input.

A few players wanted some game code changes. I can't recall what they were about, but were good ideas (mostly expanding game capabilities). I hope they see this and post.espace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />>>

[Q]

Even at the risk of repeating myself:
The one thing that stopped me playing SE IV and changing to SE V was the AI. At a certain point of the game, when the AI could, especially in the team mode, still easily defeat the human player, it gets extremely passive and leaves all initiative to the human player. And there is absolutely no possibility to change this. In SE IV you have no modding possibilities of the AI fleet composition, attack locations, attack frequencies, colonization orders, facilitiy manangement. This is the main improvement IMO in SE V and would be the decisive factor for me to buy any SE 4.5.

[dumbluck]

Intelligence is broken. I don't know how to fix it, but it is very broken.

[Ed Kolis]

Just a pet peeve, but no mini-portrait conglomo-bitmaps please!!! :P (Components.bmp, Facilities.bmp, Planets.bmp, etc.)

I HATED those things - in order to add any graphics to the game, once you had your nice graphics made, you had to shrink them down to 36x36 or whatever and line them up JUST RIGHT on the grid... and since they were indexed by numeric ID's, not by filenames, that just made things even more confusing...

[Xrati]

I agree with Ed. Change the BMP's to JPG and save space in files. One picture should be scaled down by the program as needed. They do this in other games, no need for different sized pics. One pic does it all. After all, how many times must you hear that the "glitzy" graphics do not make the game.

MAKE SURE that all formats relating to already useable mod work remains. Do not go and change all the file formats to an unusable one, say like .x!!!

[Fyron]

No JPG! Use PNG for lossless compression. With JPG, you cannot re-mod graphics (without original lossless sources), since every save adds more distortion and destroys more color data. Not so noticeable in massive photograph files, but it is a huge detriment to any low resolution file. As a web developer, I've run across these problems way too many times!

MAKE SURE that all formats relating to already useable mod work remains.

The data file format is absolutely atrocious. It would be really easy to write a conversion script to reformat old mod data to a newer, saner format (like XML), so don't let that be any excuse!

Originally Posted by dumbluck

I'm surprises Fyron or SJ haven't spoken up. they have modded enough to know most of the guts of this game.

We've already posted way too many things in the various SE5 wishlist and feature improvement threads. Concerned parties should go read those!