1 Bug, 1 Comment, 2 Suggestions, 1 Complaint

[gbraley]

First, the bug: I'm pretty sure that the costs/time to completion for Counter Intelligence projects is being miscalculated. I usually do 6 or 12 CI projects with points divided evenly, because I don't want to bother with intel most of the time, and the minister isn't very good (see my first suggestion). If I have, for example, 120000 intel points and set up 6 CI3 projects (I think they are 500k each), they should take 500k*120k/6 turns, or 100 turns/10 years. I usually finish all of them in ~1 year, and that just ain't right!

Suggestion 1: Separate CI from Intel. Make CI a set portion/number of points and no projects involved. Leave the intel projects. The problem is that, when I finish all CI projects, there is a window in which all enemy intel projects succeed. Or, if I want to actually do intel projects of my own, I leave myself open to attack.

Comment: I get a much, much better game out of the AI when I quickstart than when I create a race and start a game. I haven't tried yet, but I think adding the pre-generated races to a non-quickstart game may be good too?

Complaint: This is a common problem with most 4x games - the tiny little empires irrationally declaring war on the big player empire. My suggestion would be this: the AI should check, before declaring war, if the computer empire would surrender if asked. If it would, it shouldn't declare war. Does that make sense? When a computer player declares war on me, I immediately demand that it surrender. Many of the small ones do so, quite rightly. However, they should never have declared war in the first place. Instead they should seek alliance with me, or maintain it if it already exists.

Suggestion 2: I often want/need to know about system wide resources (computers, shrines, urban pacification centers, etc), not only those that already exist, but those in the build queues. I'm not sure of the best way to handle it, but maybe a table set up like the planets screen, with all of my known system wide facilities as radio buttons and all systems down the side. When I select a button (i.e. Urban Pacification Center), the planet, level (Urban Pacification Center II) and status (complete, building (xx turns), in queue, upgrade in queue) and so forth would be shown for each system. So for system AXF, I might see AXF IV Urban Pacification Center II building (3 turns).

Those are my comments and so forth...


Scott