I really like FO but there are a few things that are annoying and maybe could be done better, so this thread will mainly focus on negative stuff/critics but it isn't ment as a rant but to help improve the game/get some ideas etc
1. The game isn't really challenging! Once you've found out how to beat the AI you can repeat this behaviour successfully in any other game/map. I've never lost a single game, and I play on maniacal exclusively (although I had to scrap a few games - also the first one which I might have lost - because they became unplayable due to lag....). This is so because of a number of reasons - but foremostly because War/Invasion is easier than colonization.
2. You can establish peace with anybody right from the start - even if they turn it down, simple cancel request, repeat it, accepted. This gives you a headstart as you'll have uninterrupted supply, scouts can go free, and gives you the opportunity to declare war once you're set for it while everybody else is at war and thus, busy to keep themselves low.
3. The AI does neither delare war or propose peace even if to do so would greatly aid him.
For example in one of my games as Cray I went on to completely ignore military ships but produced only bases/colonies which were subsequently terraformed/gaia, all gas giants were also turned into planets and I build every single building that was available onto every planet (even though its useless...). In the end I had 2* the production of all other AIs combined, 2* the amount of planets but only 10 ships! While the best AI had ~1000 ships and 50% more researchoutput as me. He could have easily conquered me! But at that situation he stopped producing ships and did nothing at all (Lag was horrible).
He had approximately 600 SpaceInvaders (!on a 25 system starmap!), 200 Decoys (!for 3 planets!) and 200 low-weaponed Griffith.
After producing 200 own warships within 10 turns I destroyed his fleets in 3 turns and then the game (at turn 250) was again fast as if freshly started.
4. I don't quite understand the concept of Decoys. They seem to be bare colony base hulls which can be massproduced for apparently very little cost. However, you can't do anything with them at all, so they only tend to make the game more laggy and eat up production that should be invested into something more useful. Am I missing something?
Generally I think 1pp for it is too low, and besides, a shipyard should have a certain cap for the amount of ships that can be produced in a single turn.
5. The techtree is kinda annoying to look at. On a 1920*1080 screen I can barely see 10% of it. If I zoom out the text on the techs disappears. I would re-design the techtree completely making it smaller, more "tree-like" and more transparent.
6. Techs that don't do anything are annyoing and should be scrapped entirely, their respective researchcosts distributed equally into neighboring (pre-requisite/follow-up) techs. Make all techs do something for the player, either present a new building, a new hull, new shipmodule or baseline empire boni etc. You can still keep a lots of techs/huge techtree by spliting techs that bring several things, for example, "Asteroid Hulls" brings you 2 hulls and 1 building. Why not introduce simply the shipyard and afterwards bring some tech for the specific hulls (which can be researched in the time the shipyard needs to be build...)
7. I cannot close the info window in the techtree although there's a X in the upper right corner. (The same can be said from the pedia index window in the production screen.)
8. Group similar techs together so the player can have a better overview, esp. if these techs are linear like Mass Driver 2-->MD 3-->MD 4 and offer no requisite to other techs.
9. You start out with too many techs! I believe this is so because you get a planet and 4 ships right after start and their respective parts need to have been researched (?). It would be more fun if we had to research these techs and start out with a single bare planet.
10. There's some techs that can cause confusion, eg "Contrived Symbiosis" will introduce the Symbiotic Hull and the Cellular Growth Chamber which implies that you'll have to build this chamber in order to build this hull (which isn't the case) while all other hulltechs will be accompanied by their respective needed shipyard....
11. Some organic hulls need their growth time reduced. After 125 turns the game will either be won or the ship will be seriously outdated thus near-useless while your new heavy ships do severely lack hitpoints. Although the concept of hulls that grow (and are therefore very cheap to produce) is quite nice
12. Some techs do need to be rebalanced in terms of research costs in order to promote a more divers gameplay. Esp. everything that has to do with military needs to be stifled and everything that has to do with colonization has to be buffed.
13. In my personal opinion a 4X game should promote colonization over conquest, esp. in the early stages of the game when these resources (planets) are still unoccupied. However, as the game is now, building a few warships and troopers is more easy than colony ships! And it does provide you with a better advantage generally – conquered planets provide more infrastructure and population/production than if I have to start from scratch. In addition, conquered planets do no longer benefit my enemies. Plus, adding a new race into my empire will greatly increase my possibility to colonize previously hostile planets!!
14. Going early to war and conquering the surrounding races will let you win any game.
This renders all other techs, esp. interesting late-game techs such as Star-Gates, Artificial Planets etc useless/redundant, you don't need them to win. In fact, concentrating on these will delay and seriously stifle your path to victory.
Logically, claiming free planets should be easier than conquering one because of the resistant force you'll have to defeat in such a scenario.
So basically the player/AI should aim to grab all planets and make outposts while they are still free, then build up his empire through adding more buildings (ie terraforming), getting more production through maxing out population etc and then once certain caps are reached and no more growth is possible should weigh possibilities/ ups&downs of declaring war and conquering/annexing systems militarily. Conquest should come with severe drawbacks and thus, have to carefully planed.
Basically increase the research cost of weapons and armour by a large margin and put them somewhere in the mid section of the tree, so you can't research them right away.
Reduce the build costs for the Colony Pod.
15. Increase the buildcosts of the Ground Troop Pod by a large margin and nerf it to hold only 1 unit of troopers. Introduce a second Ground Troop Pod which will hold 2 units, make a new branch of the techtree which will let you research these Troop Pods and put it also somewhere in the mid section of the techtree.
Besides, I don't quite get it how the planets defensive troops have to be grown with each turn, and at that, quite slowly with +1/turn – while offensive troopers come unlimitedly out of nowhere. In my last game I could build an average of 20 Troopsships per turn who hold 10 units = 200 troops while all my planets combined could possibly reach only 1/4 of that number, realistically not even 1/10 because my core planets were all capped. And then release these ships from a single planet that is freshly conquered and which has just 5 units of troops for itself^^
16. Although I realize this would require a major update of the game, I suggest making troops a resource that can be shipped via the Troop Module, you can only take what is grown on a planet, and only refill a planet to its cap. This would promote another interesting gameplay, that is, ferrying troops around, mostly from old core worlds which are usually capped, to freshly acquired planets in order to boost their defenses. Or to border planets which are more likely to become victim of an attack, or that had been attacked etc... Besides, using Troops for invasion would also mean a trade-off, as it would leave your own planets more vulnerable.
17. I don't quite get what infrastructure does...? There's one tech which will grant me better regeneration of shields (or defense...) by a division of my infrastructure but besides that, I wouldn't know why I would want to keep in positive numbers... Usually I build a Starport + Drydock everywhere so my ships will be repaired always and these to buildings make my infrastructure to be 0.
18. The Space Elevator is kinda redundant. I never had to build it because the baseline supply and the extra ones you get from techs are enough under all circumstances. The idea of sharing resources via supply lines is really nice but there should be some sort of limitation or a trade-off with it. Especially if we keep in mind you can always be at peace with everyone. Maybe the game could be designed that only neighboring planets can share their resources, and if one wanted to make supply systemwide then these Space Elevators would be needed on the planets where the supply would traverse in order for the supply to be able to be passed through.
19. You can easily defeat any AI by building warships/troops in advance, posting them onto his planets, declare war, conquering him completely within a single turn. Without any planets anymore his remaining warships usually aren't much of a threat.... Basically the AI should always declare war if you post sufficient troopers or warships (or both) at his systems. Further, the AI won't accept peace anymore after you've battled with him a few times, even if he hasn't left any ships and only a single planet while your own forces dominate the galaxy. The AI also has to observe your own military forces, and if they are inadequate, he should declare war.
20. The combat system, how attack works vs shields and armour, and how combat speed chimes in here, should be explained somewhere in the game so that ship design can be done right.
21. Shields are mostly useless and way too expensive. Although I understand the need to carefully weigh them because if they are too strong your ships will become invincible which will make them a I-win-button, but in their current state you're way better off with armour. In a game last week I got the +15 shield very early from an ancient ruin through archaeology and I think such a major breakthrough should have a significant impact onto the game. However, as it was, it was nothing but a major drawback (!). I usually don't use shields but because of this incident, decided to use it, which doubled the build-cost for all my warships (!!), that is, it also reduced my overall empire-wide sum of attack & structure-output by 50%. However, the whole galaxy (45 systems) was consistently filled with gas clouds who render shields useless... During the whole game there were only 2 single battles were these super-shields did work! lmao
22. Does Psionics work? I researched this while having a Trith colony under my control but the research costs weren't reduced... (Maybe they were, but only the display didn't show....)
23. I think the Artificial Moon is either too expensive to build, or its bonus is too small. With 250PP you can build 2-3 midclass warships, which will provide better protection of your system than a little stealth, and which also can be used offensively. Also the whole concept of stealth/hiding is redundant because of the fact you can always be at peace with everyone.
24. Artificial Planet is WAAAYYYY too expensive, with 2k PP you can easily conquer a neighboring empire if you do it early.
25. What does Galactive Infrastrucure specifically do? It says, it increases the "supply line range" (underlining by me) but even without it I never ran into any trouble connecting all my planets even if they are far apart from each other... Or does this tech increase the number of lanes a planet will support? Regardless, both aren't really needed and 1,5k RP for it is quite too much....
26. The detection strength of all sensors is currently shown as 0, the same error is in the Distortion Modular part.
27. Does the stealth from the Multi-spectral shield work together with other stealth-generating shipparts? And how great is the stealth granted by this shield? Besides, does stealth play a role in actual combat? And does stealth from hulls, such as asteroid hull in a system with asteroids, stack with shippart-stealth?
28. Do engines also improve Combat Speed?
29. Biological Warfare as it is now is kinda useless for a number of reasons. First off, the specific shipparts are in the midpart of the techtree while their counter Genome Bank can and is reached very soon. Although you could bombard that planet until its destroyed, but Genome Bank is way too cheap to be rebuild.
Nevertheless, there's no reason to use Bio-War when you have space superiority because troop ships are amongst the most cheapest ships to build and it is far more beneficial to simple invade and annex a planet than to reduce its population (which, after successful annexion will be your OWN loss!!!)
30. The game doesn't end when you defeated all enemy ships and control all planets....(?)
31. Once you research Singularity of Trancendence the game will tell you that you win but what the heck, still the game goes on... (??) lol
32. I wonder if the Interstellar Lighthouse (and other stuff like Distortion Modular) are even positively contributing to your own game. The stealth reduction of your own planets or ships could mean that the enemy will be enabled to see them and subsequently, send ships to them. And just to get +10 starlane speed. Furthermore I wonder if a ship has to halt directly unto a system to receive this speed-boonus? What if it only passes near-by? For example, in one game I was building Asteroid Ships in the back corner of my empire and had to send these through 5-6 systems to the frontline, and did built a lighthouse on each of these systems in hope to speed things up, but besides the first Lighthouse at the Asteroid system I can't say if it did work....
33. Planetary Starlane Drive tells you to have a Lighthouse within 200 uu.... How much of a distance is this and how can we make that visible on the map?
34. I wasn't able to terraform to good/ gaia transform planets with Exobots, why is this so?
35. The AI consequently builds exobot colony origins even though he has already established an exobot colony and they could simply build a colony ship there (which is cheaper). Furthermore, he also builds this colony origin even though there is no place to go for the exobots (everything colonized). I would say he is obsessed with those bots^^
36. Concerning the order of introducing new hulls, I'd suggest puting those that have more external slots (for making warships) in the mid-section of the branch while having those with less external but more internal (for scouts, or light raiders) to its beginning. For example, I usually only research Organic Hull for fighters, and its follow up Contrived Symbiosis for 8 troop invaders and you're set.
37. It would be nice to know if a ship is repaired to its maximal structure so you don't have to manually backcheck the fleets ships.
Allright, that would be all (for now)^^
Cheers
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