FreeOrion

I've tried free orion a couple of times, but I do find it a little slow paced at the start.

The things I would like seen done that I believe would improve the speed of the game early on are:

* The ability to set a fleet to Auto Explore to save having to move the fleet manually every couple of turns. (Unless this is implemented and I've just not found it, I will admit I haven't looked at the games documentation too closely).

* The ability to skip/jump turns early on in the game when you can't do anything (except explore see above) until some research or construction is completed. So the new multi turn button would open/drop down the options:
Skip 5 turns
Skip until next event (Situation Report Generated)
Skip until construction queue empty
Skip until research queue empty
(Any attacks or discovery of new race causing the game to stop looping through the turns)

* Diplomacy so when you discover a new race you can become allied (but I suspect this is already on your features list).

* The option to change the number of pre-colonised planets at the start of the game.

* The ability to hide unimplemented features, I know the game is still developing but if there was a 'Hide unfinished features' button I'm sure it would help make the interface cleaner for beginners. (This would mostly effect the research tree)

* The research tree itself is good but also feels like something needs to be done to make it more obvious what things do. Maybe this could be improved for beginners by having an 'Auto Research' option which like the planets focus can be focused on balanced/learning/construction/production etc.

I realise that a lot of those ideas might go against the direction your trying to take the game and a lot of them might have been suggested before or already implemented but I'm posting my thoughts in case any of them haven't been thought of before and you feel including them would improve the project.

Regards,
Daniel

I agree.

That would pretty much defeat the purpose of having an early-game at all, since a lot of the interesting strategic decisions in this stage come from exploration. Suffice it to say, exploration will be made much more interesting in the future.

Something like that might be added eventually, but it's certainly not a priority right now. Ideally, there will be something interesting to do every turn, so such a feature won't be necessary.

Scheduled for version 0.5. There is preliminary discussion going on in the Game Design forum if you have any particular ideas you'd like to share.

I think Geoff is planning to make starting conditions much more versatile someday, but that probably won't happen any time soon.

As far as I know, the entire tech tree is functional at the moment. Exactly what sort of "unimplemented features" were you referring to? Also, a "hide unfinished features" button isn't really feasible, since the game has no way of knowing which features are "finished" and which aren't.

In what way is it not obvious what things do right now? Also, we're trying to avoid having AIs controlling the player's empire. If there is a reason that the player would want an AI controlling a certain aspect of the game, the solution is to make that aspect of the game more interesting, not to let an AI do it.

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I love the ideas proposed here (and I think it should be moved to Brainstorming too )
Especially the skip x turns button.

Seems to me that a good fix for the turn system would be an Auto-Turn option that simply continues advancing the turn until an event of some nature happens, such as a construction completion or finishing a research item. This is kind of what has been said already I just like this wording more than thinking about it as skipping turns.

We've moved a long way toward minimizing dead turns since the first post in this thread. I'm not so sure turns need to be fixed.

What version is the last you have play-tested? If you've played the latest, and still see this as a problem, i want to know.

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One problem with your idea that I can see: How would you move your fleets if the turns autoended on you because no events were happening? That is, if you like exploring, coordinating attacks, and colonizing like I do.

Generally, "Fleet arrived at it's destination." is also considered an event that interrupts auto-ending in such games.

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Thing is, what if all of your fleets stopped and you forgot to move them that turn? I am heavily against that idea as you can tell. I'm a Caveman to Cosmos player((Civilization 4 mod)) so, I couldn't see how an autoending turn would be helpful.

The only way I could see this working is if it autoended while there were no events that turn AND no units in your entire empire.