1) AI is building too many light combat frigates.

2) I found my capitol ships often stopped bombarding a planet to go do something else. Especialy if i manualy told the TEC Devastation Capship to use the nuclear bombardment, it would do that and then head off to frolick about in the daiseys.

3) The escort carriers are WAAAYY too agressive in combat. They should be cowering in the very, very back most area of the formation. They should be far enough back to where the crews can comfortably play pinochle while the fighting goes on.(I must admit that the light combat frigates are pretty good at hunting down the light carriers)

4) I would like to be able to actualy destroy planets. Muahahaha! That sounds bad, but the reason is that I simply don't want to bother defending them and play colony tag over such a large area. It gets to the point where the only reason i colanize it is so that the enemy can't have it as I certainly don't need the production.

It would make things go so much faster mid-late game if I could hit a planet to where it wasn't colonizable (at least for a time anyway). Maybe some kind of heavy radiation poisoning on the Bombardment cap ship? I think this would be great on the big maps, it could cut that rather droll 'erradication follow through phase' when you know your going to win down alot.

****
Thats it for suggestions, now I'll just piggy back
****

Beefing up static defenses as suggested above is a bad idea. It should be that the only thing that can stop a real fleet is another real fleet and the defenses can just slow them down or suplment your own fleet. Attacking should be rewarded unless we want to call the game "Sins of a Solar Turtle".

I would second that there are some issues with the delicate balance of the fleet cap as now, as stated above, the second rate empire of 'Bubba Backwater Beer n' Bait' with their two measley planets can bring a rather sizable fleet to the table by the late game. This is obviously a delicate thing to adjust, but the suggestion above of fleet cap being tied to population sounds very interesting.

Overall it's really a great game though; Hats off to you.

Gimp the f'ing Seige Frigates. I just encountered the mass AI-induced seige rush that many have been discussing, and I won't be playing the game AT ALL until they are dealt with. They are an economic disaster wrought upon whatever empire encounters them. I just burned through 25,000 credits in the span of 10 minutes trying to rebuild/defend 3 planets over and over again. There is no functional defense. They can cause 10,000+ credits of damage in moments yet cost only approx 3,000 to produce... and I was only able to kill about 25% of them before the next empire decided to do the same damn thing!!! This tactic was never encountered during beta, so it's rampant abuse is a game-breaker.

I'm 2 hours into a game that I now see no conceivable way to win... and I have the largest fleet, largest economy and largest research tree!!!! (and v1.02)

Seige Frigates are the 800lb gorilla in the room known as 'undocumented features', and they should be shot repeatedly, have their habitat systematically destroyed, bulldozed, and razed with fire and salt. I have yet to see a valid strategy that truly defeats them in a consistent and cohesive fashion, and every other fix is bullox if your planets are turned into radioactive slag time and time again.

My copy of the game is officially a coaster until this is rectified. Here's a thought... why not make them torpedos? One use wonders that are reasonably cheap but single shot items. Or allow seige rockets to be taken down by flak. Or make their hulls out of f'ing paper since they are giant nuclear warhead-carrying cargo ships... or maybe area of effect damage to other nearby seige craft due to radiation leaks?

Now I'm going to go sulk in a corner and wish vengeful aweful thoughts against whatever madman conceived of this retched craft.

AI Replaceing players or at least make their empire disapear

PLEASE allow to chose start location

A fix for the disappearing Vasari weapons would be nice.

1) Toggle exchange of MMB and RMB camera controls.

2) Scalable unit caps based on setup preferences by the user and the size of the map.

3) Some benefit or bonus for completing the achievements, though its easy to "cheat" the achievement stats.

4) Expanded game speed options. Make it slower or faster then current limits.

5) More Diplomacy options.

6) More Game setup options and victory conditions.

7) Maybe adjust the siege frigates so they can be killed in a reasonable amount of time by overwhelming fleets. Currently I think they are a little strong for what they are.

8) I like the idea of the phase inhibitors being a little more useful.

9) More ship movement rather then sitting still durning combat. Also, making the fighters bank when they turn. Would make things prettier.

10) Modding tools FTW!

Fleet operations need work. Homeworld did strike groups a lot better. You could band together everything, and send them on their way. Capital ships would slug it out with destroyers and other capital ships, frigates would chase their targets of opportunity, fighters would engage bombers, and bombers would engage capital ships.

I was sorta expecting to be able to fleet my units up and have them function the same way. Right now they just feel way too stiff and require too much micromanagement.

A few small things off the top of my head that haven't been mentioned yet, in no particular order:

1) Auto-explore option in the game options for scout ships. I'm usually setting these to auto-explore anyway since I'm too lazy to micromanage after every phase jump.

2) For Vasari scout ships, if auto-explore And auto-capture are set, the latter should take precedence, even if they need to wait for antimatter. Since I usually have scout ships on auto-explore, I often don't notice an undefended extractor until the scout ship is already a jump away.

3) (Real) Textures for Advent fighters / bombers. I think I read somewhere that they're Supposed to look like that, but they look unfinished.

4) Abilities that affect both fighters and bombers should say so in their tooltips.

5) Colony ships should come out of factory with full antimatter. What, they forgot to top off their tanks before leaving dry dock?

6) More customization for random maps, ie. sliders / buttons that determine % of colonizable worlds, # of artifacts, # of phase lanes per planet, etc.

Most be more positive options for human players in Diplomacy: ways to initiate an AI empire to like you other than just doing their bidding (ie- the missions...). Throwing money, metal, or crystal their way, giving some tech, sending a candygram- something so that a player can take the initiative in diplomatic relations.

One suggestion I would have for the problem of PJI is not to increase their effectiveness (except maybe to extend to the whole grav well) but rather to add a significant cooldown in general to phase jumping (which would get affected by the current PJI adding 250%) though scout ships should probably have a much quicker cooldown.

Basically the way the game is right now there is very little penalty to you if you stupidly jump into a heavily defended planet with an enemy fleet without scouting it first. You can just jump right out practically immediately.

A rash player who fails to scout ahead to see what was in the system should be penalized by having to endure losses while desperately trying to keep as much of the fleet intact while waiting to jump out.

The cooldown would add more strategic depth to the game as it would make you think ahead as to where you really want to send your ships. I mean if you were running a space empire you probably wouldn't run your ships around willy nilly without thinking about where to send them

I mean if enemy ships were really meant to be able to freely travel to anywhere in you empire anyway then what is the point of having the phase lanes at all? Why not just make jumping free form so you could go anywhere you wanted? (that was a rhetorical question in case someone missed it since I doubt anyone would want that in a real-time game...)

A lot of good suggestions above.

I think, though, that it's very important to implement any new changes as options instead of total game changers... The population cap, for instance. If the cap is simply raised, I'd like to see a way to set the cap in the pregame screen. If the rules are changed to allow scalability according to the number of owned planets, then I'd like to see an option to select between the old and new pop cap "rules" in the pregame screen, as well.

Also, I think that if the pop cap is changed there will probably need to be some sort of shift in the way the AI is designed, as well. As someone already pointed out, once population cap is increased we're going to see much larger offensive AI fleets, which means defensive fleets will have to be that much larger as well.

My idea regarding this has to do with a potential "Militia" planetary infrastructure upgrade. This would allow the planet to deploy a small fleet of ships to slow down any invading force... This would hopefully allow your planet to hold out for a little longer while you respond with a defense fleet. The upgrade could be an expensive one to prevent it from being abused early in the game...

My big request, though, is unit veterency. This probably isnt the kind of thing that can be added at this point, but I'd love to see support units achieve higher levels through combat experience... We wouldn't have to see new abilities or anything, but a Kodiak that's been fighting through 6 hours of an 8 hour game shouldn't have the same level as the Kodiak that was built at the 7:50 mark. You'd only need something like 3 chevrons, or perhaps 3 chevrons and a star or something to denote levels of veterency, but I think it's something that really helps with fleet persistence over a long game like Sins tends to be.

Fix PJIs, but also lower their tech level and make them more expensive. Also increase the time on normal phasing, and allow us to bring a PJI to the party. Phase lane tag is not fun.

I think the online interface would be the easiest thing to fix to make things more enjoyable. Here are examples:

- Make it where the game properties can be changed while people are in the game room without having to cancel and remake. (i.e. speed, resources, map, etc.)

- Improve whisper feature. Having to double click on someone's name, bring up their profile, then click whisper is a pain. Yes, you can do the /w command, but it's case sensitive, which makes it very painful when someone's name is SpElLeD LiKe ThIS. Having a quick TAB key to complete the name would help.

- Make the music a little less intense. Intense music is fine for in-game, but while in the lobby, I personally think something more soothing would be nice.

- Please explore the router problem more. I know it's easy to say "Well, people that can't host have router/firewall problems." I personally have my DSL modem in DMZ mode and every single other game I play has no problems. Sins won't let me host effectively, and I think the issue needs to be explored more rather than just say "Oh, it's your DSL modem. Not the game."

These changes could be done this month easily and would make a world of difference.

Aha, I love topics like this. But to keep myself under control I will try and separate what I think are needed from what I just want.


So in 1.03 I desperately think the game needs:
- PJI improved. For starters they need their AOE increased, but also they need the effect strengthened (whether via upgrades, or bonus effects between linked wells of PJI, or something). I am sure you have seen the tons of topics on this lately.

- The Empire Tree needs refinement. Having ships in phase space pop up at the top causes the whole tree to hiccup up and down every few seconds (this should happen at the end of the list). Also the autopinning features are either not working or REALLY need an explanation, becasue after spending hours with the toggles I still cannot tell when things are added/subtracted. There should be more toggles as well, having to see fighters/bombers and resource asteroids just waste tactical space there.

- Also the option to have ctrl groups on the Empire tree would be immensely appreciated.

- Fleet commands either refined or more optionable. There are many features which can only be gotten through fleets (auto grouping, formations, etc). But if we want to make use of any of these we are stuck dealing with the downsides of fleets, like how you cannot micro the leaders (caps) without messing up the rest of the AI, and how fleets cannot be bound to hotkeys.

- Group move/jump function adjusted. There is no single key to press to get a whole group to move/jump at once without messing wih the autocast toggle (you have to toggle it on before he single use option is useable). It should function like the attack command, one click is one time group jump, righ clicked (autocast) is always group jump.


Those are what think the game needs to be more playable at the moment. Now things I would really like to see (but perhaps not absolutely necessary right now):
- Reduced antimater penalties for sequences of jumps. I understand the purpose of the penalty, but when it takes 5 or 6 jumps back and forth and around in circles to pin down an enemy enough to actually get them to engage in combat then neither side has any antimatter and the "defender bonus" concept is out the window. Ideally I would like to see it changed to something like a 15% of current AM penalty applied. Which would mean that after 10 jumps a 500 AM pool would be down to around 100, still enough for a single casting of something upon arrival.

- Increased cost and increased damage of Superweapons. There used to be rumors of an actual bullet cost every time you fired one, but that seems to have been dropped. I think it should be reimplemented, but with cost to fire changing based on the distance of the enemy. Make it cost more to nuke their omeworld rather than some midworld you are fighting over.

- Also the Advent superweapon is far too subtle. I think, in keeping with the local psychic dominance idea, should also convince all the citizens of the planet to transfer their earned credits to your empire for a short duration.

- Perhaps it is the proliferation of bombers, LRM, and siege lately, but fighters seem infinitely more useful as base defenses than turrets nowadays. I think turrets should all have their range doubled. They would still be weak vs bombers, and enough siege could still squeak by. but at least enemeis couldn't skirt around the edge of your defended so easily (and we could afford to place out turrets slightly farther out in the well).

- Somehow make the Vasari's inherent strengths more apparent sooner. Lategame they are noticeable, but they lack the an early notable bonus the other cultures have (like trade and culture). Increased ship expense and fleet cost while being marginally more powerful is not a very interesting characteristic. Give them a tier 3 research to add phasic cloaking to another few ships, or a tier 3 research to slightly increase their phase speed travel. Something unique and phase related, since that is all they have going for them.

- I would also like to see slightly larger gravity wells on the whole. Weren't there high/low density planet cores or something planned? If so they are barely noticeable, and could stand to adjust the well size far more significantly.

- I know full PJI stoppage is an incredibly powerful abiliy, and you do not want the map flooded with them, but full local gravwell outgoing jump interference would make for a very powerful artifact...


Anyway, those are about all of my -reasonable- desires after the first week. Mostly elements to make control/selection/movement of groups easier and more intuitive for RTS gamers, a few changes to the pace with less penalty for moving fleets around and more consequence for trying to jump out of an interdicted system, and a few balance changes to make early vasari and late advent gaming more interesting.