Please can you make more colour contrast between the Light Blue and normal Blue. Infact take one of the colours out and replace it with another colour

Ship training should be based on the amount of experience earned(it's also a bit on the expensive side). You pay 1250 for 200 exp(6.25 ratio), 1500 for 300 exp(5 ratio) and 1750 for 400 exp(4.375 ratio), a constant ratio of 4 would be fine IMO. Training should also be faster if you have a small amount of exp needed for the next level and it should refund the experience gained killing enemy ships during training.

Siege frigates should do less damage, they are way better than the supposedly bombardment oriented capital ships.

Phase jumps should consume less antimater, but be slower if you don't have enough, that should make it easier to intercept enemy fleets running around between your planets and not actually fighting, as well as leaving most ships with any anti-matter to use when you're playing a map with 20+ planets.

In bigger battles capital ships are easily focus fired and destroyed, while in smaller battles they can always escape and repair/regenerate shields and are basically unkillable. Solutions to this would be to reduce repair/shield regeneration rates for them(especially at higher levels), but increase total hp/shields, as well as further increasing shield mitigation if they are being focus fired by a lot of ships.

Defensive turrets range is pathetic, you need at least 4 to cover the planet surface with just 1 attacking incoming enemy ships and they can't cover the outer regions of the gravitiy well, so massing them just means that the enemy will jump to your next planet(if his fleet is too weak to destroy them), there's basically no reason to build them at any stage of the game.

The upkeep system makes little sense, it should be based on the actual cost of your ships, while keeping the curret percentage tax(it's just going to be over 5-10 minutes and not every second, of course), because realistically bigger armies are not linearly harder to sustain, but closer to exponential progression, which doesn't really depend on your income.

Support cruisers shouldn't have the habit to charge the enemy ships, sometimes even before your other ships, they should also help your ships even if they are out of their range a bit, as well as use their support abilities when given another order, they should be repairing even if retreating or in a fleet, which is given an attack order, e.t.c.

Maximum allegiance should scale with your empire size or map size(the former is more realistic). It currently drops off with 10% the first 3 jumps and 15% the next 3(capping at 35%), this could be the standart for around 20-30 planet empire, while smaller could have each jump dropping 15% off the maximum(cap of 5 jumps and 35% again) and larger empires having more jumps reducing just 10% up to(depending on empire size) an 8 jump cap, with the last jump dropping just 5%(again resulting in 35% maximum allegiance at the planets furthest away from the capital).

Culture and the culture cannon are a very weak offensive, the culture rate cannot go lower than 0.05%(except if they change their capital to a planet further away from your target then their previous capital was, which ups the cap with 0.02%, but is unrelated to your actions), so "destroying" planets takes way too much time and the enemy can colonise them again and even with the minimum 25% starting allegiance they'll last for another 500 seconds(almost 10 minutes), not to mention capital ships and culture buildings of his own easily counter this and he has more than enough time to create them. You also can't benefit from several culture cannons firing at the same target, while that is not the same with the other superweapons. If I have 20 culture cannons firing at a single planet(I actually did that), it better have some very clear effect and not need almost 10 minutes just to remove the lowest base allegiance a planet can have. The cap should be removed, so you can actually use culture offensively and not need hours just to take several planets, which have their defences and everything else left intact, needing an actual offensive fleet on top of the investments in culture buildings.

Some general ideas, in no particular order:

Patch:

1. Scale fleet points with map.

2. Switch back from large fleet supply if not needed - to decrease the resource drain.

3. AI surrender.

4. PJI buff.

5. Diplomacy - give missions to AI, swap technology (if research usable for another race).

The Future?

1. Moons.

2. Space stations.

3. Slow-firing, but powerful anti-capital ship gun. Either an orbital installation, or firing from the planet, like the ion cannon on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. Planets won't take it lying down!

4. Select and few "Ace" pilots for fighters or bombers. Adds another element of "caring" more about your units. With XP perhaps, and kill counts. Would remind me of Wing Commander / Star Wars, so a good thing.

5. Different types of orbital defence? What about missiles or mines? Mines would be sticky, and be "sucked" onto a ship in its proximity radius, thus possibly solving the Z-Axis issue.

6. Upgrades for light carriers. More squads? Also, should not be totally unarmed.

7. Space events. Meteorites?

8. Minor / neutral factions more fleshed out.

9. Espionage / sabotage?

10. Battle chatter. Total War gives you voice updates during battles, how you are doing etc.

I think it would be a bad idea to increase the unit cap, because with more units planetary defences will be becoming much less useful, which is bad in my opinion.

Lol guys, remember they did say they wanted to be able to finish it by the end of the month guys, don't go crazy (some of you are asking for huge balance/gameplay changes). And no, we don't need more supply cap. For the love of god, defenses are insanely hard to place for their price as it is.

Personally, all I REALLY REALLY want is a little addition to the ship group/fleet infocard telling me how much supply that fleet is taking up...

AND...

PLEASE give us a little diplomacy infocard... or something, anything like in the bottom right or something we can cursor over... so we know who is allied with who. Thats it. Its impossible to follow in unlocked alliance mode with computers.

... how are fighters and bombers not easy? Capships have them and get more as they level up (mostly with the carrier), every race has a cruiser which can mount 1 squadron of fighters or bombers, and hanger defenses get 2 squadrons per hanger. Unit cap is in fleet research... but it also has a tax on all your resources. Like at the end you can have like 1200 unit cap.... but you lose 75% of your income to unkeep (cursor over your resources in the top right to see). Balancing the game out is pretty easy... you support as many defenses and ships as you can afford, and just because fast feels better for most doesn't mean you should play on it until you know what your doing and not taking your time with stuff

I'm glad to see the devs are so aware of the issues. The AI needs a tune-up so that they work as a team, build balanced fleets and maximized economies, capture asteroid fields and other non colonizable areas, and generally be harder to beat (I'm playing multiple Hard-mode AI's at the same time atm, and even that's way too easy). And yes, make them surrender! I hate spending 2 hours cleaning up AI opponents who are already doomed.

Also, I love the idea of adding more game speeds, like you said. There should be a game speed called "arcade" or something to that effect in which the ship speeds are a little faster than fast mode and the research times, antimatter cooldowns, and resource-gathering rates are drastically faster. That way, huge multiplayer matches can still take place in a reasonable time frame - say, like 2 hours.

And yes, add more logistics! I'm always at the fleet cap by like the middle of my games, and I can't spread my fleet wide enough to protect all my colonies by endgame, so the game really turns into a steamroll-fest with the small unit cap.

bigger heavy cruisers
or a new cruiser that looks more than a flying crate =[

- more than 10 real players (about 16 would be nice)
- priority option for the research tree (on click and selected research is started even if 10 other research projects are still in the pipe)

(sorry for that bad english)

THX

It could use a campaign mode and maybe a few more ships.

like medium assault ships, that are kinda in between the light frigates and the heavey corvetts.

how about giving all FFs an auto explore option. Also I would like to ability to set set a ship/fleet on recon (continually jumping between a selected group of planets.

I'd like to see some upgrades to the Research window:

* When I mouse over the Research button, it should tell me how many of each type of upgrade I have (for example, if I'm playing the Advent, it should tell me my empire has 2 Harmony and 3 Hostility constructed).

* When I'm in the Research window, I'd like it to display the icons differently depending on WHY I'm unable to research specific things at any given moment -- whether it's due to insufficient cash/metal/crystal, not having built prerequisite techs, or not having built enough Harmony/Hostility/whatever buildings.

Also, there should be an option to allow me to refuse all enemy "missions." Being constantly spammed by preposterous mission requests from AI players throughout the game is very distracting and confusing ... To top it off, many of the AI players are the same empire type as me, making it difficult for me to discern at first that the audio is actually coming from an opposing player instead of my own empire.