First off I love the game at the moment, I feel like it is one of the better 4x games at release and I know it will only get better.

I have played a couple of immense maps and got to around 350 turns in most of them and I have noticed a couple of bugs and a couple of things that I have suggestions to make the game better.

I have been playing with a custom civ with focus on peaceful traits (research, social, growth and pop) and dense, with penalty to soldering, hit points and resistance, and patriotic and star faring as abilities and the iconians tech tree. My aim in games is to expand in the earlier games and research tech to help expand. In mid game I focus on research while trying to stay at peace, then late game crush everyone with superior tech.

With that out of the way here are some of the bugs I have noticed.

• Colony unique with multiple level don’t work correctly

If you upgrade a colony unique to the next level of that unique you can build the base building again, and that building can then be upgraded. So you can have as many as you want. Have noticed it with Molecular Fabricator/Industrial Replicator (iconians tech) and food distribution/ Xeon irrigation (food tech)

• Xeon irrigation does not upgrade to Biomass Sequencing

When you research biomass sequencing Xeon irrigation building to not upgrade and there is not option to upgrade it.

• Research cloisters can be build multiple times

I think it is marked as colony unique as you can build one on each planet. But the description says player unique, one per player.

Suggestions

• The AI seams to stop doing research

In the game I was playing all the AI’s decrease their research by about half at around turn 150 and only get back to the same level at turn 310 as they had very little growth, almost no growth. Whereas I continued doing research and when they decreased their focus I was about 3^rd or 4^th in research production. This is also at a point in the game where population and research building are more common so by about turn 190 I had 5 or 6 times as much research production. I believe if they did not stop they would be higher. Looking at the timeline for research you can almost see a curve of the research growth. This could be a bug but all the AIs should not suddenly almost stop researching.

• Don’t show ship details in the trade window.

This is tricky to fix but as it is you can easily just go to the trade window and see the focus of weapons and defence the opponent has and easily build a fleet that can counter it. I know people might like to trade ships so it is hard to change but perhaps it can just be the ship name or only some of the details, or only show ships that you can see in the map.

• Indicate if tech is specialisation or not

Again in the trade window I did a lot of tech trading and with so many techs and also that I have only played a few games I cannot remember every tech. so it is difficult to tell where a tech is on the tree, for the most part is does not matter as you can work it out by what it does. But with specialisation techs I would like to know if it is a specialisation tech or not so I can try to get as many as I can as they are really useful.

• Living ships

a minus 100% maintenance cost is massive especially on larger galactic where you can have hundreds of ships, I think it should only be 50% as with the other tech in the tree you can still get it quite low but there would still be a cost.

• Late game balance

There are probably a couple of factors in this but I my game the scale of what I could do at turn 300 was extreme. I was playing in an immense galaxy that had about 170 habitable planets and I had about 40 and the other two leading factors had the same 40 each and the other 4 remaining factions had about 10 each. With this pre turn with all of my planet focusing on it i could make  49000 research point or 30000 manufacturing points or 20000 in economy which was an income of 20000 per turn as there is very little maintenance cost. This is like 20 times higher than the other two factions which had the same amount of planets.

I think the main factors in this have to do with population and the patriotic ability. Currently it is not hard to have a very large population 70+ per planet, in my game I had 1700 pop over 40 planets and only like 1 or 2 of my planet were maxed pop and I had a growth of 15 per turn and with a couple of tech that give flat approval at no penalty from patriotic ability it is not hard e.g. one approval building to support 70 pop with 100 approval per planet. I think reducing the patriotic ability to half instead of none and possibly have diminishing return to the flat production from population, this could fix most of the problems but it is hard to stay without playing with the values.

• Ship movement per turn indication

When you move a ship it gives you the path which indicates how far it can go per turn but the green section e.g. one turn always is the max movement. I think it should be the moves remaining for that turn. E.g. when a ship moves don’t change the line so when you move a ship it finishes where the green line ends.

• Pre designed ships

I think the ability to design ships is very important but the pre designed ships also need to be able to put up a fight with them. E.g. I have a constructor with 6 construction modules that costs 750, but the pre designed constructor costs 2800 and has 5 construction modules, it is the same with the scout the pre designed cost 7000 whereas mine costs 1500. A big part of this is that the range module costs so much the top one costs 250 which is massive. The combat ships are not as bad as they don’t have many range modules.

I think a way to fix this would be the ability to control how a blueprint creates a ship e.g. when you create a new ship you can let the blueprints decide what to place on the ship but the player controls what to place with sliders, so you have sliders for the three weapon classes and defence classes as well as range, speed and sensors. So nine sliders and then checkboxes/sliders for survey module, construction module and colonisation module so 12 options then you can change the slides to customise the ship e.g. 20% kinetic, 10% shield, 10% point defence, 10% range, 15% speed and 5%sensors. For a total of 70%, the blueprint system with them place items on the hull but up to 70% of capacity. This would allow new players and the AI to quickly create ships for certain situation and the ability to create hulls using blueprint that are not full to make them cheaper.

I have some more ideas on this so I might create another post later with more details/sketches on my idea.