Dear developpers,

I'm following your advancements for over a year now. And i must say: i'm really looking forward to a completed single player version.

Yet, i would like a greater emphasis on the eXplore-phase (after all: it's about To Boldly Go…) in the 4X-concept.
The current versions let me explore the galaxy way too fast. And i expect an emphasis on battles and waging wars. Nice for multiplayer, but not really Trek...

So i tweaked the universe tables a bit:
- i've created a 120x120 spiral galaxy (it took my PC 10 minutes, but it came trough)
- this one has really big voids, so it's necessary to build stations to cross them
- i've tweaked the planets: tiny and giant planets should not support populations (gravity-concerns).
This gave me a far greater eXplore-feel. It took me 100 turns to break out of the quadrant, and minor races are far more apart and thus strategically more important.

Further suggestions for optimizing the eXplore-phase:
- at starting level, i think scan-range and speed are too big for the early ships
- planets should be scanned (individually) before seeing the attributes and being possible to colonize: a full scan should consist of several turns and would trigger maybe some events or science points/breaktroughs. So this would stimulate the building of science vessels (better scans).
- i think planets should be colonized (and managed) individualy, in stead of whole systems. So, when a planet is fully developped, you can move in-system to the next planet (at the cost of a coloniser-ship). In this way, even your most developped systems remain interesting. So you can choose a dense, compact and strong empire, or a stretched-out one, that is vulnerable but large, or a combination.
- colonies should start very small and should be supplied by the homeworld or by developped planets: so transports will really be necessary and surplus populations of developped worlds can be shipped off. Now, colonies grow way too fast on their own. In stead of transports, you might create supply-lines (like trade-routes)
- planets also grow way too fast
- terraforming by building a terraforming station in a system (100 turns for TF a planet)
- also, mars should be smaller than earth and venus

But then again, i'm not able to create a game like this, and do not know what the possibilities are, so: keep up the good work!

Welcome to the forum Filipvdv. Thanks for the feedback. We hope the game will be plastic enough to adapt to many user desires. One thing we are trying to do to make the game more like the TV series is introduce more "random events." We hope to challenge the players with many of the situations found in the many episodes. Much of this work is in the planning stage and yet to be implemented.

I guess there is nothing to keep players from settling down to a life of peace and love without a final Armageddon of war. The game would lack an end point but then that is what we want in the franchise as a whole.

Welcome to the forums, Filipvdv!

It's nice to see people playing round with the game files and making a contribution for once. It's also nice to see lurkers start to post.

As i'm sure you can appreciate, the game isn't complete yet and therefore hasn't been balanced. The database also hasn't been fully implemented yet, and in fact is currently being overhauled (At least on paper, the editor currently doesn't work so changes can't currently be implemented) so a lot of changes will be coming in future. Once the game is at a more complete stage, we will be able to think about balance, and will be able to eg. adjust the speed of ships accordingly.

Scanning individual planets before you find out about a system and can colonise it is something that I personally would love to see in the game, but is unlikely to make it in for the simple fact that it adds micromanagement to the game. Whilst to people like myself, micromanagement is a good thing, not everyone would agree. Mike, the developer, only adds a feature if it adds something to the game without taking something else away, is something that would actually be fun to use, wouldn't take a disproportionately long amount of time to implement, and is something that the vast majority of players would actually find useful. The simple fact of the matter is that this scanning feature would only be appealing so some players, would be hindrance to everyone else, and could potentially take a long time to implement if the option to turn the feature on or off was also added.

Planets cannot be managed individually because of programming constraints. It *could* be implemented, but only if you rebuild the game from scratch, and Mike simply isn't prepared to do that. I actually asked him about this once before which is why I know.

Supplies are an idea that was sort-of rejected for similar reasons. We originally were going to include supply ships in the game, but considering the size of the maps and the potential size of your fleets, this could potentially involve hundreds of ships and would be difficult to manage. We decided it would be easier to simply not have them.

Changing the size of Mars is already in my to-do list of stuff for when the editor is fixed.

Thanks for the feedback, if you have any other ideas or comments please let us know.

Oh, but i do like a nice battle and a big war. And i don't like too much micromanagement, with x-ty types of resources and personnel. In fact, the level of micromanagement like you can find in the Total War series would be fine (or maybe a little more... ;-) ). It was the eXplore i was after...

Even with the existing features i still would enjoy Supremacy very much. But i'm convinced that tweaking the universe tables would result in a better game. A bigger and emptier galaxy adds to the strategy. Empty space with stations and sensor-arrays will become more important, as will the relations with minor races. You could also get surprise attacks in that way. Distant colonies would be more vulnerable. And you would stille be discovering new worlds by turn 200. Wich would be nice, and gives a relevance for the later types of surveyors and starships with greater range and speed. I 'discovered' a lone star between two spital arms, with two earthlike planets orbiting. I felt like Columbus, for 1,4 microseconds. After all, space is mostly empty...
Try a 160x160 spiral galaxy once. you'll see.

Changing the speed of ships will be part of the balancing stage, so when that happens we may very well decide to implement your ideas. But there's no point in balancing the game when only half of the database is implemented, or even when half of it is incorrect!

Changing the universe tables will also be a part of the balancing. I've already been forced to make some changes to the planetary sizes because of the lack of energy problem and the creation of more systems with tiny populations than we had originally intended. But more changes will be on the way once the database is fully implemented and we can start gauging peoples reactions and thoughts on the speed of development, exploration, expansion, and so on.

Something else you might be interested in is that Mike is interested in borrowing interface and empire management features from several other games. These include Civilization 4, Sins of a Solar Empire, and Rome: Total War, amongst others. He *knows* that many different types of people with different playing styles will want to play his game, so he's borrowing ideas from those games to try and keep the management style as broad as possible, which in theory will allow players to customise the game to exactly their own playing style. He's also come up with the term "Macromanagement" to explain how this system will work; many of the systems in the game will have an option to surrender control over a particular feature to the AI, allowing it to make the decisions for you. Player swill be able to influence the AI towards making certain decisions over time though, for instance if a player doesn't want to manage the development of new colonies, they will be able to turn on an AI-controlled system governor who will decide what to build and prioritise based on preferences that the player can also choose. Or players will be able to set their ships to go off and explore space on their own if they would rather concentrate on the empire management instead of exploring. So player will be able to choose whether to get down into the minutiae of Empire development, or concentrate on the overall war effort and leave the management to the computer, hence the name.

It's certainly going to interesting to see it in practice.

Well, it takes 2 people posting around here for something to be noticed, so I'm glad you mentioned things like scan range and speed of ships... I also mentioned several tweaks to the universe tables, but sometimes it triggers changes that are worst, so careful with that.

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If you like TW, then check out Armada 2526 - developed by Bob, TW's main man. Been beta testing it for a while now, should be released next week or so. Has the same feel/pace.

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BTW, the term Macromanagement has been around for a while, it's not exactly new.

My new universe tabel works fine...

I've checked out that game Armada 2526. Maybe it would be nice to play, but the artwork is terrible... It looks like it's a game from the nineties that somebody pulled from under a short leg of a desk where it was placed to stop the desk from wobbling about. I guess it would still be better used that way...

I'll be waiting for supremacy to get finished, or for Total War: Galaxy.

I didn't say the changes might make it not work, I said the changes some comments trigger might not be the best for the game.

About 2526, the images for (some of) the races is not the best, but the rest is quite nice - for the genre. And if the artwork is all you want in a game, then there's really not much I can say