we'll post to-do-stuff in here as well as comments to (hopefully) a lot of your ideas being left here. (our german forum contains a lot more information about this unfortunately in german but if you're familiar with the language, go !

About the resources (titan, duranium etc) and trading

Do you have plans to implement a system where different planets have different values for these resources. E.g. Planet A titan "richness" is 1,5 times greater than in Planet B and thus planet A produces titan 1,5 times more efficiently.

This would give the players new dimensions in trade and create economies of scale on some commodity. Thus one planet could specialize in titanium and provide it to other systems where mining of titanium is inefficient and not worth the effort.

Also you could add certain amount of trade goods that would be tradeable. I had a idea about this that in order to create trade route the planet should create an x amount of trade goods vs. one trade route. Currently trade routes are created through population. And if some planet has higher resources then the efficiency for these trade products is higher as in the titan example. Technological advancement could also provide small percentage bonuses for efficiency (better business processes etc).

I admit it sounds that it could get complicated, but a basic version could be implemented and make it simple at the same time. I have always hated the kind of trade that occurs in CIV 3 for example... this would be more realistic and add a whole new level for trade.

Master- Slave, sounds complicated... Something like that is mentioned in Nemitors game Allegiance, somaybe is no need for such things in Bote!

I must report this, Rotharian UI in Bote overloads my eyes!

I know it's complicated, it's just one of my ideas you know ..

you're not the first thinkin Rotharian UI is too heavy on the eyes. Well it's mostly the font, that is difficult to look at for a long time. It would be much easier if the old botf font would be freely and easily available.

Maybe some of you guys know a better font to replace the RomulanFalcon-Font?

Anything goes here

ahhh Not selling them off just disable them so they don't apear in the shipyard menu.. Like turn them on and off. For instance if i was building the Farscape class warships and then the later-scout-class came avalable i would want to turn off the Farscape in the tech area.. Save space just for ships i would want.. Thanks again..

sure.

that one is already hidden inside the game.

if you use the modding tools like the shipeditor here, you will see there is a field called "Gets obsolete when.." for shipclasses.

and if you play long enough in the game, you'll see some ships really disappear when having researched a newer class.

well let's sir p. decide if he implements this feature in-game for the player

I like the idea of certain planets / systems / whatever being rich in some things so you could trade them between systems. Resources, food, etc. all look like good things to trade.

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Talking about resources I think that it might not be a bad idea to do some tweaking. For example I notice [the way I build] a huge slowdown in the game when most of my buildings are Tech 3 and I'd like to upgrade but I don't have enough Duranium (sp?) mines and resources around.

It might be a good idea to play around with the tech tables to allow mines to become available roughly 1 tech level before you need to do the upgrades to allow you to accumulate resources so the build progression goes more smoothly.

[Reposted from other thread to "suggestions"]

I would assume that when the AI is released that there will be code to manage each of an AI-controlled major power's planets as far as development goes.

I think that it would be cool to apply something similar so that planets controlled by minor races would also follow a similar line of development.

This would avoid situations where a fairly populated minor power has 1 or 2 L3 farms, little-to-no-industry, and little-to-no mines making it a real hassle for the controlling human player to save them from starvation [and then somehow increase morale so they're back to normal].

sure, a self-sustaining AI for the minors is something - one could say - necessary thing. I don't know if the AI is someday gonna be that easy moddable like the ship stats or the buildings for example with an appropriate editor. We'll see when it further develops how this works out.

I doubt that the AI would be easily moddable [say with a building editor] .

The problem that I'm trying to solve is to make sure that I don't get another minor race to join me who has 0-1 [L3] farms with no industry or mines. IIRC I had a famine in their system until the morale hit 86 before I could finally buy & trade for enough farms to feed them all.

The way I figure it you either allow an AI to manage the system to prevent this OR you would need a large set of tables (matrices) and have the minors have "jumps" like you see in BotF. [I imagine the tables would have variables like turn number and population to determine how many of each building the planet should have].

The benefit that the AI has is, obviously, the minors would have to play by the rules. The benefit the table approach has is that it is EASILY moddable and it allows you to break the rules if that's what you really want to do.

With the ship designer it's possible to make MANY different variations on a single ship type [phasers, torepdos, hull, shields] are all easily variable.

Is there a way we can see a ship's exact details? Also being able to see if the ship is green or legendary could make all the difference in the world.

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BTW is there a reference guide that I could use that would show how much better a phaser bank is than a phaser emitter? Or a standard tube vs. type 3 burstfire launcher?

EDIT: The ship editor will give you an idea of how effective weapons are over time.

I would suggest that some of the formulas for how to do upgrades be changed.

As I understand it the cost to upgrade a building from Level X to Level X+1 is 60% of the industry cost of the upgrade. However I don't think that a formula that simple does justice to the concept of an upgrade.

I would recommend a slightly more complex formula that depended on the costs of the building of Level X AND the costs of building X+1.

Example 1: Lets say we have a level 1 building that costs 10 industry points. Now lets say that the level 2 building of that type has a cost of 100. With the current system your upgrade cost is 60. However this doesn't make sense because the Level 1 building obviously can't be 40% of the finished building. In this case the upgrade cost should be much higher [at least 90 and probably higher].

Example 2: Lets go to the other extreme. Lets says that you have a Level 8 building that costs 950 industry points. Now lets say that the level 9 building costs 1000 industry points. With the current system you'd have to pay 600 industry points to do the upgrade. While this number looks much better than the other it doesn't seem like you recycle enough of the prior structure.

Example 3: [With resource costs instead of industry] Let's say that building level X doesn't require any Duranium. However building level X+1 requires 125 Duranium. If I'm correct under the current system to do the upgrade you only have to pay 100 Duranium. I would change the formula to make sure that you have to pay all of the 125 Duranium costs for the building [there isn't anything to salvage from the prior building].

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While I haven't tested out the numbers I would think that something like what's below would make sense:

Total Cost == (Cost of Level X+1 Building) - ((Cost of Level X Building) * Recycle factor)

Really the only thing to discuss would be what the "Recycle Factor" would be. Maybe the factor could change depending on the type of resource and/or industry cost .....

Depending on the structure anything from 50% to 100% sounds reasonable to me.

The balance that I would personally like to see would be to reduce the upgrade times for buildings dramatically [no more 40 or 50 turn updates] while still keeping them expensive enough so that you MUST manufacture the majority of your high end buildings instead of just buying them.

In the end [to force people to mine & manufacture most of their own goods] we may need to take a look at latinum generation and make sure that it's inline with updated building costs.

Comments/ideas:

The system overview

you should be able to switch between colonies in the system screen, having to go to the galaxy screen every time is a nuisance.

I'd like a drop down button displaying all of your colonies so you can quickly switch between them. (could be accessed by clicking on the colony name)

Also, a small mini-map to the left (right under the credits/change/news information) displaying your current selected colony's position in the galaxy would be handy.

Diplomacy/Alien encounters

Right now all races have a description with lots of coalition references in a lot of them. Very annoying when playing as Rotharians or Khaorons. (btw, same comment for special research descriptions)

I'd like each race to have a general description, as well as a smaller description based on the major race's perception of that race. (something to explain why the other race is liked/disliked or why they are useful/useless to the major race, like the first encounter screen you got in botf)

Mining resources

Right now, the mines of my homeworld are producing their full amount, but the mines on my new colonies are hardly producing anything. While this seems natural, as new colonies will no doubt have to grow before being able to fully start pumping out resources, this brings up the following point:

Mining should be another field in the production tab, where you can assign population to. For every mine you build you should have to employ one unit (or maybe one-half) of population to get the mine operational.

Just building mines and assume that they are fully automated facilities seems off, especially with the first generation mines (maybe mining upgrades would decrease the amount of population needed to run the mine, as well as producing more resources, which also seems logical. You could start say with a level 0 tital mine which needs 2 units of population to produce it's 5 units of titan, while a level 1 mine would only need 1 unit of population to produce 10 units of titanium)

Just some thoughts...