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please delete

Hey Sheva, welcome to the forums!

Thanks for your feedback, although it's perhaps located in the wrong forum. But never mind. I'll try to answer our points as best as I can.

Mike already plans to do exactly this. The game currently lacks an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to take control of the other empires and minor races, but it will do a lot more than that. You will *eventually* have the option of setting a "system governor"; basically you will be able to set a system to auto, and it will build structures and ships as it thinks you need them. Or alternatively you will be able to create predefined build order lists and have the game automatically follow them in new colonies or whatever you want. Mike has termed this development style as macromanagement.

This is a planned feature, and will be part of a future update. It's on Mike's to-do list, but so are a million other things, so it'll take time.

Mike does have plans to improve the game database. Whether this includes a search engine or not, I don't know. But I don't see any reason why he wouldn't include a search engine. As with scrapping stations, it's on Mike's to-do list. Please also remember the game object database isn't finished yet, so adding a search engine at the moment would be premature.

Again, it's on the to-do list. There's no point in having wars if you can't capture systems!

Diplomacy is still very, very early in development and will be undergoing major changes in future. Adding this feature is on the to-do list, but it certainly isn't the only diplomatic change or addition that will be made to the game.

The problem isn't just about adding ships, it's making them. If you have a ship in the game, someone has to make the model, give it textures, give it hard points, give it a database entry and stats, give it an upgrade/obsoletion path, and so on. That's a lot of work for each ship, and we have literally hundreds of ships in the game already. If you want to add more ships to the game then it is perfectly easy to do so, but it's time-consuming and there's only so much we can add to the game. The ships that are currently in the game are there because we have spent four years discussing them on the forums.

Actually, we've got 12 tech levels in Supremacy- that's two more than BOTF had. The number of levels is arbitrary though, and can be modified, although it takes a bit of work to get extra levels to work correctly. The game is physically capable of supporting up to 255 tech levels though, but that's a lot of technologies that you would need to think of.

...And before you say anything, I have actually had a go at creating additional tech levels. I managed to think of 30 different weapon tech levels alone, although the other tech areas are around 17 levels each. Not that i'm showing off or anything, but i've attached them below.


I've included random events where you can capture advanced alien ships. These are more of a research event though; you don't actually get to use the ship. It may also be possible to capture ships through your intel services, but tis will be a rare event. Intel is also going to go through a massive overhaul soon, so things will work differently to how they will now.

physically capturing a ship in combat is almost certainly not going to be in the game though; it's simply to complex to implement something like that. And combat is combat. You run or fight. That's it. Obviously I could be proved wrong on this, but I seriously doubt it will be in the game.

Ships will actually contribute towards your research if they perform scans of star systems, stellar phenomena, and alien entities. This option hasn't been implemented yet, but it's on Mike's to-do list. Some ships will be better than others as well; dedicated science ships will obviously be able to complete scans more quickly an accurately. Such scans will be how you encounter Wormholes as well, and possibly other phenomena or random events as well.

As for flagships...wait and see.

This definitely won't be in the game. BotE (Birth of the Empires) has this feature and Mike consciously chose not to include it so as to differentiate Supremacy from BotE. It would require major programming and interface changes as well, further reducing the likelihood it would make it into the game. *some* rare ships get upgrades of a sort though; the Constitution in the Federation Cruiser II and the Constitution Refit is the Federation Cruiser III for example. The B'rel actually gets two upgrades in this manner.

Thanks for the feedback. Please keep posting if you have any further comments or questions about the game.