I loved Birth of the Federation so this remake is close to my heart. I even put Mass Effect 3 down to return to my empire building before picking my sniper rifle back up, which says alot I think.

The resource management is brilliant - very true to the original, but very well developed so my vote is for 1) Don't change a thing with it.

I do get very bogged down later in the game though once the number of sectors owned exceeds the size of the System Overview window.
If I could change anything I would allow us to structure that menu screen a little better. I generally have systems that I end up leaving to do nothing, like just produce science or intelligence - or more importantly, maximise credits! It would be immensely helpful if you could create groups in this window, name them yourself and then drag and drop systems into them - then be able to expand and collapse the lists. The idea of controlling 3 System Overview screens worth of systems and having to scroll them up and down in dense Klingon (etc) and remember where every one is and what it is doing is daunting. It definitely hinders the late game play.

Programming wise it isn't too much of a pain. Just a multidimensional array, instead of a single dimensional one, or index's - though i'd use a multidimensional array. Each sorted alphabetically like you do and then drag and drop between them and the ability to open or close the array slots with dimension zero in the array being the primary array index, like you have now. Etc

It would be a great change....

Now all we need is the 3D battle scenes back! (Oh, and I still have to figure out how to use espionage and sabotage - but I think thats my fault)

nice to hear you like it!

well, the late-game control aspects aren't optimised yet, the grouping idea is quite cool, don't know however if MFC classes allow for that but again, I'm not really an experienced programmer in that respect. The BotE code btw. can be downloaded at bote.codeplex.com (it is done in cpp with MS VS 2008 and MFC 8). Maybe if you want to have a look at it and suggest changes or even better change the code directly .

That way one could also group all systems currently on auto-build (if you don't know already, just clicking on a system in the view there and pressing A on the keyboard activates system auto-governor). Don't know if it would also be a good idea to allow to switch through grouped systems in system build menu view with keyboard cursor buttons respectively xtra mouse buttons. Currently you can only switch through all systems you have without further differentiation.

Intel is quite like botf, we just improved it by adding depots for your intel points generated on your databanks / intel buildings. So you can save up points to coordinate for a larger attack / espionage attempt. There are also special sabotage attempts to be conducted on previously espionaged items in the espionage report list. One thing botf also missed.