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 here!

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.

I had an idea. In the tech area under research / ship design. Would be nice to be able to turn off ship classes you don't want anymore so they do not show in the ship yard.

hm, maybe even sell the design to minors allied with you?

that's not so bad at all

Selling design to minors, playing with minors... minor turning to major power over the night ! That is game I want to play!

minor turning over to major..we had such a discussion already before I joined staff and IIRC we decided to let some "major" minors "expand" like, well, majors but they cannot ally around like normal majors would do. I guess this is because it would a bit too much coding work for the AI part to have all 120 minors have "majors-"capabilities. But maybe there's a way we just don't see right now..

There is no need for 120, but few (2-6) playble minors!

one of my "extravagant" ideas was a M-MP (Massive Mulitplayer Game ) (ok, calm down here, malvoisin! )

to the idea: it would be possible to let other ppl join a game as a so-called "slave" to the "master"-player. They'd have to sort out what things they wanna do separately (and they have to do it separately though the master-made actions soak up the slave ones (we only consider real changes made in the corresponding turn with regard to the old turn, not with regard to the different players' decisions)!) and then more than 1 player (possibly up to 10, then network traffic gets too high and jams most probably) can play a single race and they can subdivide the work.

You might already get an idea of the "response" I got from our team when proposing that specific spawn of my brain wires there...

btw. I still think it's possible and though one might think, it'd be unstable or the master couldn't possibly merge with the slaves correctly, it is, it simply is (stable, I mean):D

and forget about team-edit-mode, it will only lead to masters crosspathing their own co-players and undo their stuff so one could scrap the idea in the first place..

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

Its not just font, these colors should be brighter! Wich font? I don t know, anyone as long you can read it!

the colors still brighter? hm, if you look at the early rom designs back from alpha1 stage, you'll see our guy made it a lot brighter already. I don't think it's brightness, it's more about contrast and the button color. Those buttons along with the font make reading the screen difficult but our guy knows that, even long before he rolled out the design for the alpha2. He'll redo them as soon as he finds the time to do so.

btw. since they are jpgs in the c:\botf2\graphics\ folder, everyone can do that (ok, you get less quality when saving again but hey, if you can read better ).

no just wait & see, it's all not finished here, far from it even

btw. if you want any font (Arial btw.) just remove the installed romulanfalcon font via windows explorer from c:\windows\font and you get a readable one. Maybe then you be able to better differentiate if it's the font or the menu design that nags you the most

So i guess this is something we could add in ?? or did this post just jump off course I also like the selling it off deal. Any idea when we will get some form of 3d combat ?? i can't wait to try it out. Thanks for all the hard work i love how it is gone thus far.

the selling designs idea/feature will not be first priority of course but maybe later..

3D combat well. there's enough already said in the other threads about it. Just wait like we do atm, it'll come at the end of development if it comes..

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

Thats right. Atm we have to work on the serveral shiplists. Than we have to balance all the different ships. So we have to decide, which ships get obsolete. Like Malvosin mentioned you can edit the current shipslists with the availible editors by your own.

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.

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Visual recommendation: On the "galaxy" screen there are pretty nebulas that you can see. However the nebulas are so bright that it is not easy to see stars within the nebula.

Recommendation 1: Allow the user to be able to disable the nebulas and just have a black background.

Recommendation 2: Make sure that all stars have max "brightness" for their particular color. Any surrounding nebula should be at most 1/4 max brightness so you can still see stars clearly within the nebula.

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Interface recommendation: When setting up trade routes you have to go to the trade interface, tell the game you want to set up a trade route, then the game takes you to the galactic screen and you have to find and select the planet you want.

With the larger galaxies available sometimes a minor race's planet will hard to find ...

Recommendation 1: From within the trade screen show pictures and race names that you can trade with and allow the user to set the trade route from there. This way they don't have to go hunting for the planet.

Recommendation 2: Make the planets that are goverened by minor races stick out more on the galactic map. Perhaps they would have a different background color indicating that they are a minor???

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Visual recommendation:
I know this problem. We have to rework the galaxybackgrounds. Some parts of the image are too bright. If you want you can change the backgroundimage.

Interface recommendation:
Okay. I have an other recommendation. When you want to add a trade route, all the systems you can set up a trade route get a color indicated background. But I don't know if I will implement this feature very soon.

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 .....

reference guide

Okay, thats sounds good. Perhaps I will build it in with the next alpha, so you all can test it. I think the factor should be about 60%-70%. In alpha one the factor was 80%, but you allways have needed over 30 turns to update your industry- or research buildings. Now it is similar with the original botf.

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...

You can! Just use left or right and you are in another systemview.

I think that would be too much data. I don't think anybody want to write and translate these information, because it would be a lot of text.

There is a production tab for mining. In the workersmenu in the systemview there is a small button. If you click this button, you can switch between the mining production and the normal production

8O I never noticed that button before.

ok, new suggestion: include a game manual. That way I don't have to post ideas that are already implemented.