I finally finished my humongous game at intelligent difficulty. Unfortunately that level of difficulty wasn't difficult enough so i'll have to move it up a few notches for my next game. Here are some annoyances that I hope get addressed.
- If I'm zoomed all the way out in icon mode and click on the newly built ship icon on the right side, the game should always center on the planet that created the ship. Currently, if the planet is in view, the screen will not center. That a problem for me because I run at 1920x1200 and have a difficult time finding what planet the ship is on because tons of planets may be on the screen. This caused a big issue late in my game.
- Major gripe here... The AI, in every game I've played so far, always surrenders to another race when you defeat them. This is completely unrealistic. The only circumstance I can see this being valid is if you are at war with 2 races that have formed an alliance. One gets defeated and their ally takes over. Even if I heavily influenced the sector all of the defeated race's planets resided in they still surrendered to another race. Granted, it only took a few turns for the planets to join up with me, but it still should have never happened. In addition, I see this as an act of aggression by the race agreeing to the surrender.
- It's still too easy to manipulate races in negociations. This happends often... I'm powerful, I attack a race, another race declares war on me to satisfy an alliance, I immediately negociate peace with that race and demand a butt load of money. Works every time and I get rich really quick.
- Many people mentioned this one... It takes way too long to make planets useful late in the game if you have to build social projects. You should be able to build cheap things to get up and running before upgrading to the high tech stuff.
- Better fleet management- Upgrading fleets and ships late in the game is extremely tedious.
- I noticed the AI has some trouble with ship management. I will very often find a bunch of stacked ships just sitting in one location for most of the game. I can easily destroy it with a fleet as I only have to destroy one ship at a time.
- Late in the game I was really happy to see that the remaining races formed alliances, presumably to defend against me. Unfortunately it was way too easy to buy off some of the races in order to aviod attacks from several fronts. Made my military campaigns very effective. I was very disappointed that the AI didn't mind my building ultra powerful influence starbases next to every colonized planet in the galaxy. They also didn't seem too upset about all of the planet defections I was creating. What's even funnier is I easily spread my influence to consume the nearby planet forcing the civ to pay me 5bc a month for having a planet in my controlled sector. The AI should have declared war.
Bugs:
- Music would cut out. It would simply stop playing.
- I would loose mouse cursor and have to reboot. This may be due to photoshop running in the background, I'm not sure yet. Need to test more.
- Social bonus bug
That's it. Fun time playing. Now I have to try out the new patch and get some of my games into the metaverse.
