After playing this for many months, for many, many hours, I have reduced a long list of wants to a few critical wishes:
First, let me say I love this game, and I have played it actually more than Civ4 now, which for me, there is no higher praise. You have come very far in terms of improving this game since its release, and you all deserve VERY high praise for all this, especially the post release efforts. BRAVO!!! Except…
1. We need better AI for maximizing ship creation ability: Basically the AI does not build the best ships it can apparently. In a recent game on Masochistic (I cheated to barely keep up by adding about 40k in funds and did ctl-n until I had a precur mine, FYI), I managed to make it to an end-game position without going to war with the Arceans. The Arceans had essentially dominated this game and had conquered every other race, but the Yor, who surrendered to me. According to the status history, they were way outdoing me in every area by about 3 to 1 or more. So, based on where I was with research, they should have researched everything. Based on the fact that they had 3 times the military might, I would expect them to utterly slay my butt. However, before I lost culturally, I declared war. They had so many fleets running around by I simply over-ran them like the Mongols through China. Now how in the world could this be???? Again, they are not building the best ships possible, and I think more than anything, they are NOT destroying outdated ships! They may also be maintaining a military way bigger than necessary and thus way over-spending on maintenance. Simply put, please make it so the AI will kick my arse when they are that far ahead of me.
2. Something that I simply don’t understand is why you got rid of the "docked planet/ship display" that was on the right of the screen at all times in GCI. I miss this… BIG TIME. It is such a pain to have to shuffle back and forth between all the windows when I am micro managing sliders and the like. Big time disappointing. Oh, and a simple fix would be for the planet list to maintain its position when you zoom to a planet and return. What a pain in the arse it is to have to go through each planet, then have to scroll all the way down again. Yeah, I know I can go through each planet without exiting the planet screen, but to maintain a sense of order about how I assign planetary duties, it is easiest to refer to the planet list, which is another reason to want the permanently docked version on the side of all other windows.
3. Emphasis enabling on the planet list. I don’t use spending emphasis much, mainly because I forget about it, and I have too many planets in the late game to remember and go through them all. So, I would really like it if you moved the ability to do spending emphasis from the planet list. Again, a docked list would make this quite manageable.
4. The last annoying thing is that I really wish the 3 spending sliders worked independently. Why can’t I spend 100% on all three??? If I have the funds to do it, why can’t I? What is the reasoning for limiting this? Is there some weird galactic law in place that says you can only spend 33.333% of your total combined manufacturing and research ability or something?
