Hey all, been playing GalCiv2 for a while now. I've really been enjoying the game. Great job there at Stardock creating a fantastic game.

I've got some ideas for improving the overall player experience, hence the name, "Suggestion Box".

I wasn't sure where to post it, so it ended up here. I feel there should actually be a Suggestion Box sub category, but hey.

1. Enslaving populations/Conquering Planets

One of the things about GalCiv II is conquering planets is odd. You can technically grab someone else’s planet and their population via influence. Yet, when you conquer, you effectively wipe out their population and then seed the planet and the existing infrastructure colony with your own people.

While this idea simplifies the game, it would be a lot more interesting if you could slay the soldiering population (defense forces) and attempt to subjugate/integrate the remaining alien population. Or have an option to kill them off. The higher your influence and happiness factories (Zero-G Sports Arenas, etc) the faster an alien population converts.

2. Complex Populations

I'm not sure if you guys remember or played the great Master of Orion II, but the game had something that was quite interesting. The bonuses and whatnot intrinsic to a race was linked to their population. This included existing conquered populations as well as pre-spacefaring inhabitants. This would allow capturing an Altarian research base and their scientist population to be more meaningful than "slaughter the lot of them and set up shop." This would also allow you to have a seed population when you get the popup of existing population (what do you do morally).

This would also allow you to have more than one kind of people on the planet, giving it different bonuses overall. Since these are all numbers and percentage points, I'm sure they could be calculated for the overall bonus. Plus under the stats screen you would have a demographic breakdown (74% Terran, 12% Vegan, etc). It would be more interesting to have a diverse and varied population, a true democracy of aliens (or Empire with Vassal States, or whatever). Also, a hotly contested world may have three or four populations after being conquered by several races.

3. Invasion/Soldiering

The idea that the entire population of the planet gets pressed into soldiering and planetary defense is unrealistic. An easy way to account for this would be a slider that keeps a certain amount of the population on standby as soldiers. They are taken out of the "production pool" so they produce nothing, but would decrease unhappiness or allow conquered planets to convert faster.

Perhaps ground troops and starships should be divided out into two different types? This way, instead pressing your entire population into soldiers, you have to build units for defense and a certain percentage of the rest of the population is made into the Planet Defense Force (i.e. National Guard). You could build infantry and armor divisions and have to transport them to far away places.

4. Production

Is the production linked to the population? A larger population would be able to produce more, either scientifically or production wise. As far as I can tell, population only really has two uses in the game, taxation and as soldiers. And the 100% combatant rate is just silly. Perhaps calculating the production of a planet should be population times production ability? Here’s simple formula, the number of tiles you have dedicated to a particular item (social, science, etc) times the bonus for type.

Population x [(TILE1 x TYPE1)+ (TILEn x TYPEn)]

This would mean your existing worker population (or farmer or soldier) would produce based on dedicated population times the quality of your factories times the number of factories. Managing your labor pool would make an interesting dynamic. If you aren't paying attention and get invaded, having no soldiers on hand would make conquering your planet easy.

5. Bonuses

Tile bonuses are awesome. Let's face it, finding a planet with a 700% production tile is amazing. Why not expand this to soldiering bonuses, starship quality bonuses, etc. How about a fertility tile that increases your birth rate? Variety is great for spicing up the old boring "class 23 with nary a bonus" planets.

Including a drop down of bonus frequency would also be neat. So you could play a game where almost every planet as a bonus tile or perhaps one where only 1/10th of the habitable planets in the game has one.

Also, dividing out the random events into a selection box, so you can say how often you want the crazy stuff to happen, like the emergence of a new minor race, or a wave of xenophobia.

Well, that’s my two cents. Feel free to chime in with ideas/comments.

Thanks!