So, what are your top ten things you would want to see changed in 'your' moo2? For me, I'll just throw these out there and welcome everyone else to comment on them or add their own.
Race picks that were unbalanced.
Creativity. Get all techs, at all levels, in all fields, everywhere, without penalty.
- For me, lets first talk about limiting to ONE of the eight R&D types, and only getting 1 extra tech per level.
- Then, decide if there will be options for lowering the picks cost by:
- Selecting a corresponding 'un-creative' type (where the race looses 1 option, per level, and either it is random (big reduction) or player selected (lesser reduction). Allow multiple uses of this pick to either, help in a different type, or give 2 extra tech per level within R&D type. Another option would be to pre-assign the matches, so a player knows that "X" R&D types being better in will make the corresponding "Y" R&D type worse. This way, they cannot just take "Sociological" for every negative pick, and 'get over'.
- If player chooses no penalty R&D type, then double base cost of pick! Use this as often as they choose this pick.
There are other race picks that could use some work, but the above can serve as a template for a discussion point and 'wish list' kinda thing.
Diplomacy and knowledge:
We all have had the situation where, you have a NAP with one race(A), and an alliance with another(B), and then when you finally get race (A) into your alliance, they shortly thereafter go to war with race (B), thus ruining all your hard work and alliance. This seems to me to be a glaring example of where the original design team left things less than optimal. I got ticked off enough on one occasion to actually check how the two races were even in contact with each other, and discovered that the problem was coded right into the "Alliance" option itself.
- First, there needs to be some sort of protection against this happening, like joining an alliance automatically enforces at least a NAP with all other members of the alliance, or the new race cannot join. If a member of an alliance wants to go to war with a fellow member of the alliance, then perhaps they should be required to cancel the alliance with all members (and be downgraded to a NAP), and then they can go to war with each race that they so choose.
- Second, the idea of letting all of your worlds serve as refueling stations for your allies is bunk. Maybe have several different "Alliance options", where in the closest one, you share just like in Moo2, but in other options, you can opt to not share any refueling stations at all, or perhaps just for those they can already reach on their own, thus they cannot suddenly reach further and further into the Galaxy, without ever building so much as an outpost.
- Third, maybe there could be a 'veto' voting process involved when one race wants to go to war with a fellow alliance member.
Knowledge: You make first contact with another empire, and right away (and for as long as you maintain contact) you will auto-magically know every system in the galaxy that this empire controls, no matter weather or not you could even reach those systems or not. In a alliance, this could be the norm, but in any state short of that, why would they tell you anything about what other systems they were in control of? So how about, you only get to 'see' who controls a star system when you are capable of sending an outpost ship there, AND you have at least a NAP with the guys that control it. Otherwise, you have to wait till you get there to find out if there is someone there or not. Using something like this is a way to have something like the "Fog of war" that other games use to great effect, and helps to "preserve the mystery" in the game. I would also like to be able to establish 'listening posts', where I keep my presence in a far off corner of a solar system a secret, and just use such an installation for intelligence gathering & espionage possibilities.
So there are just a few of my own 'wish list' things that I would want an option for implementing in game via a setup screen.