>specify variety, there are bonuses. I made a different suggestion too. you might also check out some mods. as for the non-colonisables: pretty much every one has an effect, just check it out. I think only the junk yard doesnt. the dead roids don't have effects, but can support military structures.

I should have been more clear.  My gripe is that that effects have no impact on the game, because there is no reason to ever fight at non-planet sectors.  You can't build a phase inhibitor in these sectors, so people will just avoid fighting there it the effects hinder their fleet.  What I would like to see is phenomenon WITH planets.  Sieging a planet with an unstable atmosphere would make battles much more interesting, instead of everyone just avoiding the gas giant sector.

>most of the higher techs

Key word there being 'most'.  The tech trees are largely okay, but there are unquestinably some techs that never get researched because they just don't provide a solid benefit for the time and cost.  Simply buffing these weak techs isn't a great solution (the aformentioned scout drive upgrade really can't get any better for example), so the best fix to give them a cost that makes them worth getting.  There's simply no denying that, say, the anti-matter increase upgrades aren't as useful as weapon/shield/hull upgrades.  So shouldn't they cost less to make the upgrade more attractive?

planet effects on battles? now thats an interesting idea. when nebulae and co were first introduced I also wondered if those could be somehow combined into planet. imagine a planet which had an asteroid belt in vicinity or a planet inside a nebula. bit like new caprica. need not and should be copies of existing neutral rings, but I'd say its a thought worth pursuing.

also, these neutral well do have a reason to be fought over - the neutral mines.and sometimes they may serve as a stepping stone into your territory and can serve as traps. how about attacking a carrier heavy fleet that is in the middle of a plasma storm? or use asteroid belts and their effect. not a professional player enough to judge the current impact, I would say its a bit too low, but they do serve a purpose. in particular its nice that if one fleet breaks off an attack and retreats in sometimes has to go via one or two neutral wells. as such they cannot immediately flee into the safe harbour of defenses and repair bays that would discourage pursuit.

as for the techs, I never intended to argue much about it. your probably right that some techs in the same tier and with thus the same costs have not an equal value in most games. I guess it does keep things simple for beginners though.

I finally got it where I got the thought from, what inspired me. actually, it was age of empires and the related titles, which usually had both some form of individual improvements of weapons and armour iirc and had upgrades according to age type. another influence was earth 2150 which offered a couple of chasis with upgrades for each. big mesh changes are not necessary, a few details, an additionaly gun somewhere. along with that drop the tech requirements, so you get heavy cruisers at say lvl 3, but at that level they are not as effective. and make tech lvl 8 a real long time goal, maybe with massive scaling of laboratory cost or a tech level research that costs a ton and unlocks the next tier or something.

futile proposal? probably, but I would like a bit of a "passing of ages" feeling.

Also would love to be able to order ship to go up/down, it is space.....

And would love it to cost 20 dollars instead of 40, espeshially for digital download. In russia i bought it for 10/15$

(250 rubles). It is original, english version. I really liked the price. Imagine sales with that price... I would buy a coulpe for my friends...

But it is interesting why in russia in a box it is cheaper than buying online

I would suggest the following ideas to add fun to the Sins experience:

Diplomacy is a nuisance more than anything.  I think a more fluid system that is going up or down based on who is enmies with who.  Like if I go lay waste to a fleet of one Vasari AI another Advent AI that hates that particular Vasari AI improves standing, not only if I specifically kill 5 civil structures (and not only 4 structures cause that would make them hate you!).  How about trading as part of diplomacy more, the AI offers 'missions' to trade (not just donate) in a certain matter perhaps.  On a cosmetic level it would be nice to have very short vids in the diplomacy video of the other factions leader talking (Think Starcraft 2 inter mission type talking).

How about an option before the game to add xenaphobia to diplomacy, it is harder to make a race that is alien to you like you and easier to make the same race want to ally?  How likely is another human faction going to ally with 3 Vasari factions to wipe out the only other human faction in the solar system?  Possible yes but unlikely in reality.

More natural looking Solar Systems, movement of planets would be nice but is probably out of the question but certainly more variety in planets.  At the moment the variety in planets is very dissapointing to say the least.  Also moons or other things in orbit.  How much cooler would defencive turrets be if you could put them in orbit so they are covering a larger part of the gravity well.

Pirates can also be considered a nuisance, they are meant to be but not in an enjoyable way even when they are working in your favour they have to be considered too often.  I would suggest that the time between raids is increased and add some form of pirate activity inbetween based on bounty.  If there is bounty up on a character perhaps a very small pirate group will go and kill a few trade ships then go back to base, just something to consider and a reason to consider defencive structures.  Not something so major that you have to micromanage protection of your trade routes but something that makes the bounty system a means to hurt someone other than who is the last to bid before a raid.  Why do Pirates siege planets?  Never understood that, what's the motivation?  Perhaps they could have landing party ships that are looting therefore stopping tax income from that planet.  Maybe if left for too long the planet becomes pirate controlled and is a new base of operations for them.

More Customisability to Cap ships, perhaps hard points for diff weapon types so they can add weapons based on what you have researched or what you are fighting, or change it's role to be more like a siege Cap or anti strike craft or anti whatever.  The skill upgrade from leveling kinda does that in some cases but a level 9 cap is just the same as other level 9s of it's type.

New races.  Can never be too many.

i think the three races are too similar

to give an example, why not give the vasari huge, planet size motherships - upgradeable with factories and stuff, just like any regular planet, and they have to get resources by occupying planets

i like tec like it is, and the advent too, and cant give any examples on how to differentiate those races more

but you might want to change the capital ships and defenses too - give the advent a better attack, the vasari would have theitr motherships and the tec a greater strikecraft focus (both in defenses and capital ships)

all factions should have different ships (especially capital) - more than just in name, like it is now

and like other persons said before me, ships should move in battle

lastly, would it be possible to make the x axis more manageable ingame, like being able to build, let's say, a gauss defense platform above and under you planet and structures

Like many others, I crave a story mode.

A little more differentiation between the races would be nice.

Even bigger ships 

More emphasis on scale. Example: the game manual tells about how the vasari pack upwards of 1600 people onto a colony frigate, yet the colony frigates are about the same size as any other races ( who only pack 500 to 1100 for the TEC and Advent respectively). Dunno about anyone else, but that seemed a little odd to me.

Better counters (so there's less incentive to spam).

Can't think of any others at the moment...

-Chaotic Magician

i been around awhile on these forums but havent really posted much so nobody will probably know me lol

but hear me out

i was up last night till about 5 am thinking of ways to maybe improve the game in a later patch or maybe a sequal (if there is one)

i tried to come up with ideas that hopefully wouldn't be stupid, and would have practicability and usefullness aswell as hopefully not requiring too much of a overhual of anything, and using existing systems in th egame for them to work

so i got thinking and thinking and racking my brain out and ive come to a few ideas

i know some will have been mentioned before (in some capacity) but bare with me here

1) taxes: ok i know its been brought up before, but my idea for it is maybe a global tax rate, a slider somewhere that affects every planet you own at once, and if not creating a morale system, it could affect the culture system in the game now... for instance, lower the taxes, the more culture spread bonus you have, the higher the taxes the less culture spread and hence less resistance to culture you have, after all, nobody likes being robbed by the govnment and i think it would add a more usefull route for culture to be of use perhaps

2) anybody play risk 2 on the pc? anyway, a ne wgamemode (i know ya thinking that would need alot of work) but i think theres a way to create one without it being major work

we already have a missiosn based system as the ai constantly nag you to get them extra toilet paper and wipe their arse... so how about a risk style mission based game using a similar method of what the ai uses, just a little different

example.... for player 1 to win the game, they need to control 10 asteroids, for player 2 to win they need to destroy player 1, for player 3 to win they need to ally with both player 1 and player 2, and i dunno player 4 to win could be to research all technologies before anybody else, it could be anything like that

3) how about more than 1 star in a system? instead of there being just wormholes or the one star to another system, why not have the random 2 star system, it would add an extra elemnt i think, maybe not abig one but i dunno

4) the big one, diplomacy, i have a few suggestion on this, but keeping it very simple at the same time

example options for a diplomacy screen could be

declare war

declare war on empire ?

alliance

alliance with empire ?

put bounty on empire ?

trade ships

just simple basic things like that which could be usefull aswell as be a simple click on a screen

i have other ideas but i'll leave it at that for now and see what people think, feel free to tear them and me apart i dont mind

peace to you all for now

Last night i was replaying HomeWorld 2, it is a dated game, but though the graphics are not as intricate or detailed, the "style" of the game play was interesting. It has been a while since I played, but I really miss the "story mode" of the missions, one arc or action from one map to another. Another thing is the research tree, which is implemented in stages, in a sort of "just in time" fashion, just before you need it. We have research trees in Sins, but I can see the whole tree, and I have a tendency, (I know its my fault) to try to do all my research at once. It would be nice if it was automaticallyl done by the AI in the background, or prompted by the AI. "Do you wish to research Planet Observer Drones at this time?"

"Increased Hull repair research is available, would you like to research it at this time?" that sort of thing.

It is probably just me, or maybe my approach to each game is different, but I can't understand why, if both games approach things the same way. Or perhaps Sins is Tactical, and HomeWorld strategic? Hope I haven't offended anyone, its probably just me, im missing something, but I like the slower, thinking... laying out my positions and following up on background details while the battle is going on, like, making sure I have enough harvestable materials to convert to points for all the ship function costs. Perhaps Sins could incorporate a mode system? Where if I wanted a quick and heavy battle, i go for the tactical, push all detail to the ai and let me concetrate on fighting, or the other slow mode, where lots of details are brought forward to the users control like harvestable materials and followup on research or building of ships or sub-systems for the ships, and yes, the ships need to be bigger, way way bigger, like real you know?   Anyway, I love HomeWorld, but its dated and probably not going to be redone, a shame, because it is really really good. And Sins which is very very good, but which of course is held up against the spotlight of all our favorite games. It is hard for one game to be Star Trek, Star Wars, HomeWorld, Sins and Halo and Doom all in one $49.00 package. But well... it is was... haha.... there would probably be like megatons of marketshare 

New items or ideas?  How about a persistent universe?  LikeI start playing, and can load maps consecutively? one right after the other without leaving the inside of the game?  Stars and wormholes could be used as load points and load screens such as the main load window could be used to transition, or you could use something more appropriate, like a still image of a ship, or planet, or anything really while the new map loads in the background.  Inside this persistent universe we could also have additional persistence, meaning inside this multi-map loading game play area, we incorporate a clock and random, or even extrapolated events from the state inside the game, such as, I play until midnight, I'm tired, I leave my fleet at a planet and hit save/exit and go to bed, When I log on the next night after work and dinner, I see that in game 12-15 hours have passed. Several of the outer rim planets that were minimally guarded have been lost to the Vasari, while some of the inside planets have increased fleet numbers from production on those planets continuing, or from coalitions that were automatically done by the ai to join the tec/advent factions on close planets into a cease-fire treaty to battle against the vasari. So what do you think??  Workable?   Like EVE online, we could have skill sets or repair functions that take real world time. But the player could be compensated with other things to do while that happens, like having my player character asked if I want to be reassigned to materials mining while my fleet is rebuilt over the next 12 hours? I then get a miner ship, and concentrate on doing mining runs and selling the ore and not seeing or dodging the war ships that are the main fare of the Sins maps. I'm not saying i dont' like Sins, I do, it is great! but i am just saying if i had a dream list, what would i want to put into this game to make it even more "mine" more awesome and more cool for everyone.

In addition, what about a Auto AI?  What I mean is where the user puts the game on auto, where fleets build, explore, fight, conquer, lose automatically?  Where the user can sit and watch it all unfold like a movie?

What about Online Coalition Wars? Where a mini-perpetual game is in progress, days or weeks? where real people come and go, and when they leave their places are held by NPC fleets, or the map area is surreptiously move away from the vacated players worlds and fleets to other worlds and fleets. The AI could be scaled for this, so when 15 real people are playing the ai is in the background moving the pirates and the diplomacy? But when 10 people log off to go to sleep, the ai steps in and takes over those factions and moves them out to a unobtrusive area, and the war and the ai, and enemy scale is toned down to the 4 or 5 people that remain? In this way it is like one long continuous game joined and unjoined, played and exited, fought and bled and cried over and still kept going, as long as the players want to select continue game in progress from a login when they go online? Is this too far fetched or workable?

In addition, the ai could be used not only as adversary as we are used to having it, but it could also be used as a tutor, to learn the game or to tweak some to the decisions of players (mostly new players i am guessing) but could also be used with advanced tactics and suggestions from prominent players or devs to be used as an advanced tutor for advanced players. Workable?

Ai could keep running records of how many enemy or allies are on map at any one time and where, and decrease or increase them according to the players desire. Lets say I start a game on easy, because im tired and i dont think i will play long, but then i get into it, and the game is getting a little more intense, could i have an in-game area to change the difficulty to moderate or even hard? Or perhaps the ai asks me? "Your opponent is increasing the pressure on 3 of 4 worlds in this sector, do you wish to increase the difficulty level?"

What about Chess styled games?  By this what i mean is starting on a rather large map, say 60 plus worlds, but the key here is with a fixed amount of ships, with no more available for the duration of this game on this map. In this way, perhaps captures, instead of kills would be preferrable, or if not, straight kills, where one player (even the cpu in single player games) gets to a point, much like chess, where it is win, lose or draw? Also, having respond to times might force a players hand, if that option was chosen in this chess style screen options?

Also, last and not least ship and weapon editors: It would be nice to design our own ships. Yes, in game that eats up  a lot of time, but lets say you spend a week building a perfect fleet, one for each type of ship in sins, and then load them up and play games. At that point there is no in game time lag for the design, it has already been done, either accept the default and get in game real quick, or select to build new fleet and spend however many hours you want on that and then move in game. Also, last thing...   I promise... character editor, or new character portraits. An editor of course would take it off the devs hands, they could simply give a range and let the users play with it. Of course there is the up front dev time to build an editor in the first place. So its a trade off, upfront dev time for editor alot, or cheap with new portraits, but the editor has more running power that the portraits. Two years later users can still be using it and the devs dont have to worry about portraits. Anyway, that is my rather extensive two cents, but I love this game and just want to see it I suppose, more personalized to what I think a perfect game is. That may not actually be possible with any game, but its worth writing posts about anyway 

Take care,

-Teal

@ brenil: yes, the hw z-axis was cool, but I think the system here works fine. there is much to do as is and I dont particularly think that the added axis will do so much good.

subsystem targetting: considering how fast even capital ships are destroyed in larger battles, I doubt this makes any real sense. still, a system as in EaW or ST armada was cool to use. at least for smaller more tactical battles.

detto boarding parties.

the stances idea isnt bad, but what should be the parameters? ship classes or individual ship types? should it override other orders like defend or such. I see a few problems there.

the naval doctrines in fact could connect to a thought I had about incorporating the civic options found in the civ mod final frontier. maybe like give empires a choice to select between frigate, cruiser, capships and squad doctrine, each giving a slight boost to all ships of the relevant class. I'd elaborate on this further, it would basically involve a whole system of internal choices of government options aka macro strategy.

well, the conquer the galaxy and the real map are more or less the same. I guess you could build yourself a map that simulates it. I am in fact contemplating building a big map which plays more like in the freespace 2 universe. systems would then linked together via wormholes instead of jump nodes and contain fewer grav wells and resources. maybe I'll do it when more tools to tell a story are out.

@ MT4K:

taxes: a nice thing, posted on it before. could be tied to eventual income, culture, garrison fleet and some other options. in general, more macro level domestic decisions.

risk card system: ohh, now thats an interesting concept. it sounds very hard to balance though. but still, different players having completely different objectives other than wiping everyone else off the map. its especially welcome since that one single victory conditions does kinda reduce it to just a big, elaborate rts rather than the hydrid.

while not in random maps, this should be doable in the editor. there is even a map which has multiple suns which are more or less closely conneced. derelict I think it is called.

@ teal:

in that chess style game, what would be the incentive to hold worlds at all if you cannot produce more ships. arguably to make them stronger via research, but thats a bit low. people would tend to cluster their forces for fear of being taken apart if they split it and there is less incentive to split, because defending worlds isnt so important any more. I have a few ideas in mind to make it work, but they all need quite some modifications, so I doubt its any good.

oh, and to any who like fast deaths. please, watching ships duke it out for some time is nice. a frig getting killed at full health in 5 seconds by a capship is not nice, it lacks epicness.

@ teal:

in that chess style game, what would be the incentive to hold worlds at all if you cannot produce more ships. arguably to make them stronger via research, but thats a bit low. people would tend to cluster their forces for fear of being taken apart if they split it and there is less incentive to split, because defending worlds isnt so important any more. I have a few ideas in mind to make it work, but they all need quite some modifications, so I doubt its any good.

Just my thought, but holding worlds in the chess sins game would be to exert tactical advantage, just as in real chess when a knight occupies a particular square it forces the other pieces around it into a certain pattern or avoidance. Survivability is of course the ultimate goal, to live, to outlive the other player, be it real or ai. But in this way, with a limited size fleet which is given me at the beginning, like chess, each loss forces consequences on me that if i could spam capitals i wouldn't have to worry about. But that is the enjoyment here, the fun, to be forced by those losses which i cant replace into other moves, other decisions. And not just get out of it by resorting to the standard way out of the game, which is to spam capitals, or whatever ability ship you need at the time. That is simply my thought that this could be fun, maybe not for everyone certainly, but it could be cool.   I should see if I can actually make up a map in the editor and if I can get it too work, but the limiting thing has got me, perhaps i'm not thinking clearly just now, but there should be some way to limit the ships, make all planets with no logistics/tactics slots except the home world, and that one only enough to produce the 16 ship fleet?    haha perhaps limiting the capitals to a single ability as well would be a good idea. In this way, a "knight" is truely only a knight, and not a knight/bishop/rook as well.    and perhaps after the cap/frigate power line, the remainder will all be lights or scouts stripped down to just guns, in other words "pawns"    haha  im having a blast just thinking how to do this, of course it may not be even workable or popular, but it would be fun to give it a go and see if it is workable. take care and talk to you soon,

-teal

  Now that would be cool! 

It would certainly make it easier on being the one to have to sit down and code it all wouldnt' it?

If it only cost $80 and took a month to do.