criticalsystems0110

What we want in the Expansion Pack

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What we want in the Expansion Pack

Great Game but can be Extraordinary with a few additions

from Sins Forums

Ok now first off i just want to say that Sins is already the best 4x RTS of all time. That said, there are a few additions I beg the developers to put into the expansion pack. Im sure you guys will have tons of posts to add but this is basically what im asking for:

1) single player campaign

One thing that really bugs me is that there is no drawn out story line to follow along map after map. I realize it saved money by not releasing anything but individual scenarios, but now that the game is making millions of dollars it only makes sense to add this much needed aspect to the game. This also gives the creators a chance to really show the players how to use every tech and unit to its fullest ability. their is so much more strategy in this game beyond economics and fleet sizes, but it is lost on the majority of players since we cant see those strategies play out in a single player environment.

2) battle stations and capital siege engines

a logical unit that races would want to construct to defend themselves from hordes of enemy ships while their fleets are light years away would be an extremely powerful battle station. like a castle in space, it would be designed to be nearly impenetrable to smaller units (strike craft, frigates, and crusiers). the enemy fleet would want to have in tow some sort of asteroid sized siege engine that could house a seige engine. perhaps a dead asteroid would have to be used as a resource to build such a weapon.

3) planet based defenses

with so much space on a planet, we should be able to construct some planet-to-space weapons that would be effective against large capital ships in orbit. the smaller ships would be too hard to hit with a weapon like this but huge battleships should be a welcome target. imagine building a mountain sized canon that could fire huge payloads into space to devastate a battleship. i can see the logistical problems of integrating this into the games graphics but it would be very cool.

4) moons and bigger gravity wells

hopefully we will see colonizable moons floating around our planets, with much more space to work with. too often an enemy fleet can phase jump within 5 seconds of hitting a fortified planet and begin bombarding it before the attacked player even know its there. it would be much better to have a few moons defending your planet so that you have time to mount a defense or recall your fleet from distant stars. the gas giant planets especially could have moon based societies, look at jupiter and saturn - they both have dozens of moons and smaller colonizable sattelites floating around them even thought the planets themselves arent hospitable for life.

5) more artifacts and anomalies

it would add a another dynamic to the game to make exploration more beneficial to your strategy. space junk should be able to explore and find something useful. there should be more artifacts to find, and not all of them should be helpful. imagine exploring your planet and loosing some sort of micro organism that is infecting your people and turning them against you. or finding a primitive culture on a planet that is hiding an ancient secret that they once ruled the galaxy. also, some artifacts should benefit one race over another, for example the advent would benefit from finding an ancient psi-amplifier on a distant world more then the other races. perhaps the humans would benefit more from finding an abandoned genetic research lab that can enhance their labor output. anomalies in space are also important to consider when moving your fleets around. radiation and cosmic ray belts around stars, blackholes that can suck in your whole armada, anti-matter draining clouds of dust. asteroid belts should also be possible places of hiding small ships off of the radar. The asteroid belts should be in motion around the gravity well so that they could damage a large ship that doesnt get out tof the way.

6) diplomacy with NPCs

almost every gravity well has some sort of NPCs defending them, it only makes sense that they could be bribed and manipulated just like the pirates can. they may not be much help but we shouldnt have to exterminate everyone just to get access to their resources. Rise of Legends has a similar feature where you can choose to kill the NPCs or to purchase their allegiance and build more of their units to fight for you. Its a nice feature this game could integrate somehow.

434,763 views 272 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
they probably wont tell till expansion in progress lol
but we need more people to join this thread so we get more ideas and improve other ideas
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
I would like:

1) campaign mode/story line
2) additional races
3) moons
4) planetary based defenses (i.e. ground based laser cannons)
5) ship formations
6) a true 3 dimensional battlefield
7) larger gravity fields
8) better diplomacy systems (request aid, allow transit through territory, etc.)
9) better allegiance system (i.e. military victories/losses translate into political gains, increasing allegiance; abandoning planets militarily should result in decreased allegiance...just a better allegiance overall)
10) a more diverse resource system (i.e. other resources such as strategic metals or gases)
11) a more diverse research tree, one that forces you to choose a path for your empire, not one where you just research everything
12) planets that can be destroyed

Also, please get rid of those missions from the AIs. Its just like the Senate in Rome Total War: annoying, useless and impossible at times.
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
-Moons
-More Anomalies
-Effective Culture that converts planets to an empire after a period of neutrality after the initial overthrow
-Heroes
-A SP Campaign
-More advanced tech trees, possibly with strict branches that lock out other forms of technology or make them much more expensive/time consuming
-More starting ship classes; starting with scouts, light frigs and colonies seems like a good idea, but it makes every starting fleet nearly identical. I'd like to see some more advanced support ships in the starting line up.
-Doomsday Weapons, better yet, effective ones that really do some damage and don't take an hour to get to their destination.
-More and Better defensive stations
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top
I remember it being mentioned by someone at Ironclad that one of their goals to do in the future was a better particle effect system.

I hope this is realised soon with an expansion, would be great to see Sins battles with more modern effects. ;)
Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top
i think that the game is too focused on offense, we need more defense options such as strong defensive stations that can be built at chokepoints and such. They need to be able to actually survive attacks with huge fleets and the ability to do some good damage.

we also need the fleet naming ability. no offense but it would give us such a better feel for the game.

as well as

1) Moon bases
2) bigger grav wells
3) anomailies actually doing things (psi storms damaging ships, astroids hiding small ships and damaging large ones, etc)
4) Large defense stations/space castles (maybe as a special ability for a hero ship or built by capital ships after certain reserach built[and with the ability to actually survive and do some damage to large fleets])
5) Hero ships with lots of abilities for high customiation (with my little input of adding customizing the looks of the ship)
6) Weapons on planets
7) better artifacts
8)boarding
9)some more ships (some cap ships that have to be end-game researched maybe?)
10) CAMPAIGN!!!!
11)Vasari nemisis (the inevitable care bears )
12) civic options like the civilization franchise(increased tax rate with a decrease to culture spread for example)
13)Galactic powers
14) Better diplomacy options such as asking AI for money, metal or crystals for planets or other such things.(civilization style yet again)
15) the ability to have ships that are mobile planets (makes it harder to kill an enemy off and thus makes game more complex for those elite few)
16) super capital ships?
17) destroyable planets
18) Galactic size maps (like 20 stars and 1000 of planets for those of us that want games to not be quick deathmatches)
19) more fleet tactical options/ more fleet formation options (like having cap ships attacking first and frigates gaurding siege frigates for example)
20) different sub factions in the current factions ( vasari general - military strength, vasari elder - diplomacy bonus, etc lol just examples btw)
21) all those graphics and technical improvements
22) to be called 'Forgiveness of a Solar Empire' lol jkjk

Some things such as galactic sized maps and technical improvements dont have to wait for an expanison
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top
this thread gets me so hyped up

a rewarding defensive style gameplay is so needed.
Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
If they can't add a campaign mode/story line (Something they planned, or I least I read about it from ign) could they at least add more to the back ground story. As I'm still lose as to why the most adavance rase in the game, needs slaves, when thay have nano tech?
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top

A few ideas for the expansion:

1.More modes of play for multiplayer like limited to a fleet.
2.Admirals you can assign to captials like in Conquest:Frontier Wars.
3.Give more incentive to use culture ingame.
4.more background noise like independent planets with their own plans etc..
5.More space dwelling beings/or creatures like machine race or organic swarms.
6.Make all weapons have a chance to miss..not sure if thats in game or not.
7.Advent can research shields on their orbtial stations.......
8.Events! Like Suddenly a hostle force comes from no where attacks everyone.
Or different type of waves of particles like gamma rays affects the ship systems or whatever....
Reply #34 from Sins Forums Top
One step further, give me the ability to destroy a star (turn it into a super nova explosion) and hence destroy all of its associated planets and produce adverse side effects to the planets of the nearby star systems.

Who wants to destroy a star? Of cause, this will not be the first intention of empires but the ultimate goal of galactic terrorists - empires are conquerors not suicide bombers. Galactic terrorists camps scatter around unexplored astroids or moons. They can disguise as merchent ships fully loaded with nuclear bombs or whatever mass destruction bombs, and ramp the ships towards the planets. Ultimately, they will steal the star destruction technology from empires and....doom. Terrorists can also join force with the pirates.

Terrorists can sucessfully upgrade to empires by annexing the planets if an empire run away from a star system to avoid the doom.
Reply #35 from Stardock Forums Top
I would like to see a lot of things in an expansion but most of all I'd like it to be polished and not rushed out the door to capitalize on the original's success, you know the way it goes...

"let's capitalize on christmas but alienate our customers, I'm sure that'll work out"
"Good idea Jim, how about I buy you a golf course"

Hmmm... I think something I like very much about this game is the lack of micromanagement. You can generally trust your ships not to do anything *especially* stupid. So in an expansion I hope you remember this.

Although I'm not one of the people who'll complain about planets not being the right size just for "realism" or "pretty graphics", I would really appreciate it if ships looked more like they were fighting when they attacked each other. It just just seems so fake to see your ships just sit still and take all the punishment coming at them, not try to maneuver or dodge or generally do all the things we've come to expect after watching sci-fi. This seems like something that would be difficult to balance the gameplay for though, since it would sure be irritating if your ships didn't fight as effectively as they did before... I hope you can do something with it though.

When I look at a game I consider to be really well-designed, I usually notice NOT that there is a lot of variety, but rather that there is NOTHING I could take away without affecting the game. I admit I don't play the game very competitively, but for instance I don't see a reason to build command cruisers. A small boost to accuracy, or whatever it is they provide, just doesn't justify to me the fact that I'll be lacking a real combat ship. I think you guys have really got to plan out in more detail "this is what this ship is for, this is why you'd build it, this is why you might not".

I would also like to see all that "armor type" and "damage type" stuff made more transparent to the average user. Frankly I'd like to see all of that removed entirely, rock-paper-scissors is something I'm really disappointing to find in a modern game. I thought we left that behind ages ago. If it's sensible, like, flak is good for attacking fighters, that's OK, but how are we supposed to know a siege frigate has a thin hull and therefore isn't optimally attacked by missile frigates or whatever?
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
May I also add that it would be nice if there could be characters in game, say, two dozen characters per side. It would be nice if I could have proper captains for my capital ships, proper admirals for my fleets and governors. It would also be nice to have leadership characters, politicians, research specialists, etc.

The game is great but it could be so much better!!
Reply #37 from Sins Forums Top
On the top of my wish list, DEPLOYABLE MINES! Create a frigate class mine layer that could deploy nuke or antimatter mines that could neutralize large formations of frigates and cruisers. This would allow some form of defenses of not only jump points but the non-colonizable formations like storms and gas giants. Then come up with some way to sweep for mines as well.

Another thought that crossed my mind was special operation cruisers. Each race could have their own. TEC for example could have a cloaked cruiser that could sneak in and destroy fixed structures. No weapons just the cloaking devise and some special operations troops that could hit like trading posts or media hubs and even capture mining facilities. The Vasari could have a specialized Electronic Warfare cruiser that could disable phase inhibitor and possible carry the Nano Weapons jammers. The Advent could have something similar that could be a Psychic jammer that confuses strike craft and frigates/cruisers making them go crazy. All of these would be dependent upon anti-matter supply and would have a regular cool down time to go through just like every other ability.
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
One thing I thought would be cool was the ability to INVADE planets using troop cruisers.

Rather than have to sit there bombing planets all the time. It'd be based on Population. Each ship however should have something small like .1 Population unit. Meaning its preferable to bomb the planet before invading to avoid being overwhelmed. GalCiv did this well and this game really needs to do that because bombing planets all the time gets a bit boring. Plus all that planet health doesn't make a lot of sense, if a planets health hits 0 shouldn't the planet technically be dead? :D Killing population is better.

Also I'd like to see planetary damage, as the planets are bombarded they'll loose their bonuses due to the explosions and start to look all burnt and dead similar to that shown in Homeworld.

thats the only issue I've had so far with the game.

Reply #39 from Sins Forums Top
If stardock/Ironcald are going to include Moons, then make shure that they rotate arround the planet, but not to fast. Twice the speed the planet itself rotates. Also keep in mind that not all moons have a round shape. Some loom like astroids. Just to give it some more realism  :LOL: 

I also want to make shure that the Exspansion is not rushed, like somebody said befor. Realease it bug free and with cool new extras.

more Ideas:

- Game types/mods: for example "instant death" in which each player has to colonize as many planets as possible and defend them from the enemy, befor the satr explodes. could be a supernova and there would be a countdown. The player with the most planets wins. Or similar game types.

- Customizable "hero" (capital) ships, with some kind of editor.

- Another resource called " Dark matter" could be added for super weapons and such. This resource can only be gathert by special refinery ships in plasma storms or nebula.

- black holes: could be added as a "Event" which comes unexpected and destroys a large summ of ships. ( in options can be activated or disabled)

- other events, as well as on planets, like natural desasters (earthquakes or vulcanos)

- Improvement of Planet development: You can built buildings and defences on planets, some also not military based. like a "minister building" or "whitehouse" increases tax income.

- Moons: as described, with some structers as moon bases for faster research and moon artifacts.

- destroyable Planets: can only be destroyed by very strong superweapons. Planet will leave a astroid belt behind, with some mine astroids.

- detailed explosions, with smoke and tiny parts flying arround.

- more detailed engines: When ships are not flying and the fire is out, the engines look like someone painted them.

Reply #40 from Sins Forums Top
I dont have many complaints about this game, in fact it fits my style of play well, but here are some things in addition to those before me that I would like to see:
1)ROTATING TURRETS
I like the unit detail of such a huge game, but is it possible to give vessels rotating turrets or broadside guns that swivel? I know this will eat up processing power, but Maybe this should be optional for low-spec machines. The ships do look a bit silly firing any way they please while the turrets and barbettes remain static.

2)Z AXIS CONTROL
The one thing I want is total control over my ships. Z axis control would let me nosedive my fleet on the enemy, catching them unawares. After all, space is... empty space that ships can move around in however they please.... Maybe clicking on the map and pressing a key will give acess to the z axis, like in Hegemonia: Legions of Iron.

Otherwise, I'm content. :3
Reply #41 from Sins Forums Top
Correction: What YOU want in the expansion pack. Personnely I would rather have the devs spend the time and money in other areas rather than a campaign.
Reply #42 from Sins Forums Top
I like the idea of moons, and the idea of variable planet sizes. I mean, you could have a planet like Jupiter, with a few habitable moons surrounding it. Of course, population would change based on size. Then, the moon would have it's own small gravity well, which by principle would need to have a lower support for structures, as smaller masses produce smaller gravities.

Another thing I'd like to see is more involvement with the planets themselves. Right now, they're pretty much just anchors for everything, involving only with credit generation, among others. I like the idea of planet based tactical structures, but I'd like to see more. Maybe you could have space elevators to space based habitation complexes or something, or like a planetary command centre that would increase military effectiveness in the gravity well. Or, mining facilities to improve the efficiency of the orbital mining facilities.

Another idea- making more use of the stars, like maybe you could develop a type of shielding that allows you to enter the star.

I also really like the idea of espionage. Maybe the scout and small frigate could equip a cloaking device that would allow you to sneak into any territory (even pirate territory!) without being seen. Then, you could take your ship within the vicinity of a enemy ship or orbital facility, and you could sabotage something on it. Of course, you could also get discovered, and depending on what you were caught doing, you could get anything the enemy just hating you more, to a full scale war.
Reply #43 from Sins Forums Top
What I would like to see (even in the current version of the game) would be a revamp of the current system of acquiring ships. I do not think all capital ships should be available immediately and cruisers and even some frigates require research. In order to make this balanced, Ironclad had to significantly cripple the capital ships so they wouldn't overwhelm everything. But isn't that kind of the point of building a massive battleship? They kind of underwhelmed me when I built them...they should be extremely imposing and not just a nuisance I can send some frigates after to take care of, this would make them soooo much cooler. I think they should require a large amount of research to acquire and be as powerful as they should be. Almost all frigates should be available immediately, with the exception of the more specialized units, and cruisers should require minimal research (maybe requiring 1 or 2 research facilities). Capital ships should be your reward for developing your empire's military might.
Reply #44 from Sins Forums Top
Point Defense System!!!

Will stop LRM and Phase missiles etc...
Counter to spaming

Upgrade/Ability on certain ships (Caps???) and maybe on turrets (new turret type even???)

This should definately be something for carriers - something to shoot down incoming missiles while the fighters/bombers do their thing...

My 2c while I wait for the game to be released in Australia :D 
Reply #45 from Sins Forums Top
- the ability to capture / salvage damaged enemy ships
- to *not* to destroy every ship out there but to disable and disengage once they're floating space-junk
- disable auto-repair / regenerate on ships once they are below a certain amount of hull-points left
- the possibility to disable/jam weapons

in my opinion it doesn't make sense that a 10 HP / 0 shields frigate can still fly around in space burning and shaking but still shooting on my fleet as if nothing happened.

add some research to improve salvaging/boarding of ships and to counter that some improvements of internal ships defenses

+ a self destruct option for bold captains :HOT:
Reply #46 from Sins Forums Top
Nebulas - a gravity well (or a group of gravity wells) would be encompassed by a nebula where sensors dont work (no empire tree shown) so you have to zoom in and look around in there with limited distance of visibilty. If you zoom out more than a few thousand feet from your ship you cant see anything but explosions and weapons fire going on in there


Nebulae are huge - non-planetary nebulae tend to be many light-years across, and planetary (the types resulting from supernovae) nebulae generally span solar systems.
Reply #47 from Sins Forums Top
random events like planets blowing up or like that feature from GCII where another race discovers a tech that will make them gods unless dealt with.

maybe an unknown race invades a system. Imagine winning a game but continuing to play because something MIGHT happen that is a challenge.
Reply #48 from Sins Forums Top
NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!NO MORE MINI DUMPS!Please.     


I used to think these did not exist till I tried using mods. About half the mods I try that others seem to be able to use do not not work for me.

If a campaign is introduced I would like to see a random generated campaign for replayability.

The thing I would like the most is some sort of planet based graphics and defense. Not like Empire at War. Just building that get destroyed and guns that fire at the ships in orbit.

No expansion of the tech trees for me. They are fine like they are.

More planet types and maybe space junk, old wrecks etc.

Cheers MarkL
Reply #49 from Sins Forums Top
I'm kind of late to this thread but,IMHO, most any of the suggestions would make for an excellent expansion. One thing I didn't see is space monsters. I'd like to see some space creatures guarding the occasional planet/asteroid. I'm thinking something like the NPC ships but bigger and badder - maybe something that just can't be defeated at the early stage of the game. I guess it could be comparable to an NPC cap ship that could go toe-to-toe with your own cap ship (without any support fleet). These creatures could be any number of things: hydra, dragon, slug, worm, amoeba, swarm, Godzilla, Spaghetti Monster, Chthulu, or a giant Care Bear.
Reply #50 from Sins Forums Top
Ginat Space worms in the asteroids???

And they can have Mynocks living within them (ala SW-ESB :D)