Didn't you post this before?

Hero units: Well, I can see how in some games this is good. But this is Galciv. Could be in for number 3, but personally I doubt whether it'll ever hit this game, because it just doesn't fit into the game at all. I do like games with these in though, like Rise and Fall, and others, but it just doesn't seem to go with the game.

Carriers: This one has been answered multiple times. Fighters are ALWAYS useful, because they are cheap with high firepower. Huge hulls with all firepower are a waste of money. Fighters stay useful, except for tiny. Also, carriers wouldn't be any good in battle, because it makes the combat with them tactical. Which probably won't happen in GC2. And for my 2 cents, I can't stand the idea of them.

Capturing ships: Same again, it's a tactical idea, and extremely illogical. It probably won't make it for GC2, but I like this idea more than carriers, and I hope it (or a form of) will make gc3. Perhaps if you're allowed crews, you can plant spies on the ships, and cause them to possibly defect in battle, or steal the blueprints for the ship?

Space stations already speed the repair of a ship, same way a planet does.

Special weapons, the only one I can think of is the Terror Star, planet destroyer that will be included in the first expansion (if the AI get to use them properly). The others don't make much sense, since it's not a ground battle game, and how would a weapon steal a trade good?

One thing I always thought might be interest was Blueprints. For example, your enemy builds a ship that, frankly, kicks your ass. If you set your spies onto tracking it down, you might get a chance of nabbing the blueprint, and copying it to make a replica of the ship, and then work towards researching the tech required, so it becomes a ship in shipyard.

Also, for Terror Stars, there should be some sort of beurocracy involved, testing etc. The USA (or Germany/russia for that matter) didn't just clobber together uranium and hope for the best. If that had happened, there's a chance America and England might have been fired at. No, it had to undergo testing, which is when the US nicked the uranium and blueprints for an A-bomb, and used the information to forward their own plans.

Basically, there should be a stage where before using a Terror Star, you have to build some mini-wonders to test it (like civ had the manhattan project for nukes) during which another civ might figure out what you're up to, and either steal the plans, or alert the UP. This would add an extra strategic level to them, because you won't just be able to jump out with a flying starbase of doom and say "Surrender or die".

Galciv doesn't have room for heroes. Even if they do, I wouldn't want them in the game.

Capturing ships in space battles seems like a nuts idea to me. How would you even approach and dock with a ship unless all of it's drives and weapons were gone? In which case, why not just blow it up? How much would it cost to return such a ship to usable status? The big question - how would it even WORK in the uncontrolled combat? At random? Let's be honest - having very damaged ships surrender is probably better than some uncontrollable, not-very-feasable 'space marine' nonsense.

Carriers and fighters don't really fit with GC2. You're either stuck with tiny hulls being fighters, in which case introducing fighter and carriers does jack shit, or you make up some smaller 'fighter' hull, which does some worthlessly low amount of damage and dies in one shot. How many fighters does it take to kill a ship with high defence? That's right - they can't.

However, bases should get repair modules. It'd be great to be able to repair your ships there. Call me nuts, but I think upgrades should be limited to planets, bases and squares adjacent too. Upgrading in the middle of nowhere? Stupid. Sploitable.

I've never posted before, but it's nice to hear someone else has come up with similar ideas.

Fighters are rarely useful as is. You can pack large firepower cheaply on a small hull but any fleet of larger ships designed with even mild defensive capabilities beats just about any fleet of equal logistics that uses fighters, unless you have a massive tech advantage. Even when you mix only a few in among larger ships to try and get a weaponry advantage and rely on the selfish herd defense, they still get picked off easily because of the low HP and essentially zero defense, still waste $$$ and several turns to build up again and are a b*tch keeping track of in terms of sending back to the front line/to the appropriate fleet, even using rally points. Furthermore, the combat AI doesn't factor in that smaller ships = harder to hit. So really, what's the point? I love fighter combat, consider myself a vet strategy games player and have tried to make them work. But particularly on higher difficulty levels, they simply aren't so cheap and easy to stack firepower on that they offset dead-in-one-shot and worthless-in-an-equal-logistics-battle-vs-fleets-of-larger-ships.

So I say just cut out the middle man. Nobody says you need to use carriers, but make them an option for those of us who think they'd be badass

"how would a weapon steal a trade good"
--> Tractor beam? Beats me. I'm just saying the concept of one shot wild cards would be a nice twist on what is essentially paper,rock, scissors at the moment. We're talking about advancing a concept. The advancement of paper,rock, scissors would involve introducing a new element to the combat system...why not special weapons?

The Space marines/assault shuttles would be the hardest to implement I'm sure. The spy/defection idea sounds good. Basically I just want a way to steal enemy ships, because that's how I roll. If you want to steal his plans and build your own, I'm cool with that. I'd rather steal the keys and turn his own guns on his homeworld. bwahahah.

Hero units with avatars would only get out of hand if they were allowed to become absurdly powerful, which was their downfall in other games involving them like MOO2/MOM. I'm talking about minor buffs, limited levels of advancement and a limited # you can possess. Again, nobody would say you'd have to use them. They'd be balanced by the cost they have to your economy to pay their salary, which would increase with their level.

You could play MOO2 to get a lot of these features. You could play a lot of similar games and get a lot of similar features. As you say though, this is Brad's game, and I'd like to see Brad perfect features that I think could be largely improved upon from MOO2 and other games. I also like both Features 1 and 2 that dweller_below suggested above, although they are nowhere near as important or cool as my suggestions

Even if you try and use fighters in conjunction with bases, it takes about 7 constructors before you have a (as in ONE) military base that's both adequately defended by itself and also gives them significant enough buffs to start to counteract the defensive weakness. In the time it takes to build a single powerful military starbase, you can build almost an entire fleet of mediums/larges that not only have just as good/better stats, but are MOBILE. Also, while your constructors are going towards military bases all over your territory, they aren't going towards influence, economy, or devoloping and defending any resources you control.

In the time and resources you're taking to buff up your military starbases in terms of territory and upgrades to the point where fighters actually become viable just for defense, your opponents have spent that time to expand/buff their economies, territories, influence and fleets while you've been focusing on defending only the resources you already have.

As to my suggestions, you might notice my title says suggestions for the expansion or sequel. Not changes that should be made to this game.I think this version is great as it is. I do think putting some of this stuff in the next game would be a good idea, or else you'd just be repeating this game with better graphics...

Carriers are the natural progression of any military combat system. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, would stay in line with the random combat system and would add a new stategic dimension. Hijacking/stealing ships is more than just a cool idea of dubious utility (lol), it's a realistic wartime concept. Every army has it's heroes, they'd be a fun way to give more flavor and personality to your side. And special weapons/events/wild cards are already in the game to an extent, it's those things that appear and make you make a moral decision that give you a bonus/penalty and push you towards a certain alignment. I'd just like to see it expanded a bit more into the combat system, particularly for fleet battles.

If Brad could find a way to include these elements while keeping it as balanced as this game was, I think it'd be incredible. None of this is criticism of the current game, which is outstanding. Cheers.

edit: double post