Please do not post in black: it makes things quite difficult for the rest of us!

paragraph 1: I would also like this, but one thing I learned in my modding experiments is that 3D modeling is HARD, and requires at least months of pretty heavy study! I suppose the devs could put in a simplistic internal editor, but the cost-benifit analysis is not that great, so it it most likely not going to be included.

P2: If by this you mean some type of sliding scale, it seems ineresting but you could get pretty much the same effect now just by adding more of the same component. Regrettebly, as much as I want an infinate tech tree, it would also require infinite development time and memory, so it will not be included in any game. Ever.

P3: They already have that. It's called the "library", and is available from the site's homepage.

P4: Everybody wants more models, but they take a while to make and time is money, so Stardock will draw the line somewhere... You may want to experiment with KHSM and other mods, they free you up tremendously!

He used Word, most likely.

What I want to see in GC3:

AI editing.

GOD YES.

Oh man, would not that be the utter bomb. The Bomb of bombs. Even if they just included a text file that included hundreds of changable variables that the AI uses to make its decisions would be great. I'm assuming it would have to be something of that sort anyway, since the AI is usually integrated into the game, but for the new game Stardock is making, Elemental: War of Magic, they stated that there would be different AI opponents that you can play online, and that you would not know they are even AI (I'm assuming they are putting quite a bit more development into this new AI aspect). This way, people wanting to play online against others would not have to wait for others (of course they have the option not to play against AI opponents).

These opponents would be able to be downloaded to play against offline as well... Something of that sort at least. With all the new types of things Stardock seems to be doing, maybe that idea is not as farfetched as it initially sounds.

No. From a reality standpoint, mines are a fundamentally bankrupt concept in space. It's simply too big to mine.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't use mines period, but you can't use them for territory denial. You can use them tactically, to damage enemy ships as they attack a particular location. In that case, I would suggest that the mining module simply cause damage to enemy ships in a fleet at the start of combat. It would effectively act like an attack on each ship, that gets pitted against the ship's defense(s).

I have seen them though, with my own two eyes, so I do know that they are actually used. I saw them in Freelancer. Each mine would have to have a warp drive attached to it, to be able to actually 'catch' something. I'm sure a civ would rather just park a fleet there instead.

But seriously, that would also make things such as defense platforms, any stationary weapons platform for that matter no good. (Not that they are going to add those into GC3 anyways). Although from reality, half the game concepts could be cosidered bankrupt and impossible. Such as 'missles in space' <--- same as a mine.

This would be cool. And it would be awesome if you could use different AI modules for each race (i.e. C-Evo - http://c-evo.org/index.html). Even though I don't know the first thing about AI programming, it would be awesome to see what third-party modders develop and how it might change the game.

They are used differently, yes, but the same problem applies: the mine/missile is too small and expendable to support any type od "stardrive", and any ship that fired one while traveling FTL would just run right into it. Still, if I can suspend my knowledge of physics long enough to fire a missile, I could do so long enough to lay a mine.

A minefield, to be effective, would have to be setup right. A ship would know it's entering a minefield, since it's sensors would detect thousands of the things floating around. A huge computer station with vast sensors would have to be coordinating all the mines. And the mines would need some type of cheap thrusters (say, a Twin Ion Drive.... TIE Mines). So that way when a ship shows on the sensor grid, they would automatically dispatch on an intercept trajectory.

Of course, even that in reality would not quite be worth the effort, and probably not very effective. Better off building whatever is that important right in the middle of a dense asteroid field.

Or the mine close enough to the ship. As I said, if they had really powerful magnets, they would latch onto you from a fair ways away.

Who says that the mines would be that small? Take a 10-Meter or 50-Meter or -heaven forbid- a 1-Kilometer sized metal sphere. Fill it with some kind of explosive. Add a few super-strong magnets. Repeat several hundred times. There's a minefield.

So, you're going to build ship-sized mines? Do you not see how silly that sounds? You may as well just build actual ships and leave them there.

Furthermore, magnetism is a 1/(r^2) force. That means it decreases with the square of the distance between the targets. To get magnetism to actually matter at ranges in outer space would require monsterous levels of power. Also, if you have a magnetic field strong enough to affect a ship from across a solar system (that's how big empty space is), then it would be affecting planets and stars nearby. That's the level of power it would take.

It would probably collapse in on itself when you switched it on.

Ok, per Star Trek, they are encased in a closing and usually consist of a warhead (photon, plasma, quantum, gravimetric, etc....). But they are not exactly guided, using some guidance system. Once fired, that's it, I have never seen in Star Trek Voyager, a photon torpedo track it's target all over the place with thrusters or impulse. And the photon torpedo is about the size of a person, which isn't quite big enough to fit all that other stuff in there (until they research ultimate miniaturization).

That's why Star Trek photon torpedo's often miss their target if the ship does some maneuver. In Star Trek as long as I've seen, torpedo's miss quite often. The only guidance system it may have may be something to make minor course corrections, that's probably about it (and why? because for a high-mass object takes ALOT of energy to re-direct that mass). It would probably be easier for the ship to redirect the thing with a tractor beam.

In the Old Star Trek episode, Spock modified one to track a ship or something, kind of like a heat seaking missle would track a jet, but that is the only episode I remember where a torpedo was actually tracking a target with a guidance system.

I always considered them more as an unguided bomb I suppose.

Here's a way to make mines effective.........

You can have a stealth ship with a mine-laying module on it. And all you'd have to do is send that ship to an asteroid field/moon/whatever else that is smaller than a planet, but bigger than a 500 meter chunk of space dookie, and put your mines on that (asteroids would have to be worth alot more in order for any of this to acctually be logical in GalCiv2 or 3).

And so the next time a ship comes around   to upgrade/construct on/etc. in that asteroid field, they will find a 500 Megaton (atomic) surprise!!!

This in my opinion would be the only effective way to use mines.

Either that, or place them on a 0 PQ world (that has higher PQ worlds in that system), and when a colony/transport ship comes around to capture that planet, you will trigger a Planet Buster type warhead, causing a massive meteor shower, rendering any PQ 7 and lower worlds unhabitable, and all other worlds in that system ranging between PQ 3 and PQ 11 (depending on what it was to begin with, for example a PQ 26 world would become PQ 11 and no lower).

So because of this, you would have to research a tech that enables you to terraform uninhabitable worlds in order for them to become as usefull as they were before. But it would take a long time for the uninhabitable planets to become habitable (like 10-30 turns). This tech could also technically enable you to turn certain planets into PQ 72 (or whatever the max number of tiles will be in GalCiv3) worlds!!!

And here's something else.......

Planet Buster Nukes...........

Only missile to be able to support a Warp Drive. Cause something that can destroy a planet, would either have to be built on that planet, or would have to be really big. It would be like the Terran version of a Spore Ship.