Hi,
I'm about 20 hours in and finishing my first full game, and would like to list issues I have discovered thus far. I've jotted these down on a notepad over the last month, so please disregard anything you have already fixed. I've also only listened to a few of the developer reports, so may be missing some things already covered.
Welcome.
Master production list: The list of planets and their projects is useful -- a master list of ships in production is needed too. Two games that do empire-wide production management well (and allow you to edit production from the overview screen) are Civ V and Endless Space.
I expect something to show up at some point. GalCiv 2 had many tools to get information and manage an empire.
Decommission starbase option: When my empire is bleeding cash I think I need an option to shut down or dismantle unneeded starbases. I also need more detailed financial information to see how much each starbase costs per turn, etc. when making these decisions
I accidentally had to many ship yards. I couldn't de-link them from planets and destroy them.
At this time, there is no proper way to destroy such things.
You can delete them using the command console. For the beta, you can access it by typing the "`" character (for normal keyboards, it should be above the tab key and left of the "1" key. You can destroy the thing by select the object you want to destroy, and then typing "destroy" in the command console.
If you want to learn additional commands, type "help" into the command console. It should provide you with information.
When enemy fleets are stacked, they often all disappear after I destroy one. This happens repeatedly and is very confusing.
The only thing wrong is they are not being shown properly. They are still there. You can try selecting a fleet, and it should show up. You can also attack them normally.
Ship designer could use an "undo" button. I've accidentally ruined some awesome builds by changing things that I then couldn't get back to where I started.
Angles 2.0: I would like to be able to type in an angles and offsets in addition to using the slider buttons. This would make it much easier to replicate the same angle on multiple parts quickly.
I agree with most of these points. I don't like sliders. It is difficult to get precision with them. Numbers would be easier to work with. More so if you can copy them.
Automatic upgrades and version renaming for custom ships. I don't really understand how model upgrades work now, but I'm not sure that all of my custom ships are upgrading along with the base models?
No, they don't automatically upgrade right now. If you want your ships updated, you will need to upgrade them manually. This of course might mean that you end up with a big list of ships to sort through. I haven't checked if there is an obsolete button to hide ships (GalCiv 2 had them). I haven't felt the need to go look since the AI ship designer in GalCiv 3 has been good enough that I haven't needed to design many of my own ships.
In GalCiv 2, the original release version started out where you had to design all of your own ships. Even the upgraded versions. We didn't even have templates. It was only in later expansions and patches did we get new stuff like an AI ship designer that could design ships for you.
Will ship designer have Steam Workshop support? I could imagine an unlimited number of parts in all shapes and colors... that would make this tons of fun.
One thing that would add a lot of variety is a powerful texture editor for existing parts. -- if i could take any existing part and, for instance, make it 30% translucent and 15% green tinted -- it would really add to the variety that we have to work with.
I don't know. The ability to change the colors of individual parts might be interesting. In GalCiv 2, most of the colors of the parts matched the color styles of the controlling empire. So if you favored purple, your ships would be purple. Not many ship parts had colors or patterns that didn't conform to the controlling empire's colors.
Thanks! I welcome any clarifying questions/disagreements. Overall a great start. I probably won't play that much more until a lot more is done though -- It's just not that much fun without diplomacy and real combat.
That is alright. I didn't play much of the alpha.