A few minor points - generally I am most content with this game so far. Well done people and thanks.
1) In some places an annoying relationship with the idea of "NEXT" and "ZERO". If I tell my kids its Christmas next month, and when next month rolls around I tell them only another zero months to go so they've got to wait for another four weeks I would expect a little trouble.
Similarly when the game tells me there is one turn to go for something to happen, it is silly for it to tell me a turn later that there are zero turns to go, and make me wait another turn.
This needs tidying up.
2) Foundry spelt wrong.
3) Only one crash to desktop in about ten games and several weeks of play. The Drengin lost that game when their last planet defected to one of the other AI players. In the same game turn I went into diplomacy and saw the drengin were still there - and assuming they would be removed after I next hit the turn button I thought I would have one last look at their stats from my spies. Immediate crash to desktop. I suppose the data tables for the drengin were wiped but the button was still trying to access them. The AI race should have had its picture taken out of diplomacy as soon as it was eliminated.
4) Distribution of stars in galaxy creation is a bit flaky - perhaps deliberately so(?). In one 5x5 galaxy my little 3x3 corner turned out after much exploration and rushing around to only have my home system of two planets with the next best system containing only a class 14 planet. An AI immediately below me had at least 4 systems with some stars having more than one planet. I was going for a research victory with sub-normal AI in a galaxy with COMMON!! habitable stars and can't remember clustering. It was an interesting game, defending my frontiers was easy, and after about 8 hours towards the end of the game I did colonize that class 14 planet.
5) Both in the game, for instance when submitting stats to the metaverse, and within Stardock Central there is an annoying lack of feelgood confirmation messages - like "Your score has been successfully recorded". There is usually no confirmation because either the process has worked as expected, or it hasn't. As a user this leaves me feeling uncomfortable.
6) During the calculations after pressing the turn button, sometimes the processing seems to stop with the little target on the turn button. In my experience so far this is because the game has found a ship which has movement points left requiring player intervention. The mechanics of resolving these stoppages in the game is a little messy and the game does not inform the player about why it has stopped. An information screen may be covering the galaxy map at this point so it is not obvious what is going on.
7) A really annoying thing with scout ships auto sweeping a sector is that they get stuck on anomalies and inform me that only surveyor ships (is that right - I only saw the error mesage about 500 times ) ships can enter anomalies. Why doesn't the stupid scout just go around the anomaly. I tend to leave one scout permanently sweeping each sector in the little galaxies I play in. I probably misunderstand the use of autosweep - I treat it like autoscout mentally.
8) Lack of context sensitive help throughout the game. I really want to right click on anything to get very detailed information - not just a two line potted summary if i'm lucky. This is particularly true in the trading screens where I simply do not understand the value of what I am trading. Especially with respect to technology. It is also pertinent in the screens where build queues are set up - I end up guessing what things are and how long they take to build.
9) A few "are you sure" type messages would be nice before, say, a colony ship merges with a star system when I erroneaously try to put it back in orbit.
10) It adds nothing to game play to do a manual binary chop during EVERY trade deal to find the highest number between 0 and 100 which my trading partner will accept. It might as well be automated.
11) I sometimes wonder if all those numbers and stats and improvements percentages are all working quite properly. No good reason for this. Just a gut feeling.
12) Some filters in the ship list are needed to remove entries, for instance, for all the scouts. Currently it just sorts I think.
13) ....and finally a real irritant for me at least, when I select a ship with a mouse click I expect it to be selected and stay selected. I do not want it to go shooting off somewhere as it finishes its game turn. I do not not expect to be automatically moved to another ship. The number of times I have sent completely the wrong ship to someplace!
Sorry - turned out to be loads of suggestions in there too.
Thanks again Brad and all for the game.
~SDC~
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Also if you capture another capital and you have a capital of that kind already it should be destroyed, how can you have two manufacturing capitals lets say?