2.6 bugs and qol problems

Station garrison is just one of the many repeating planet projects that IMHO shouldn't repeat, or that we should at least have an option not to repeat.  My latest gripe is playing as a synthetic race I tried to build just one more population on one planet and a couple of turns later discovered that all my durantium had disappeared.

That's exactly what I would suggest. I know the project mechanic was changed some time ago because of some vocal people that resented to give fully developed planets new orders every couple of times when a project came to a close, but while that is only a bit annoying (not for me, I must say), the current system with auto repeating projects is downright harmful if you forget to check on your planets every turn: in case of "normal" projects like Aid Research you lose production if you have to cancel the project because you can now build something else for what you waited by initiating the project, but in case of Station Garrison if you station too many legions you cannot retrieve them anymore and they are lost for war.

I agree the best solution is to introduce an option to specify for every project whether it should be repeated or not. But Stardock seems more than reluctant to make UI changes (like more sorting options in the various lists, an indicator how far a ship can move, changing the default auto improvement  setting to "only when all tiles are full", giving a choice at colonizing a planet where to put the colony capital and so on ...). It's not clear to me what makes that so difficult but it really must be very, very difficult

As to disappearing duratium: I hope that (and all other occurences of resources being deducted every turn instead of once) will be fixed soon, because such a problem would ruin the game for me.

Why even build Station Garrison in the first place?   Planetary Invasion heavily favors the attacker.   If you lose a planet, better to use your legion retaking it back.   Can't honestly say I have ever lost a planet, either.

I'm not an "ideal" player that uses his calculator every turn to find out the best actions. So I'm surely more vulnerable than such an ideal player. In my current game as Onyx on gifted everything at around turn 250 the Kif are pressing me hard (AI seems much more coordinated than in earlier versions of the game) an have even attacked my homeworld twice. I could only repel them by converting some spare citiziens to generals and station them on my homeworld the turn before the attack. The second time they brought only 3 legions against my 6, but had an attack advantage of 19:6 (or so, the 19 is accurate, the 6 I cannot remember exactly). I still could defend my planet, if barely. The first attack with even chances ( was something like 12:12) I won also, but more clearly.

So I wouldn't say that stationing legions is useless. And apart from the current mechanics every game element should have it's use. If not, then there is something wrong with game design. 

Unless you are being totally interdicted by fast ships, you can build one transport to "station" 5 legions for cheaper.  The AI can't use invasion tactics on you (because your planet is undefended), then you can retake your planet, such that the odds are in your favor.   You have the option to use invasion tactics if you want.  A transport is not locked down to any one planet. 

You might be able to leave the transport on one of your own starbases, for a little protection.  If the AI's got me that much on my heels, I've got a military starbase close by, for defense.

Currently, ground combat is unbalanced, and you are correct that it doesn't seem to make any sense to station garrisons on your planets. 

In any strategy game, from RTS to TBS, it is necessary to provide a significant defender advantage, otherwise the game is boring. If every matchup of Starcraft was simply a Zergling rush, no one would play it. In Civ 4 and 5, there were defender advantages, which is what made it possible to do things such as build wonders and pursue culture victories. 

GC could use some work in this department, imo. Military starbases should have their effective range increased, I think. But we're talking about ground combat. I think station garrisons should be separate from legions. You should be able to build them independent of having any legions in your global pool. They would be much cheaper, but the trade off is they are permanently stationed on defense and can never be moved. 

I agree about the station garrisons.   For Military SB's, I think they should be given one move, just like Terror Stars did.  In fact--giving them a planet destroyer upgrade module (which explodes the planet into a bunch of asteroids and durantium) would be really fun.   Now that would be cool.   Can you imagine blowing up class 0's, crossing your fingers, and hoping for durantium?    They already have their effective range increased by 2, which lets them cover more precursor relics.  

Hm, that sounds like a good idea I didn't think of yet (but is no option for building up a defence when you see the enemy fleet one turn before it arrives ;)). One more reason why the ground invasion and ground defence system should be revisited by the devs.

I agree. Make garrisons cheap, not moveable ground defense units, use mobile legions for attack.

Station legion in one turn is not much of a winning option, either.  You can summon multiple legions at once by building one transport.  A cargo hull, transport module, maybe a warp drive?  Rush buy would set you back 1000bc, maybe?  Unless your shipyard is dead next turn.  People design dedicated sensor ships to avoid that sort of thing. 

Yes, yes, sensor ships.  Vision is knowledge.  Knowledge is power.   Find them early and hit them first.

I use them sensor ships myself, but I cannot do everything at the same time ... (at least not in this game ;))

Influence already does very little in this game, you'd think it could at least provide line of sight. 

Ship maintenance is somehow off:

- All ship designs show a maintenance of 1 in the popup that appears when moving the mouse over the list on the left side

- The "Selected Ship Details" window on the upper right shows always 0 maintenance

- When I go to "Govern Civilization" and put the mouse over "Ship Maintenance" then the maintenance costs for individual ships are bigger than 0 or 1 (in my case 2 for the three individual ships that are in the list).

Not a bug, but still:

- I have not found a single non-precursor anomaly that was defended by pirates in a long time (2.6, 2.5 at least, before I can't remember).

- All precursor anomalies I found so far are defended by the same weak 8 precursor "pirate" ships with in sum 24 beam attack and no defenses. Before as far as I remember there were weakly and strongly defended precursor anomalies.

Anyway, anomaly defenses are not varied enough (and for middle and late game to weak altogether). As far as I know anomalies spawn randomly from time to time. If a defended anomaly spawns make their defenses depended on current average strength of all civs or something like that.

the ship graveyard is the weak defended anomaly your talking about. they turned it off for crusade. or else in one of the crusade earlier patches anyways. Sexy leader anomalies on nexus mods turns them back on, couple other mods do too, but they tend to be bundled with a lot of other stuff.

you would have to design a new anomaly type or I guess edit the existing ones to make some variety. i think it may be easier to code a check for average tech age or something, or set up some defined turn times that unlock harder anomalies than it would be to calculate the avg str of all civs. 

A timed galactic event that replaces anomalies could also give a warning/ details and stuff so it doesn't catch players off guard.

going back to one of your other points/ topics, it would be nice if the repeat projects was a toggle type button on the planet screen or in the governor menu. default off.

There was the ship graveyard that was defended by weak pirates, but there were two types of defenses for precursor anomalies, one weaker and one stronger. Now there is only one and that is quite weak.

Actually I did mod my game way back to increase defense variety (not regarding civ strengths or game age, since I don't know how that would work with the current modding possibilities), but I didn't reactivate that mod yet because the game changes so much.

But since you can mod in defense variety it should be no problem to add that to the vanilla (Crusade) game without the need to resort to modding. If Stardock wants to have that feature they can simply ask me when they want to know how to do it

(Some form of) Strength of civs is already calculated and shown as numbers, to calculate the average of that would be quite easy

Colonizing a Precursor Quarantine world gave me the colonization event for that and I chose the pragmatic option that would increase my pop cap by 6. But nothing happened, pop cap remained at 3.

I began a second 2.6 Crusade game and play for the frist time since Crusade the Thalans and not the Onyx. I just researched Xeno Entertainment and now I see the Entertainment Network in the build list on the right on planets where I have already an Entertainment Center. But the icon is disabled, there is no upgrade arrow on the Entertainment Center.

I looked in the Crusade ImprovementDefs.xml, and the definition of the Entertainment Network seems correct to me, here just the relevant part:

    <Prerequ>
      <Techs>
        <Option>XenoEntertainment</Option>
      </Techs>
      <UpgradesFrom>EntertainmentCenter</UpgradesFrom>
    </Prerequ>

What is wrong with the Thalan Entertaintment Network?

Do you have the requisite resource to upgrade it?  If not, it won't show the upgrade arrow.

Yes, that was it! I had Arnor Spice, but not much, an on one planet one Entertainment Center was upgraded automatically and used up my Arnor Spice so there was nothing left for the other ones. Thanks

Just was able to sell the Yor Novel Harvesting for a good price ...

One QoL thing: When selecting a rally point for a ship or fleet in the "Goto" order window it would be good to see how many ships are already going to that rally point.

I often use rally points to mark planets to colonize or resources to mine so I have to send only one colonizer or constructor there. Without above help I must always first check the rally point by clicking on it or consulting the rally point list in the lower right.

And another QoL thing: when you click on "Shipyard idle" and are taken to the shipyard screen show which ship was just finished building.

E. g. if I build a colonizer I unsually don't want to build a second one right after to not drain my pop. In the moment I have to leave the shipyard screen to check which ship was ejected and then go back again.

QoL: when will it be possible to sort the various lists in the "Set Ship Destination" window by destination name and distance?

To add sorting to all the different in the game lists seems to be a major problem since that was requested very often already without anything happening, although it sounds like such a small change ...