Apologies if any of this has already been mentioned, but i noticed some things the AI does weirdly while I was conquering a neighbor empire (a consuming swarm). Keep in mind that these things may have just been a fluke for that empire.
First, they don't like to build any upgraded buildings. I noticed this when I invaded my neighbor and noticed its planets had lots of level 1 forges, research stations, etc. It seems the AI doesn't like to invest resource upkeep. On one hand, this is kinda of a viable strategy, but it may also cause ai empires to struggle to keep up when they don't have the space to just spam level 1 buildings.
Additionally, the ai likes to build stations just for kicks. While conquering that same empire as above, i noticed that many of the stations i captured did not have any modules built. If they only have the funds to just build the station, then the ai needs to have the forethought to save their money.
Here is a bunch of other stuff that has come to mind. Mostly UI and QoL stuff.
I am sure balance stuff has been mentioned but fleet upgrades feel waaaaay too expensive. I remember having to spend about 3000 alloys on upgrading a roughly 12k fleet. Maybe this is similar to costs before 2.2, but this seems really high.
When i started conquering hive mind empire planets, they began to die off once i took the planet. REALLY. REALLY. SLOWLY. So I have about 70 pops slowly dying away while not working, but the UI doesn't reflect this very well and it shows me having 75 workers for 80 jobs when i actually have 5. From there it just seems to lead to a bunch of derpy interactions, such as "High Crime on planet X" when it's close to 0%.
I would like to have some more feedback on how much input to output a building at full capacity generates. I still don't know how much mineral an alloy foundry consumes, I just wing it.
Hovering over built buildings to see how many pops are working there would be a nice ui QOL instead of switching tabs back and forth. Overall, I think planet stats could be organized much better so players don't have to dig around so much.
Being able set up placeholder ques for planet construction would be huge. Currently I have to go through each planet every five or so minutes and just build as i go. It's hard to plan out specific roles for planets when you have to keep track of over 30. I might have to break out MS Excel for this. Being able to preemptively plan out the next 10 slots for a planet and initiate them when ready would be great. Think of it like using blueprints in factorio.
Being able to select more than one building for mass disabling and such would be nice (maybe i can and im just dumb?)
Please, please, please let us decide the order in which fleets are listed on the UI and in fleet manager. Currently, I have patrol fleets mixed randomly with my big fleets, and I would prefer all my big fleets listed first. This really was not much of an annoyance in past versions, but no we have to manage a bunch of tiny patrol fleets. There is a way to switch the order, but it involves creating fleets and transferring ships which becomes extremely tedious.
Speaking of patrols and piracy, it's a pain. I like the idea, but in practice it's tedious and dissuades me from exploring the new trade mechanics because that means making more tiny patrols that clutter the ui and map and takes up valuable fleet size. It's also hard to tell which is my military fleet and what is a patrol on the galaxy map because they use the same symbols. And, if they are in the same star, i cant just click the icon on the map because it will select them both. I also noticed the ai sometimes won't do anything during wars because they are using their fleets to patrol. My ally neighbor was useless because he wouldn't defend his territory from attack since he needed his fleet to patrol.
Piracy patrols should be separated from military fleets, perhaps the military is used when pirates spawn. But i think there should be some kind of "space cop patrol" mechanic instead. Civilian patrol ships with civilian rules (auto upgrade, don't affect fleet power, etc.) They wouldn't be able to fight (or at least well) against actual military ships. This also means that the military UI would be less of a clutter since the patrols would be under a separate category with different map symbols. I imagine the AI may have an easier time managing 2 separate mechanics instead of balancing 2 intertwined systems; though, I know nothing about coding AI.
Let us draw out patrol routes. So instead of A --> B we can do A --> B --> C and so on. It's super annoying when I make a route and it paths around a piracy system forcing me to make 2 patrols when 1 would've been enough. (I already tried Shift + Click, it didn't seem to work)Let us draw out patrol routes. So instead of A --> B we can do A --> B --> C and so on. It's super annoying when I make a route and it paths around a piracy system forcing me to make 2 patrols when 1 would've been enough. (I already tried Shift + Click, it didn't seem to work)
Oh and finally, fallen empires currently hold the top 3 spots for score on the victory page. They probably shouldn't be included for victory since for most of the game all they really ever do is sit around and occasionally yell at kids to stay off their lawn.
