@Rocco.40 thank you thats awesome.

I know this is off topic but is anyone excited for the new season of game of thrones?

IMO you, Rhombus guys, took a narrow road at "repeating MoO2 for 2015"... It's a common thing to take MoO2 as a paragon for 4X space TBS. But what about having a wider look at the others "classic" (more or less) titles?

Master of Orion 3 (yes, it DID more things far better than its predecessor)
Armada 2526 (especially give attention to exploration phase and alien races design)
Space Empires 4 and 5 (ship design, strong (really strong) diplomacy options)
Sword of the Stars (absolutely amazing race lore, even the different space movement mode for eacn race)
Galactic Civilizations 2 (though highly praised "race-specific" AIs are completely bugged and don't function as intended, the race-specific techtrees is the wonderful idea!)

P.S. And by the way, do you know what was the one of the biggest reasons why MoO2 and other titans of the past were so good? There was no "community" back then, and developers didn't adjust their ideas to mass tastes. Until you will think "how should we make our game for selling it and pleasing "crowdfunding community"", your game will always stay just "another game to forget in one year". So the choice is whether you make a mediocre game for everyone that sells, or you make a good game not for everyone that doesn't sell...:)

OK, Couple things that I would like to see (and my ref. is MOO2 and Single Player)

General
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* make the game alive with visuals, sounds etc, not everything should be ultra designed & polished.
character and conceptual strong idea makes a good game rather than flawless and bugless game.
* gui should be simple and not clogged with mini-buttons and info-stats everywhere.

* when i read stories from MOO2 players, i see some very seasoned players that are searching for the most optimal gameplay and win with minimal resource & time use. On the other hand you have players who are trying to build a story of the events that are happening. Game should be entertaining for both play styles and a.i. should be able to accomodate both play styles.

Starting a game
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this is where the fun should start .. and not an endless encyclopedia read of detailed race statistics and settings etc.
somehow MOO2 succeeded in making the racepick screen really simple and yet full of nearly endless possibilities and people have made extensive studies about the racepicks and combo's!! Still, a novice player can also find his way around and exepriment with cool new races. Simplicity & depth at the same time.
This is also the one time game may look like a spreadsheet: all options nicely layed out in from of you, not hidden in submenu's or tiny drop down boxes.

The actual MOO2 game start is also very intuitive: you have 2 scouts and a colony ship: go do something! explore. No need to start with all kinds of settings and planet micromanagement, just start
or in pre warp: you have nothing! go research something so you can build a ship or building.

Gameplay stuff
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* A.I. .. a.i. .. a.i. :) - hughly important and also on an average difficulty, a.i. should make sense, instead of just being dumbed down version, or other way, on harder level a.i. just gets lot of cheats and has erratic personality or is it really cunning? MOO2 has crappy 640x480 resolution, but the game just needs a real a.i. and some improved balance and it can last another 20 years....

* If you have an alliance with another race, and you are last two standing you should win the game. Also, alliances should have some purpose other than: i urge you to declare war on my enemy.
* If there will be such a thing as Galactic Council, it needs to have some depth; who calls the council & what triggers that races attempt to have 1 ultimate leader chosen?

* Turn summaries: the ones from MOO3 were horrible! I wondered from the start after turn 1, why am i reading this? why are all these things hapening and what relevance has it for me. Moo2 is just: 1 building finished, race a is at war with race b. Filter options are important. In the new game City Skylines they invented the tweeting bird and it was tweeting all kinds of nonsense .. that is not the way to create immersive game (it is a very cool game btw).

Researching & techs
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* the way research trees are shown in some modern strategy games is very boring way. Especially dont like the Microsoft Word 'flowchart' / boxes and lines presentations.

* it is really cool to have a lot of technologies, to show of the new game but tech balance and usefulness is an important aspect of a game and it probably not easy to achieve. If there is a tech with some unique properties, what other tech or play style can counter it? Is a tech overpowered? Do all races have access to all techs. Does every new game give access to all techs?

Spying
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I really liked MOO1 spying, better than MOO2. Game presented you with some choice options, like where do you want to start a rebellion? Also, I really like when aside from stealing tech or sabotaging, spying can provide some real intelligence like : player A is building a battleship. or player B has a fleet underway to location X.

Moddability
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I guess you are already making it so..

ok this were just a few thoughts from my side .. I might have some more later.. R

To improve MOO2 not much is needed if you start with Rocco's ICEMOD 10!

After that an absolute must is to be able to save ship designs from game to game.

Some way to insert something into or at the head of all planets' build queue's is a must. ie I just finished autolab research an now have to manually put it at the head of 28 planet's build queues...ouch lotsa micro needed. I don't mind micro, but I should be able to do this with a couple of clicks and have 28 planets soon working on autolabs.

21st century graphics, of course.

Smarter AI. Does the AI even build colony bases? I think they have to use colony ships. Perhaps the AI could even be taught to do pop-1 housing? In a long bogged down game, the AI could certainly be taught to build artificial planets. I don't think the AI researched hyper advanced techs? AI could certainly be taught to send it ships and transports to arrive at the victim's planet on the same turn.

I'd like to see the idiocy of AI surrender removed from the game.

Yes! Micromanagement should be .. managed :)

Also, taking MOO2 as an example, they really thought they built a research game, making researching quite expensive (Democracy at 7pts etc.), while they actually built a production game, and some custom prod. races proved to be surprisingly overpowered. But such knowledge comes over time when the game is played by many. It would be cool if you as game designers would revisit the game after, say, a year to balance things out.

o yeah, did i mention the GNN robots? :)
Stardrive 2 looks to be a very cool game (with circular maps instead of square] but the GNN robots are nothing more than MOO2...

EDIT
One more random thought; if you guys are doing an 'evolutionary mutation' thing, it would be cool if the race picture would change too. For example I would see the Gnolam transform in some dangerous Goblin or the Trilarian in a Translucent Energy being...

Rocco is doing great work with ICEMOD and I urge all here who easily beat Impossible in Vanilla 1.31 to give Ice 10 a shot!

With that in mind I agree with almost everything Rocco says and does re: MOO2 except that I strongly feel that the GNN bots are fine the way they are. The info they provide is often of minor significance and is often something that could be found out by one's self or simply something that in real life you'd have to notice. Certainly you'd know if your star was going to nova or if you had a plague.

thx .. neilkaz ..

Anyone going to E3 this year, what and who are you most excited to see?

[edited]

ICEMOD sounds fantastic, thanks for bringing it up. I may have to dust off my galactic conqueror's crown soon...

-- The big three that would make me rebuy the game for a new release AAA price --

1. new additional map sizes. The biggest one would make the original huge one look tiny. Why? Because it is tiny ;)

2. Diplomacy fine tuning. i.e. Make the AI behave more to their alignment & more truthful to honing deal made. Having a "pacifist" race with a for decades established friendship & trading going all out genocide out of the blue is a real downer to immersion. The diplomatic options in game-play themselves are great as they are.

3. Hd graphics/animations with moderns screen resolution (but keeping the art style)

---lesser Stuff---

4. "Artificial Planet" module for Ships tech; discovering a system with 3 huge gas giants & 2 asteroid fields makes my heart bleed ;)

5. Tiny fun techs with minimalistic improvements after about every 10-15 advanced techs at the end of the tech screen.

Don't know about A25 & SotS. But the other three do have some good stuff ahead of MoO2. The ground units & the size of MoO3 was better; GC2 had a far superior diplomacy alone for the sake of KI feeling right in how they do stuff & the respawning anomalies where great game extenders for those who love to play a single session forever; just playing SE4 right now, so cannot say much about it yet. But all the customization details are quite cool.

But in overall charm MoO2 dwarfs them all (imho).

This. So much this. 99% of all gamers are TERRIBLE game designers. I cringe when I see developers bend over backwards to implement fan ideas or make changes proposed on internet forums. The worst thing you can do is try to please the crowdfunding backers because not only are they terrible game designers, they are also often entitled fools who concoct their own fantasies about what the project is supposed to be like and they think crowdfunded games are tailor made for them, not realising that the finished game will be just another commercial game sold in stores.

Most people do not have the skills to analyze the games they play and like and are even less fit to provide meaningful input. Anyone who claims to want more realism, more customization, more open-world freedom, 1000 items in the tech tree and no tutorials are not to be trusted. Give them what they say they want and they will hate your game.

Instead, use all your talent to make a really good game. You're the professional. Don't let amateurs throw you off balance and doubt your own direction. Invite other developers to see your progress and give pointers, that is how almost all the timeless classics were made, but don't delude yourself with empty idealism like "By gamers for gamers" trying to be best buddies with the narcissists on internet forums. Forum users will only ever represent less than one percent of the playerbase for any given game, and usually it is the vocal dissidents who will forever try and change your design.

Optional Crash Course for those of us from the era of Space Empires and STARS.