Hello.
First off, I must congratulate the whole development team for the wonderful work you do. Programmers, graphic artists, musician (s), all have done a bang on job.
I have been playing Stellaris since it first came out, and every new expansion re-confirms my addiction.
This said, here it is; what you dread most of all. Seriously, I wouldn't be a true gamer if I didn't have my humble little list of QoL improvements I'd like to see addressed, right? I feel sorry, for asking, but I need to. I hope you understand; it's the addiction talking.
Why can I not watch a battle being waged for my eternal glory without being interrupted within 10 seconds by the never ending stream of messages requiring me to attend this and that matter, any of which force me to leave the battleground? Why?! How about (I suspect this is a big one...) making the time spent watching a battle a pause of sorts. The rest of the game just pauses with only the battle being processed so you're free to watch to your heart's content, until you leave that system's view, that is. Your ministers and secretaries will be waiting in the wings with baited breath, pens ready, in full battle formation , no doubt ready to pounce on you the moment you show the tip of your nose. Alternately, you could make the battles boring, colourless events that no one in one's right mind would ever want to watch, you know. I mean, why make battles interesting if we cannot really enjoy a few? You could have spared yourselves the trouble and expense.
This question comes up a lot with Paradox games.
One major reason is that the rest of the galaxy continues doing stuff even whilst you're in battle - you might start a battle, and have an enemy bringing a fleet in to reinforce their fleet - this can't happen if the rest of the game stops whilst the battle is concluded. Alternatively your fleets might not all arrive on the same day, at the same moment, and so you might be watching a battle and just not have the majority of your forces reach the combat zone if everything but the battle is paused.
The game also strongly supports multiplayer, and it is unreasonable to have every other player in the game sat staring at a pause screen everytime one of them gets into a battle.
Science ships are fine. Except when they are not. Inadvertently send more that one of them to survey the same system and they will do so, side by side, until there is only one planet left to survey (this requires a system with an odd number of planets, as I'm sure you realize). Then does their jostling and your wondering begin. The player wonders: 'Why is my science ship idle? Survey, you fool!' and 'What?! I just told you 15 seconds ago to survey. Do it!' What is happening is that Ship A bumps ship B to carry out its order making B idle, then B does the same to A when it gets selected and properly paddled. This goes on and on until you look into the system and realize your mistake, select one of the two and send it on its merry way. That, or just get used to this type of 'error', click on the ship icon next to the system, see a bunch of them reporting and fix the problem. It's annoying. I'm on a timetable here: I have a galaxy to conquer, monsters to kill, enemies to eradicate, multiple businesses to run, energy credits to rake in, I don't have time for this kind of nonsense. Besides, it's no fun. Why play a game if the fun factor isn't maxed out, right? (Which begs the question: "Why am I still playing this? Because the fun still outweighs the annoyance." This statement is very much to your credit.) My solution: as it stands, you cannot have two construction ships build a space station in the same system, so why not make it impossible for two science ships to survey the same system? While I'm at it, I'd love for my Science Ships to have a queue. Oh, and could you apply the same measure to the Construction Ships, too? It would be wonderful to be able to queue up just 3 orders. There is way too much clicking involved in this game. My poor carpal tunnels, please!
I rarely, if ever see this problem.
Usually when two science ships are surveying one system they'll just pass over whatever the other is already surveying, and move on.
Automated surveying (when it comes up in your tech research) minimises the amount of interaction you have to have with directing science ships and *usually* comes up early enough that you can manually send your science ships to different systems before it comes up.
As for construction ships and queuing up build orders, <shift> right clicking the system lets you queue up "Build all mining stations" or "Build all science stations", and you can do this to multiple systems to set a queue.
Banning two science ships from surveying the same system *could* possibly be a thing - but it's potentially inefficient to do so as you may want to survey a system quickly so you can expand into it before a neighbour does. It's fairly easy to avoid early game when you've only got a few science ships, and later on automated surveying makes it much less of an issue.
Why do planets inhabited by Pre-Sentients show up as colonizable? Yes, I know. You could establish a colony there and park them in reserves, eat them or just exterminate the lot, maybe. What if it just doesn't sound right to me\us? It's their planet. I feel I should keep away. Our Observation Stations go out of their way to remain undetected, but we can just walk in and take over? How rude! How about a choice in-game allowing me to make colonizing them impossible. Of course, they just wouldn't show up in the list of colonizable planets (F9). It would tie everything together nicely. A new policy should do the trick, right?
Or just don't colonise them?
There's an icon on the inhabited planets that tells you there are presentients there.
Perhaps a policy could be put in place, but where would you add it? Would it add to pre-sentient policies or to native interference?
What if you're willing to invade pre-sentients (who are after all not even chimp-level as they can be argued to be early stone age in some cases) but not *actual* sentients?
(On a different note, the sentient thing is actually wrong, and should be sapient... sentient is being able to react to the world around them and distinguish "I" from "them" and "it"; sapient is being able to think and use logic.)
Next: the round icons dropping down from the top of the screen to inform me of this and that. There are way too many of them as far as I'm concerned. I use the Civilian Ships and Fleet lists to find out who is inactive and needs new orders because right-clicking on the inactive ship's name TAKES ME TO ITS LOCATION. It's efficient. I see the situation, I don't have to go hunting for the ship scrolling to max view, hold my pointer over said icon waiting for a blip to indicate where the needy unit is, zoom in, select it, give it an order. By left-clicking then right-clicking on its name I get taken to its location so I can judge at a glance the situation and decide quickly what order to give it. It is also pre-selected. I have no use for the icons telling me that a ship is idle, has finished surveying or building. Many will disagree with me, no doubt. Let them have it their way, and me, mine. How about this, then? A panel, like the one that allows us to configure the panel on the right side of the screen where the ships/planets/stations/etc. are listed, which would make it possible for us to choose which category of icons we want to see.
Good news. You can alter your alerts through the same means as the outliner at the right of the screen.
Should be the gear icon at the top of the right hand list.
Possibly clicking on the alert might also take you to the affected ship - I haven't tried in a while though because I've usually got a queue of orders set up, or I'm watching the construction ships waiting for them to finish so I can give the next set of orders.
Again, after the very early game you can set the science ships to automatic.
Finally, a word about those icons' behaviour: are you trying to induce mass epilepsia in your gamers? What's with the flashing? That's another reason I dislike them so much. Yes, I realize they flash to let us know they're 'going...going...gone', but really loud sounds can damage your eardrums and loud screens can make you as nutty as a flying fruitcake. One more thing about warnings: could you fix the space stations so that I don't get a message informing me that they have finished the content of their construction queue when in fact they haven't. It's one thing to have the station tell me it is done building the long list of ships I ordered as I might want to put in another one, but quite another to have it report itself to me for every module/building/platform group I placed an order for. What if I placed half a dozen such orders? Shut up until you're done building every last item in your building list!
I'll have to check, but I don't remember seeing this behaviour for the space stations - but bear in mind they have multiple queues which all report separately.
Ship building, module building, repairs, upgrades all report independently because they need to - they're different things.
Again, I believe you can alter the behaviour of the alerts as I mentioned earlier.
Building up a space station is an exercise in frustration. I scroll to the bottom of the list of modules/buildings as there are a few items I want to have it build that are located there. I choose one. What does the scroll bar do? It jumps right back up to the top of the list. I wasn't done! It. Does. This. Every. Time. It's infuriating. Please leave the scroll bar where I left it. Thank you.
This is an awkward one - because you're not in the same building slot it moves back to the top of the list because that's the "neutral" position. I'll admit for me at least most of the things I'm building are in the top part of the list though (or I'm building them one at a time because of how I'm upgrading the levels of the starbases), so it might not come up as often for me.
Here is my final gripe, and I know it's very... 'technical', especially for people who do not speak a Latin language as a mother tongue. I apologize in advance, but do try to keep an open mind. The automatic selection of "Prime" as an added moniker for the first planet to be colonized in a system is... well, it doesn't agree with me (see nerdy explanation below). I'd much rather keep the planet's original designation, such as "Somewhere IVa". It's more accurate, astronomically speaking. As a bonus, I won't have to remove "Prime" and replace it with the proper denomination every time I found a colony
. How about a toggle that would allow us to switch this? 1) Prima, Secunda, etc. or 2) the astronomical identifier.
As for 'Secundus', it drives me up the walls every time I see it. You see, while 'Prime' is the English version of the Latin 'primus', which makes it tolerable in an English game, 'Secundus', the Latin for 'second', is all wrong in this context, because in Ancient Latin (and all modern Latin languages) the word 'planet' is always a feminine word. 'Une planète', 'una planeta'. I realize this is probably so unimportant to you as to have this comment seem unreal. In can almost hear you think: "That's a problem?!" Yes, it is for those who speak a Latin language as a mother tongue. If you'd had the gender of words and the rule that forces any adjective to agree in gender and number with the word (substantive) it refers to drummed into you from the crib, seeing such an error would make you cringe, too. Speaking of a planet, 'Secunda' would be grammatically correct, and 'Tertia', 'Quaterna', 'Quinta', 'Sexta', 'Septima', 'Octa', 'Nona'; I think I can stop there. Why bother? A lot of Latin people (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) play Stellaris. Here is a sad fact of life: we are hundreds of millions. I know, right? I cannot imagine they have failed to notice this blatant mistake (ok, I'm not sure about the Romanians to be honest. None of the rest of us understand a word they say. But their language is a Latin one! Sometimes, anyway.) Does it annoy other Latin language speakers as much as it does me? I imagine it ought to. At the least, I'm sure it grates on their nerves. And yes, I'm aware that any number of Latin speakers will contradict me about this. Naysayers! They're everywhere these days. It's the influence of... well, least said is soonest mended. To sum it up, it's a small thing, I know, but it would make my\our (the non-naysayers) gaming experience more enjoyable.
The joys of English stealing words from another language, changing or ignoring the gender, and making it their own. Unfortunately English doesn't make that distinction any more, as it is now an English word, not a Latin one.
A quick look around shows "planeta" to be a masculine (nominative first declension) singular word in Latin though, and it appears to also be masculine in Ancient Greek. Do you have a source/dictionary showing it to be feminine in Latin, rather than Latin-derived modern languages?
Incidentally, spanish and italian appear to treat planet as masculine as well ( El planeta / Il pianeta).
Since English treats it as neuter, perhaps "Secundum" would be more appropriate?
Either way though, it's now an English word, not a Latin one. For other translations it *might* be appropriate to use their gender rules.
That was my list of minor things that detract from the fun I have playing Stellaris. Because it is a marvelously fun game. To me, a great game offers choices, toggles, switches. There is quite a bit of that in your game, already. What are a few more? It doesn't have to be 'this way or the highway'. Let us choose how we want your game to present itself to us, and Stellaris will reach new heights of fame and glory. The golden, shiny type!
With immense respect,
