Hi Steve,
I was reading some old suggestions threads last night, and found a "what I like about the current release" post from right after FACs came in. Since there's been a lot of good changes with 4.7, I thought I'd do another one.
The first thing that comes to mind are the changes in mineral abundance, i.e. that factories and mines are only 50% duranium, rather than pure. I think this has had a huge positive impact - the shortages I'm seeing are in Neutronium and Mercassium, rather than Duranium, and I haven't been in a mode of having to build overcapacity of mines in order to be able to grow the economy (mines and factories).
The next thing (which is has a higher rating in my mind that the duranium change) is automated turns. These are saving me a HUGE amount of time - they allowed me to burn through the first 10 years of my conventional start MUCH more quickly in people-time than in previous games. It really helps a lot to not have to wait for the turn to end, see there's no event, then push the stupid button again.
I like the research change too, although I'm not sure if the advancement needs to be toned down or is just right. It used to be that one needed to open several new colonies with research labs so that one could work on multiple projects simultaneously. I also used to really crank up the number of academies so that I could get a big enough officer base to get research specialities promoted high enough to be able to be Governors. Now all that stress/micromanagment is gone - scientist come in as scientists right away, you don't have to wait for them to be promoted, and different labs on the same world can work on different projects. One trick I realized about 1/2 way into my empire is to "farm" scientists by giving them 1-lab projects to work on - this allows their bonuses to grow. I don't this this is something that needs to be fixed (it makes sense to train promising leaders with small projects), but it seems like the administrative ceiling might be growing too high. I've only got ~35 labs (conventional start), but I've probably got 15 scientists and most of them can handle at least 20 labs. Maybe if administrative ceiling advancement had an additional probability hit proportional to the number of labs assigned to that scientist compared to that scientist's max....
I've already logged some bugs on the science interface.
I'm so-so on the industrial screen. It was nice to be able to swing my production around to 10% missiles on a dime, but it feels a little unrealistic. You're putting ordnance factories back in anyway, so no big deal. I found the %-this; %-that interface to be more cumbersome (read micromanagement attention needed) than just shoving things in the queue, but that might just be that I'm not yet using it correctly.
I haven't hit aliens enough to know if the yoyo/interrupt issues that forced me out of my last game are still there, but so far all signs are positive. The game-start NPR has fought several (3-6?) battles with precursors where there were long stretches of 5-second increments, and the game seemed to work its way through them all with automated turns on. This is great, since it seems like the issue that made the game unplayable for me is well on its way to being fixed. I also suspect NPR AI is a lot better - I was surprised when I peeked at it during the first battle with precursors to see how many systems the NPR had explored. I just discovered one of the NPR construction ships in a system adjacent to my homeworld (I think there's an NPR glitch there - the construction ship was just sitting there even though there was already a jump gate, plus it wasn't building a jump gate into Sol) - I assume that's because the NPR has been doing a lot of exploring. One weird thing - the NPR doesn't seem to have activated any other NPRs, even though it had probably explored a dozen systems when last I looked many years ago.
I really like the division/brigade structure introduced to the ground units - I think it appeals to the OCD in me :-)
John
