I've been playing for just about a month, as the Seekers of Knowledge, in case you didn't know. When I started I could only conquer worlds with less than 100 strength of defense. I have since expanded to conquer the majority of worlds within economic range of my main and sector capital and at this point I have no intention of ever expanding beyond my current economic sphere. Just waiting for the independent gorgos fleets to slowly attrition away.
You may disagree with some of what I have to say but I hope it gives food for thought anyway. Some of it may have already been said but not with my own special spin.
My first comments refer to empire management and the game interface. I really need to be able to ask questions like these and get answers:
* Where did I park my warphants?
* where do I have heaps of hexacarbide? (100/1000/10000 watches of input/output)
* where am I in danger of running out of food in the next cycle?
* which planets are producing or importing less than optimal?
* which planets are close to rebellion?
* where do I have unbuilt arcologies?
* where am I allocating less/more than X% to planetary defences?
I have made some progress with dissecting the $Anacreon global variable using the javascript console but I'm a dabbling programmer and I'm not sure it's worth persevering while some of the game balance issues remain unresolved.
The '!' icons that appear next to planets are too brief. I really want to know if it's an isolated occurence or the start of a trend. I would really like to see the game track complaints with something like the following pseudocode, display a summary in the 'news' window, and only pop up a '!' if the value gets too high. Something like:
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new_tech_complaint = round_down(old_tech_complaint*0.9)+(if this_watch_complaint then 10 else 0)
The game could distribute what planets need and then in a second pass, distribute any remaining stock according to what they want.
More user interface woes: the info panel/hud at the bottom of the screen, well my screen is a lot wider than it is tall and the usable galactic map is a long thin horizontal strip. I would much prefer it if I could put that panel on the side of my screen instead.
And something really has to be done about the duration of the game update. On my computer which isn't particularly slow it takes around 20 seconds of each minute during which the interface is completely unresponsive. And then I can finish what I was doing, spot something else that needs doing, and just after I start it the next game update rolls around.
Rather than create a wall of text I'm going to put my thoughts on game balance in a separate post.