The musings of a quiet thread lurker on Galactic War

First things first, my complements to Uber For getting such a huge feature out the door.
Now, on to business.
My thoughts about it's current state:
I adore Galactic War, it's a huge sign of progress and is hugely playable in it's current state.
After 5 full playthroughs on Annihilation difficulty with Uber galaxy size, I can say I thoroughly enjoy the game mode but i do have a handful of complaints;

1. RNG has no real place in strategy games as a whole (I realize it's first pass of a first pass of a first pass of a... ) but RNG for Tech? The lore for each sector provides no hints on what may or may not exist in the system. There are no clues, whatsoever, as to what may or may not lie in the sector(starsystem).

2. Obliteration of tech on planets you "own"? (Ie: when you hit reject tech, there is no option to come back and swap it out later for one of your currently stored techs later) You own the planet, it's uncontested, why would you obliterate something that you may want at a later point in time(thus narrowing the possible strategy elements of coming back to pick up techs you may want to make your build stronger vs something in particular(ie: champion sectors)

3. Uncontested planets. Everybody but you seems to have a major stake in the galaxy. You poke the nest. take something from them. Are they not going to want it back?(First pass of a first pass of a first pass, i get it, but nobody in the office had any (short term) implementable idea of a counter swarm against your push?)

4. Planetcracking vs ai's impossible without specific tech? (Champion systems) (I know this circles back around to the RNG and lack of tech "storage"(trash your sub commanders early game in favor of something else?) but being obliterated in a particular match after owning a majority stake of the entire universe trying to find a sub commander so i had some kind of offensive/defensive stake on at least one other planet in the Champion systems.

5. Planets do nothing after they've been captured(other than sometimes providing a jump point to your next target). This is somewhat lacking in depth. You have a Base there, why didn't you carry along any of your metal? (once again, First pass of a first pass of a first pass and so on and so forth untill infinity.)

My thoughts on the direction that I think the gamemode should take:

1. Counter-push. The turns mechanic we currently have seems to do naught but count the number of times we've jumped. My idea would be to have a counter-attack triggered at some 10-20 jumps where they come back to seize what you stole from them (tech and such) (and possibly attack eachother). This would (in combination with my next suggestion) give a decent chunk of strategic and tactical decisions.

2. Tech Repository. On your "home" world, the planet in which you spawn, you have a cache of the techs you have found but decided not to carry on your com, and you have to return to your home planet (or some way or another pay some amount of turns to obtain one or more of your techs) to swap in and out your captured techs. This would alleviate some of the RNG qualms I had before, as before a particularly difficult sector (champion sector) you could go grab your sub-comms or advanced defense/offensive tech (or nuke-tech) before you try to annihilate the commanders of a particular faction.

3.Some way or another to tell what the planets ahead are like, how much water they have(so you can have a chance to avoid a fight where you have no offensive capability in the water(with exception to your com who is made from molten bad assery and the tears of a billion orphaned Doxen after your com has their parental com). (this is a big sore spot for me, I run into planets who have a large body of water and the AI commander runs into the water because he has every tech available, causing me to eventually circum to the swarm of air units 2 hours in)

Welcome to the forums! Glad to have you here.

Nice post, I'd encourage you to post more and lurk less!

I just wanna point out that if someone can beat GW on "Annihilation" difficulty with "Uber" galaxy size 5 times in 2 days, then there's a problem with it's longevity.

It would be nice to have an "Uber Squared" size galaxy, for days you just want to grind to see what maximum tech feels like.

I've been thinking about this for a while... What if the sub commanders you acquire could have tech slots as well.

You can then load them out with different tech to yours. Whilst allied sub commanders are in game, and alive, you should have access to their tech tree as well as your own. It would add increased strategic value to then and losing them would be a blow as any tech they were loaded with would go with them. I'd also like to be able ti select which commander to send into battle once I have a few. That way you can go in driving one of your sub commanders and actually lose a match without losing the war. It would make your faction leader more like a king in chess.

this is the first look of Galactic War, its not staying like this forever, i will improve and become, an interesting and awesome game-mode.

Agreed. I expected the super large Galactic War galaxies to take weeks.

I want BIGGER!

I think it definitely has to be more dynamic. I want to feel part of an ongoing war rather than playing connected battles-the factions should move their commanders around and fight each other. Maybe these battles could be watched as AI matches?

Systems getting taken back is actually probably a bad idea. There are a few games that have done something similar and all the ones where you go backwards are boring. Nobody wants to replay the same map, even if it's twice.