So, I've played the game for a while now and am currently on a 1v1 huge map game with 500+ turns going. It's made me realize a few things, which I'll expand on after explaining that I am working under the assumption that by entering Beta, most of the content we see is what we'll get to expect in the main release. That said, I believe the game is lacking in diversity as far as approaches to war go even from a non-fighting point of view.
An example, in my 500+ game, I'm playing the Yor vs an AI Human race and we haven't gone to war at all. This has been fun 'cause I've gotten to toy with the ins and outs of the economy, culture, etc. It also makes me realize that in order to end the game, I'm basically stuck on being forced to go to war, build endless fleets versus his endless fleets and see if I have the patience to last another few hundred turns before it all ends and one of us loses.
- I'm a long, long, long time fan of 4X games and I think I've played just about all of them, from the small like Dominion to the big like Civilizations, and it makes me have a few suggestions for content that the game could really use. I'll make a list in order to make it easier to understand.Map-wide effects of a space-age 'I can trascend mortality' kind of scene. For example, in games like Space Empire, the players could literally undo and redo entire stars, they could mold planets to existence and out of existence, they could build Dyson Spheres and Ring Worlds. You didn't just have an empire to manage, you had your tech expectation's equivalents in map manipulation.
- Continuing in another similar to opposite direction, combat and actual warfare, the game could use a lot of alternate ways to subjugate planets beyond 'attack with ships', 'drop troops'. For example, the ability to decimate a planet's rating or population, maybe even growth rates or manufacturing rates. Things that really create that tense sense of attrition in the game if you opt for war. It also provides a nice tech counterbalance if the earlier map manipulations are seen from a utility techtree point of view rather than from the military side.
- Racial modification, and I don't mean the 'customize race' kind, I mean like the ability to modify your race on the go once the game has started. Someone in another thread mentioned the use of tech victory research when tech victory was off in order to give massive boosts to whoever researched it first. I like the idea, it could work into something like countering the negative racial mods of races or adding new ones or maybe just inflicting them on enemy players like random negative mods.
- Unique, end-game, ship hulls. An example could be the Terror Star from G.Civs 2, but with a touch in the vein of games like Stardrive where each race has their own unique hulls (as we already do) for absolutely everything instead of making a single, redoable planet destroyer that's shared between everyone. Make those kinds of weapons be integratable to super capital ships, not some space station you need to make and which looks exactly the same for everyone. That would really make players tense when the war starts up and they need to shoot down a fleet of ships which has one central bad boss that REALLY needs taking out.
