How about eliminating the critical 'first shot' factor in large battles? Simple to do - move and fire the ships one at a time, player A then player B. Just randomising who gets to fire ALL their weapons first was not enough in my opinion.
Eliminate any possiblity of reducing the maintenance costs, to keep fleet sizes down.
Make the formations and strategies a bit more sophisticated. For example, I would normally set all ships to break formation - but I can't do this with a fleet that I want to capture a planet. Or perhaps an assault ship would hold back on unloading its entire complement of napalm bombs if the fleet is supposed to be capturing the planet, not wiping it.
I personally don't care about the AI or tactical/tcpip combat, its PBW or nothing for me
The inner/outer/armour is interesting, in fact it seems to be lifted straight from an optional rule in the old 'Starfire' pen and paper game. In that, it quickly became a PITA because we wanted to do large battles, not translate SFB scenarios, and it was too much detail. It might work better in a computer game though... I'm sure most players would not mind spending extra time on design, and the combat calculations are automatic anyway. To see what's going on, you would want to see the damage status of a ship DURING the combat replay though.
Trade bonus based on the
smaller economy not the larger. Much more sensible and eliminates 'phantom economies'.
Add some 'negative' special racial characteristics that would GIVE you points to spend on other stuff.
- being so disgusting nobody would sign treaties with you (I've seen that somewhere else, MOO perhaps?).
- specific races being unable to use specific technologies - perhaps a race of 3 mm midgets that could not have Troops, or a religious ban on using SM tech, or ethical objections to Mines..
- 10-metre sentient elephants needing double supplies and crew quarters, or races where you had to keep replacing the ship crews because they couldn't tolerate space travel..
More variation in the 'hit probability profile' of different weapons.
- minimum ranges for missiles and torpedoes
- weapons with massive tail-off, say 30% less likely to hit per square in range not 10%
- the converse, some weapons which only decline by 5% per square or so
Echo the request for either
a) hexes
b) 1.5 movement points to move diagonally