After playing the Dominions II demo (wow, can't wait for the full game!
I wonder if it's moddable like so many of Shrapnel's other games?) I got to thinking, "gee, there are a lot of cool ideas in here that would fit into SE5!" (Really!
) Here are a few that I can think of right now:
-Morale in combat - OK, we don't have individual soldiers running around on the battlefield, but we could apply the system to ships' crews, so when a crew runs out of morale points (which could be affected by taking crew losses, losing friendly ships, or by special weapons - the Psychic tech tree would become even more interesting, and the WMG is pretty awe-inspiring in itself
), the ship automatically turns and flees! Of course, installing a Master Computer would mean your ship never flees (unless some modder designed to create master computers that are intelligent enough to have morale
) Morale could also be affected by a racial trait, either the Happiness trait or a separate one.
-Save in the middle of a turn - OK, I know, it's something we've been bugging you about since SE4 was released, but this just gives me an excuse to bring it up again
-Artifacts and special items that can be assigned to units. In Dom2, certain units can construct special weapons, armor, rings, etc. by using magical crystals. Or, you can find them, win them in contests, whatever. These items can then be assigned to units (usually commanders since they can make the best use of them). The way this might work in SE5 is, you might have your standard Anti-Proton Beam which can be constructed at any old spaceyard. But there might be some experimental Version that can only be constructed at a special lab and retrofitted onto a ship there. Or instead of finding Massive Ionic Disperser technology at a planet, you find three or four Massive Ionic Dispersers... you can try to analyze one or more of them and gain the technology, but that could be risky - they could blow up, or you might take them apart and still not be able to figure anything out... or you can take them to your Xenotechnology Lab and fit them onto your flagships...
-Mercenaries! Bid on them and the highest bidder gets to order them around for a few months, and if enough survive, they go back to auction! Or do it the Merchant Prince way and you pay them a salary every turn based on how many are still alive, but the auctions are more fun
Also, I have an idea for making supplies & maintenance a bit more interesting & realistic without making the game too cumbersome (like some people say Stars! is, with the shuttling minerals around):
Get rid of "supplies" and instead let ships carry around resources (min/org/rad or whatever SE5 uses) to use as supplies, just like they carry around cargo, with the full range of transfer commands. Yes, this sounds like Stars!, but wait - There's also a global pool, like in SE4! Merge the functions of "spaceport" and "resupply depot" so wherever you have a spaceport, your ships can stop to draw resources from the global pool to use as supplies (or return them if you need them for construction). Maintenance costs would then be some value assigned to each component and hull in the data files, independent of the construction cost, and maintenance would be deducted from each ship's supplies/resources every turn. But how do you get your resources to your planets to build things? Well, there would be a two-tiered system: local resources and global resources. Local resources are like in Stars! where you have to move them around; any fresh colony starts with a few generated from scrapping the colony ship; make sure you build a spaceport first!
Global resources are like in SE4 and come into play when you have a spaceport in the system (which isn't blockaded, and your planet isn't blockaded either
) Construction would use global resources first, saving the local resources for times of shortage (like a blockade). So all in all, most of the time you wouldn't *have* to micromanage your resources (due to the global pool), but there'd still be the strategic element of laying siege to a system by blockading the spaceport!