[inigma]

Two ideas I'd love to see:

1. real time combat
2. custom hotkeys, and macros

1. I wonder if battle will be in real time. I think that would be very very very very very cool.

You set your ship, task force, and fleet strategy, formations, and primary, secondary, and trinary orders before the battle, hit start when you're ready, and the computer plays out the entire battle in real time. I think the ability to create your own scripts for how your fleets "react" to enemy forces during real time combat would also be one of the coolest inventions in 4x games.

2. Custom hotkey combinations would be awesome in setting up some system of macros for empire management, battle management, and others.

Imagine watching a 200 ship battle in real time, your carriers are preprogrammed to stay with the fleet near pd ships, instead of running away once they've launched their fighters. The fighters form up in preprogrammed flight groups and wings, and your cruisers provide perimeter defense while firing their heavy mounts from long range. Light cruiser task forces move in for close encounters of the third kind, forming the front line of the battle, rotating their positions so as to soak up the most enemy fire, the computer almost seemingly working hard to provide cover for weakened ships.

You can pick a ship to command personally, be it part of a formation, or a leader, or even the fleet flagship, and as the battle changes and your preprogrammed responses appear to be failing, you quickly call up hotkey macros which load entirely new strategies and responses for your fleet to follow, which eventually change the formations within battle as the enemy is flanked, surrounded, and defeated soundly in a shooting retreat as the battle ends.

Now THAT would be the Space Empires of my dreams.