I'll touch on ship design... Yeah, I always wanted to have a "Lego-ships" or "Tetris-ships" game, but that would probably be a bit involved for a 4X... For a tactics game along the lines of Begin, Vectac, or even Gratuitous Space Battles that would be awesome though!
What we're doing with ship design is basically a simple list of components, sort of like Space Empires IV... We MIGHT have "component layers" a la SE3; I'm not sure about that at the moment... or we might be able to implement something akin to "layers" in a more flexible way using something like SE4's mount system - say, a component with an "Exterior Mount" might have 10x the chance to be hit when the ship is damaged, while a component with a "Core Mount" might have one-tenth the normal chance, or something...
One game I really want to try sometime is Star Ruler, though... I've heard that that game has an interesting ship design system - from what I can tell, it's sort of like the "layer mount" system I described above, only instead of discrete "layers" or "mounts", you just drag the components around, and the ones in front are more likely to get hit when your ship gets hit from the front, and the ones on the outside are more likely to get hit in general, etc. Never played the game though, so I'l just guessing based on screenshots and what I've heard! But it sounds an awful lot like what SE5's system would be like if it were done RIGHT!
Oh, right, no arbitrary hullsize limits! Make a ship with 1000 missile launchers if you want - just, how are you going to move that ship around? You'll need a LOT of engines! Check out the latest beta version of Gritty Galaxy Mod for SE5 if you want to see that sort of system finagled into the mechanics of SE5 - it's made by SJ, who's one of the team members for SL
Oh, I guess one other area I could tell you about is combat... We've had all sorts of ideas about combat, but I think the one that we're sort of leaning towards is automated combat which is continuous with the normal spacetime continuum. By this I mean that battles will be autoresolved (like GSB, or multiplayer SE5) and you'll get a replay on your turn - but instead of ships being effectively "teleported to an arena" like in many other games, they actually engage in combat in the same spacetime as other objects, and if other ships happen to intercept, then they will be drawn into combat as well!
Hmm, research... We're going for a "continuous" tech tree, much along the lines of the continuous combat system. This means that instead of having "levels" of some tech, you instead just have "points accumulated", and various items like components are unlocked at various points along the way - say, Laser Guns might require 100 points into Physics, or something! The advantage here is that you can have auto-upgrading designs with formulas: if you have 150 points into Physics, then that next laser you build will be somewhat better than the laser you built when lasers were brand new, and you don't even have to "upgrade" your design to higher-level components - the game will just grab the "current" laser stats and apply them to your ship!
Trading tech is rather cheesy, at least in the minds of many of the SL developers... both from a gameplay perspective (cookie cutter empires/designs) and from a realism perspective (yeah, let's analyze that alien bugazoid thingy we've never seen before) so its effect will likely be minimized, at least in the stock game...
Well, looks like I wrote about more topics than I'd originally intended!
