A New Space Empires Game Idea

[dogscoff]

I had a cool idea for a game a few years back, wher eyou were raiding wrecked ships for bits and cobbling together ships out of salvaged parts. It had strategic elements as well, let's call it "junk empires".

{SNIP}
I just typed out an incredibly long description of how this game would work, but I soon realised that it is actually just Elite with a whol load of fleet/ management/ 4X stuff bolted on.

Imagine Elite with the following additions:
-The Ability to board wrecked ships and carry away cargo & components.
-Ability to buy/sell ship components like you can with cargo.
-Ability to own a workshop and use it to build components into new ships/ upgrade existing ships/ perform upgrades for paying customers.
-Space stations/ asteroid bases/ planetary bases that you can own, develop and manage. (Ownership by conquest, purchase or colonisation)
-Consistent AI Commanders and organisations that operate just like human players and remember their standing with you (ie diplomacy)
-Consistent and evolving political backdrop that you can affect.
-Ability to crew multiple ships and send them off individually or in fleets to carry out your instructions.

Basically you could start off as a guy in a ship and through careful trading/ piracy/ mercenary work/ scavenging build yourself up into a galactic force, moving from single tactical encounters to large scale 4X strategic operations. Ministers and AI would have to be excellent to make this really work, since it would soon become impossible to handle everything personally, but just imagine how cool it would be...