But I do have them working on something big. We'll start talking about that after Grand Archive releases, and after I have some more data from the Custodians.
That has me really looking forward to Grand Archive now, not just for new story events but for finding out what will come next.
Picked up the season pass because I know myself well enough to know I'd likely have bought all of them at launch anyways, so getting a discount and not needing to remind myself to budget closer to release dates has been nice.
More on the general topic of the thread...
I think there is a lot that could still be done with the game even within the current tech base and setup. While tech debt is a real thing, and kind of why the Custodian team exists to poke at and combat, there seems to be a lot of things that could be done even within the existing tech base.
I'd like to see planet colonization have actual stories attached to what should be a pretty epic event. Right now you throw a colony ship at a world, get a pop-up when the ship lands and a notification when the process is complete and that is it. Running planet colonization as a situation where you could potentially devote more resources to it (throw extra food or mineral upkeep at it) to maybe speed the process up or start with another citizen or have possible events to alter the colony startup setup (pay a few minerals overtime during colony setup and get a district pre-built, or a blocker cleared, or a planetary anomaly of some sort, etc.). Something to make it more of an event taking place vs throw-a-ship-at-a-world-and-forget.
Factions having actual agendas or missions attached to them. They get those little lists of things they'd like to see your government do that come in different color of dots but having them actually say, "Hey, make a migration treaty with someone in the next 1000 days or we'll be angry" feels more like actual power politics in action. Complete the quest for a happiness / stability bump based upon how much of that faction make up your population. Would make sense too for revolts to happen after a faction has had their request missions failed, would feel more justified and actually related to your actions as a player. Mission frequency could be based upon how much of your population belongs to that faction, how happy they already are (happy faction doesn't need you to do things to keep them happy, angry faction throws missions to demand appeasement), etc.
Frigates. Just... Something needs to be done with them. Feels like they should be a fast, evasive ship type that has a poor weapon setup (maybe weighted to Point Defense) to match their historical precedent as a scouting / escort ship class. Give them a bonus Aux slot that can only hold either a cloaking device or a sensor platform to give them better anti-cloak scans or sensor range. And they should have the best Piracy Suppression stat. Something to give them an actual use and the kit to do that job better than the other classes.
More pie-in-the-sky, and less supported by the games current tech, would be to see economic piracy and interstellar trade as a soft-power system where the amount of trade that occurs between you and another nation would have an effect upon things like War Exhaustion. If declaring war with someone suddenly cuts you off from direct trade with a neighbor that was your empires biggest market, you'd think it'd have a greater effect upon the populace in terms of their level of discontent. Basically the "Foundation" idea that economic power is a weapon as much as military power is, represented in game via that Trade mechanics and system.
Being able to fund Privateers in the same way that you can found Mercenary groups. Basically having a small personal pirate army that could do economic warfare for you. Something smaller scale than the Marauder AI empires but that might work well with the Espionage system and existing piracy systems.
Anyways, while I think they have mined a lot of the more generic sci-fi tropes pretty well already I think the game mechanically has a lot it could still do without needing to jump to a Stellaris 2 in a different engine.
