Some stuff that's come to mind as I've been playing 0.9, which has been fantastic so far.
-Colonization is definitely a good move, will need some additional tweaking (income, the regularity of invasion fleets+pirate/pather activity, etc.) but it's the right direction. Being able to be more actively involved with the systems that the NPC factions act in is a neat level of interaction. Stuff like fleet development/management could be expanded beyond just setting doctrine as well, maybe even to the level of a proper strategy game (Having to balance production of various types of ships+colony development beyond just build the infrastructure and wait as size increases) but that's probably expanding the scope of development too much.
-Being able to find blueprints to produce your own ships and armaments is REALLY cool but generally I'll have large stocks of any weapon I'd find a blueprint of, or options to salvage any ship I could find from a blueprint, so the only utility is adding to the options for my fleet doctrine. It'd be really nice to be able to find blueprints for ships+weapons that can't be bought from any other faction, true lost technology (outside of the uh, redacted ships). It might also be nice for the existing factions to find or develop new versions of weapons and ships as the game goes on.
-As an aside, one way to manage the large amounts of profit that colonies generate is to add a rising cost of administration for the more/larger colonies you own. The more space+people you have to manage the more complicated things become. It's why smaller countries generally have an easier time with developing infrastructure than larger ones.
- I checked the frequently suggested things so sorry if this is a common question but are the other factions (Diktat, persean league) going to get more faction-specific ships+weapons eventually? it'd be nice if they had more of an identity technologically rather than being just different colors on the map. Could add a few more factions in general tbh. Somehow. Maybe upgrade another corporation to faction status or add in another competing group either in the inner sector or one of the outliers.
-I'd really like for some kind of grand endgame/storyline in the finished game, whether that's leading your chosen faction to victory over all the others+uniting the sector, building up your own faction and conquering it all for yourself. The game does put you in the shoes of just one person in a complex situation but the nature of videogames is that the player's gonna drive *** so might as well give them the opportunity to become space emperor or w/e.
-Another option would be some kind of evolving threat/grand menace that slowly appears and becomes more apparent over the course of the game. Band of brothers has this (once you reach a certain point either a civil war happens, orc invasion, or necromancers) and sword of the stars has some similar stuff (planet killer, puppetmaster, locust infestation, peacekeeper, as well as a bonus von neumann world that will generally spawn most games). It adds to the story, and also allows for more interactions with the economic+military systems already in the game (Have you destablized everywhere and generally played selfishly? nobody can resist the big threat galaxy reduced to total anarchy/barren wasteland). I guess generally it'd be nice for there to be a chain of events taking place in the galaxy as you play, which you can interact with directly, indirectly, or totally ignore and just hide in your cool party pad off in some corner away from all the crazy luddites and corp boys etc.
- Skill changes are good, it'd be nice if lategame there was options to use money and some other resource to allow you to respec or relearn skills. I've reached max level and discovered that I maybe should have invested more in carrier skills, and although I can just change max level in the options it might also be another option for stuff to work towards lategame. Maybe combine it with AI research, swappable brain chips or something, because allowing the player to dabble in forbidden and potentially dangerous technology seems like a fun idea.
- Research+development of upgrades etc. would be nice in general but once again that's just a desire for more strategy game elements to the personal faction/colony element.
- Holy *** battlestations are tough aaaaa. I'm upping the battle size to see if bringing more battleships can help with some of the tougher ones. Particularly the redacted stations
- It would be nice if stations stopped spawning fleets if I smash them enough times. A couple of times it's been really frustrating trying to lure away and destroy defending fleets only to find two new larger fleets "preparing for patrol" when I get back to the station.
-Speaking of which fighting pathers and pirates becomes a huge chore eventually. It really cuts into my lategame exploration to have to go find endlessly spawning bases in order to smash them to bits, particularly when a lot of the time the location of the pather/pirate base supporting an incident is unknown. I need other options to combat this, either using ground defense rating as a way to determine how successful pather cells are at hiding+Causing damage, allowing for player-owned comm stations to report when a pirate base appears, or expanding the player's fleet creation+doctrine to allow for the logistical support of your own expeditions to clear stuff out.
- other factions sending raiding fleets also gets tedious, particularly as the credit cost continues to increase exponentially from what I've seen. It's neat that they do recognize you as a threat to their economic wellbeing and send raiders to cure this though. It's a logical decision a precariously balanced political entity would do.
- Carriers are too good and they feel mandatory for doing well in large fleet battles. part of this is due to how the AI behaves and I don't feel like I can trust having lots of frigate or destroyer sized ships under AI control as they're too prone to getting themselves killed stupidly. Carriers with large amounts of fighters can provide similar functions in dealing with swarms of smaller ships and wolfpacking larger ships deprived of escorts, and will generally survive battles. Unless they decide to steamroll straight into enemy lines, which happens occasionally
- Speaking of which the AI can be a bit wonky sometimes, and I mean it's never going to be perfect but I'd like if my dedicated carriers (with cautious officers) didn't charge into frontline combat and my legion battlecarriers loaded with ballistics (with steady officers) didn't solely hide behind me when I set them to escort my flagship. It's just a case where sometimes the positioning and choices ships make run contrary to what i'd like or what makes sense. Often I find myself getting frustrated at how overly aggressive ships are during battle and how incredibly *** nervous they are when I fight a retreat, the one time when I DO want them to get right up in the face of enemy ships. This is why I solely autoresolve retreats now actually.
- Officer skills can be a bit annoying. It'd probably be better to generate a list of skills an officer can learn and allowing people to hire based on that+their personality rather than presenting random skills on levelup.
-All the top tier technology seems to be energy weapons. kinetic weapons+armor can be high tech too
I just wanna feel special with heavily armored ballistic-focused ships and not like some kinda caveman
-The "D-grade ships cost less to maintain" skill creates a perverse incentive to find the most damaged ships that are still mostly functional to use as support ships (salvage rigs, cargo haulers, fuel tankers etc.), getting these ships without d-mods is actually downside. I could build some atlas freighters to replace my 6 colossi but due to their carefully selected d-mods having a multitude of these is cheaper in terms of fuel+supplies than having fewer larger ships. The only reason I upgraded to prometheus tankers was that I could lower my doctrinal ship quality to its lowest setting and find them in my faction shipyard, where atlas' never appear even if I set them to high priority, thus meaning I can only get them from custom order at the highest quality my shipyards can produce.
- There's opportunities for lore+setting stuff related to total societal collapse and how it shapes leadership, evolving priorities, and how stability is propped up by increasingly draconian controls on trade, immigration, and other factors, but that's more just me being really interested in that subject and how it shaped various societies and influenced history. There's plenty of systems that are complex and expensive but were required to support the scale of an economy or cilization, that eventually become too expensive to maintain but too engrained to be abandoned.
There's probably more I've forgotten but here's a giant semiorganized mess of words. This game's really fun and its current path of development is great. I've been tryna encourage everyone I know to give it a go as 0.9 has a lot of stuff that I would say has previously required mods. Really interested to see where it goes from here.