New to the forum too, but love this game.
Apologies if this has already been suggested or asked for, but since we're on the topic of faction commissions, I always thought it would be neat if faction commission got more gameplay.
It would be cool to be able to search ships and basically do the same things faction ships do now. Confiscate contraband, take bribes, mark people as criminals etc. Not many space games out there let you play as the navy/police and actually do the things they do, so it would be pretty neat.
Hi, and welcome to the forum!
So, hmm. This is the sort of thing where you could literally add an endless number of things kind of like it, just different directions to flesh things out in. My feeling is that it makes sense to flesh out things like this when they're solving a particular gameplay or design problem or just tie into a bunch of mechanics.
So, for example, I probably wouldn't want to go very deep into this in particular, since the game really isn't
about that - it'd make more sense for a game focused on trying to simulate that aspect of things.
On the other hand, I could totally see adding a mechanic where you can intercept a smuggler and have certain options for dealing with them. In fact, was just thinking about this the other day, in the context of a specific difficulty one of your colonies might be facing, which is really the crux of things.
If this kind of thing is the glue that helps build something else that's design-critical, then I'm all for it. If it's just for its own sake, then I'm very much hesitant to do that - building out a system like that with depth is a lot of work (and a lot of complexity, potential for bugs, and for generally bogging down development), and it
needs to play a critical role in the design to be justified.
Not to say it's a bad idea, per se! It is indeed neat