Hi, all, I considered putting this under the Suggestions forum, but I don't think it's really a practical suggestion for this game. However, I suspect I'm among like-minded individuals here. This game clearly aims at being more realistic than your typical space colonization sim, so I thought I'd throw this out there as a discussion for future directions.
The current state of sci-fi generally is, lamentably, based on a 1960's understanding of what space colonization is going to look like. We're starting to see some progress in this regard, the show/book series The Expanse is moving in the right direction.
On the other hand people are still making games like Stellaris and Galactic Civilizations, a Star Trek model of space colonization. Ships travel faster than light from system to system looking for worlds that are so earth-like you can just land on them, walk around barefoot, and eat the fruit off the trees. The federation is made up of scores of these "earth-like" planets in different star systems with a handful of small space stations in between, and the main limit on expansion is conflict with intelligent aliens who are remarkably similar to humans and have unaccountably equivalent technology.
We might say this makes for a fun game, and that's all that matters. But people ought to know it's no more realistic than Tolkien's Middle Earth, and I happen to know that people don't know that. The general public thinks this is what space colonization will really look like because that's what is present in pop culture. I'd like to see more fictional worlds and games that present a more realistic picture and I think they'll be better stories for it.
If the human race survives a hundred trillion years and explores a billion galaxies, which is possible, we will never find another planet so much like earth you can eat the fruit off the trees. This remains true even if our biology was started by some ancient race of precursor aliens. Life on other planets will probably resemble life on earth in several respects because of convergent evolution, the reason that bats look a lot like a birds and whales look a lot like fish, life presents the same physical challenges to all of us and evolution tends to home in on the most obvious solution to our problems. Furthermore, it will probably be based on amino acids, maybe even the same amino acids life on earth uses, but regardless of its similarities the life on other planets will be the result of billions of years of different evolutionary pathways and the odds that some other planet is going to produce life you can just eat without being poisoned, contracting an illness, or having some allergic reaction do not exist; it's never going to happen. We might manufacture other worlds like that eventually, but we aren't going to just find them.
There are probably no other technological civilizations in this or nearby neighboring galaxies. If there were, we would have found them by now. There's a lot to say about all that, but there's good reason to believe that our civilization is much more rare than futurists back in the '60s believed. The best discussion of this I've ever heard was from a youtube channel called Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur. But you can learn about the Fermi Paradox in lots of places. I think what we're going to find is that there's life everywhere. There's life on Mars, Europa, Encelidus, and maybe a few other planetoids in this star system, but it rarely develops to technological intelligence.
Faster than light travel is probably impossible. The whole universe is built around the speed of light and nothing goes faster than that. Yeah, there might be some way around it. Maybe something involving worm holes, but seriously you might as well have ships with drives made of fairy dust fighting with wands of fireballs. Faster than light travel is not compatible with known physics. But that doesn't stop space colonization...
There's no problem with getting ships up to 10 or 20 percent light speed. At that rate you could reach nearby star systems in a few decades, and there's good news on that score because we can probably extend human life until people are totally ageless. It's normal for people to say that I'm being unreasonably pessimistic about not traveling FTL, and then to scoff at the notion of people living millions, or even trillions, of years. But that's part of the Star Trek culture. FTL travel violates the laws of physics. People who don't age does not.
But even more, the idea that space colonization is going to be centered around the search for suitable planets wasn't even good science in the '60s. People were making conceptual art about large space stations back in the '20s, and the idea of making artificial gravity by spinning a capsule in space dates from at least the Gemini missions. Anywhere we live that isn't Earth will be some artificial simulation of Earth, and you can make a much better simulation in a controlled space habitat than you can on another planet. That comes with other nice advantages too. If you live a station with spin gravity, you can step outside into zero-g with no effort while you'll have to launch a rocket off Mars or even the moon. There's a futurism youtuber called Frasier Cane who likes to say, "Gravity wells are for suckers."
If you look forward in time a thousand years from you, I think what you'll find is a Sol system with millions and millions of rotating space habitats full of trillions and trillions of people. We'll probably terraform Venus and Mars just because too many will be stuck on the provincial notion that we should live on planets, but the vast majority of humanity will be born, live, and die in space without ever setting foot on a planet. And that one solar system federation will be bigger, more sophisticated, with more people, more cultures, more colonies, and more ships than whole galactic empires in science fiction. And we'll move out to colonize star systems, not earth-like planets. And in a million years, the intelligent aliens we'll find will be the descendants of colonists from earth that diverged so much from us culturally, technologically, and biologically (thanks partly to genetic engineering) that they will seem much more alien than the guys in suits from classic sci-fi.
Another big issue with the sci-fi tradition is the timelines involved. As I recall, the classic space colonization game Master of Orion II started in the year 2500 and I'd usually win in 2530. Apparently, in 500 years or so we're going to invent some ultimate technology that will solve every problem and there will be no point in progressing further. That's probably not what's actually going to happen. I suspect the laws of physics we've got are the actual laws of physics and the technologies of the future are going to be infinitely refining basically the technologies we have now. They'll be using fusion power and building massive structures with graphene millions of years from now, and the really cool things happening in the future will be quadrant scale construction projects involving multiple galaxies that will take millions of years to complete simply because of their enormity. Interactions between the different branches of humanity's descandents will get more interesting over time too.
The universe is going to keep making new stars for about another trillion years or so, and there's no reason to think that humans won't still be there harvesting the resources of a billion galaxies to try to survive as long as possible into the cold, dark eternity that comes after the universe's childhood. And I think there are stories there that should be told.
