Hey, first off, amazing game, you guys are making the exact kind and flavour of game I've been trying to find for years. Space fleet combat, piloting combat ships yourself, fleet management and customization, having crew with personality and experience, sandbox style gameplay, it's all amazing and I'm really glad to have found Starfarer.
I've only discovered this game in the past couple of days and have been having a good time with the Sandbox campaign in its current state. There's tons of things that will enhance it - for example, being able to move around the strategic galaxy view with the map open and unpaused - but things like that I figure you've already got on your list and its just a case of getting to them. I'm really excited to see how the game develops - even in its current alpha state it's fantastic.
A few things I'm not sure if you are planning though, I'd like to ask about.
1. Piloting Fighters
You can argue that being able to pilot a fighter personally isn't really that useful in a game that scales all the way up to battleships. I believe it'd still be pretty effective though - you could personally fly around in a fighter to do some scouting, provide extremely reliable fighter support or knock out key enemy small ships, etc. Additionally, you could have the other fighters in the wing follow you around as normal and back you up, which would be even cooler.
Most importantly, it'd be fun as hell, particularly with strong strafe drives to dodge fire. I can't imagine it'd be any kind of difficult to let us fly them and I assume it's just a design choice. I'd love to hear your opinion on this.
2. Lingering in a Battle
Particularly in a game that lends itself to sandboxiness like this one, I wish I had more control over exiting the battle. I feel like the battles are taken away from me all too fast while I'm sitting admiring my ships after they just took out the last frigate. I want to look at their health, check how much ammo I used, maybe even test some weapons or maneuver tactics. This'd be pretty easy to implement by just having a button/prompt that let you exit the battle when all enemy ships were destroyed or retreated instead of auto-exiting, or if you wanted a more immersive solution, having your ships leave via map edge when you wanted to leave, though the latter would add more unnecessary time onto people who do like rattling off lots of battles quickly.
To speak further on the nicety of being able to linger in a battlefield to test out weapons/see how the AI reacts to orders/just test stuff in general, it'd be nice to just be able to go to the tactical battle screen in open space without having to be engaging anyone. You could take close looks at your ships, test out flux rates, shoot missiles at asteroids, etc. I'm not sure if this is all planned already, if so, sweet, but otherwise I'd love to see that kind of freedom.
3. Command Points
Speaking of freedom, I haven't been able to find an explanation on the concept of command points. What is their purpose from a design standpoint? I won't say anything about them at length as I haven't developed a big enough fleet yet to be restricted by them yet, but to my uneducated mind they seem like just that - restrictions - and I see them existing to hamper tactical flexibility and options. Can you enlighten me on the concept of command points as a designer and what benefits they bring?
4. Crewing Choice/Fighter Refit
Will we be able to pick and choose exactly which/how many crew go where in a more specific fashion in the future? Will fighters be refittable in the future? Would you consider letting players customize their fighters from a range of different weapon types/mods/etc instead of them all being stock?
