1. Victory scenarios, or at the very least, scenarios which result in various stable-ish outcomes and a victory credit roll. It's not really "Mount and Blade in Space" when there's no way to conquer anything or achieve a lasting peace, short of glassing every other human colony in the Sector, which has always felt really nihilistic.
2. Choices that actually matter. Most of the adventures have obvious Right Answers or they're elaborate FedEx quests. More Fallout-esque, "there are several answers, and they all have tradeoffs" adventure scripting would be a huge plus for replayability. Don't get me wrong- I think that Alex and David have actually done really well this last couple of versions in terms of improving the feel of the game and connecting players to the lore. I just think there's more room for interesting stuff, like a Fallout-style ending where the player gets to review their important choices and sees how they affected the end.
3. A thorough revamp of how we relate to Factions once we establish our own. Seriously, the game really needs an official diplomatic system, not, "spend Story Points to get out of trouble until you can't, then glass everybody else".
4. Mechanisms for sharing the Gates with the Factions, which greatly change Accessibility. Allow new ones to be built.
5. Factions should behave dynamically, at least in the most basic ways. For example, every Faction should have a "budget" based on their "GDP", and every 3 months, they should be able to spend some of that "budget" to either improve their Colonies or buy additional fleet assets for <missions>. There isn't any coherent reason why the crippled Colonies must remain so. If they're never allowed to occasionally invade one another, that's fine, although I still think that's a mistake; people play Nexerelin largely because the official game doesn't do what they want. I think that there should also be ways to perma-destroy stuff on Colonies, not just "disrupt" them, so that there are options short of glassing. That should probably cost Fuel, need the local defenses to be Disrupted, and lots of Marines, and take significant amounts of in-game time, like a siege in Mount and Blade did.
6. The missile meta and the gradual erosion of the player's personal power in combat is one of the reasons why I just can't make myself play Vanilla's combat balance any more. It's boring and feels cheap to build a fleet that's designed to launch <some automated attack style> whether it's missiles or fighters, wait for it to work (or save-scum if it doesn't) and then Retreat, rinse and repeat. I want player-ships that are designed for players, require skill and can be effective at tipping the balance into end-game content. I don't think that's where things are.
7. Hyperspace remains either an obstacle-course that doesn't serve much purpose past stymying exploration, or at best a slog. I often think that Hyperspace was a design mistake; that instead this would be a better game design if that part was largely abstracted, so that the interesting parts in Systems could've had more love and time spent on it. I'm currently playing around with having [REDACTED] and Derelicts show up there occasionally in challenging numbers to give players a mountain to climb if they want, with treasures worth the trouble. Might mod in Gates to every System, so that once I've gotten somewhere, it's not a boring slog getting back again.
8. More options for Sector size and other starting conditions that feel roughly balanced. For example, a start with a Venture and a pair of Wolves- a "trader start" that makes sense and won't gimp the player during the Tutorial, etc.
9. A fix for the "corner camper" problems that are inherent to the current combat game design. Sometimes I think that the right answer is simply to make the battlefield so large that it can't happen, or force ships going further than X from the center to flee if they don't turn around quickly enough.
10. More variety of Buildings and Industries. There are mods that add both and look like they'd probably improve the feel.
11. Less reliance on soft caps and more reliance on cost to balance player-fleet power.
12. Less artificial limitations on AI fleet size, or better mechanics to represent situations. If a Pirate Armada's dumb enough to tackle the Hegemony's capital, a huge fleet should erupt from it, representing their strategic-level assets being deployed. It should look like a Somali pirate "fleet" attempting to raid Washington DC- the good ol' Hegemony Defense Fleet should arrive. Same with other Faction capitals; they should be on an entirely different level than they are presently. Same with the difference in feel of a fleet coming to raid your colony, vs. one that's trying to glass it; the second should be a truly terrifying end-game threat level, and if triggered early, should be the start of a strategic death-spiral all the way to "does not have Colonies", rather than something you occasionally fly-swat while your real enemy is a smallish bunch of anti-tech terrorists and unorganized criminals.
13. Full modding access to the ship drawing systems, at least in terms of extensible callbacks. It and the UI are the biggest areas that aren't inherently very moddable, especially the Tactical Pane view, which I've been wanting to mod for ages now. Think about modders adding features like tactical formations, new Admiral commands, etc., to flesh out the game for years to come.
14. On a technical level, putting all ship graphics of a Faction onto a single large sprite sheet at runtime would probably speed things up considerably. Rendering ships in sprite-sheet order would help this. Also would help a lot with VRAM limits, because anything that's not needed can be deallocated.
15. Addressing whatever's causing Pieces to be abnormally expensive (try spawning a hundred of them and watch what happens to framerates when AIs are actively present). It's something either going on w/ collision or drawing, I think, but that's all I've been able to parse from profiling it. I have this probably-stupid theory that they're generating collision circles that are either waaaaaaaay too big or that are tiny, leading to per-frame tests vs. the polygons. But that's probably wrong.
16. Access to explosion events in EveryFrameCombatPlugin. I want to get rid of particle spam.
17. Strongly consider looking at the GPU-driven particle system that's been released or my multithreaded system and implement something like that, as these are areas that are still surprisingly slow. I'd be happy to lend my source for free- the version that's over here in private is considerably better than the public version and now includes an engine system and generic trail system, including a punctual smoke with animation that's surprisingly cheap. If nothing else, a callback to Engine drawing, explosions happening and trails being called by projectiles, etc. would mean fewer complexities and headaches; most of the time spent writing that was spent writing around native systems, abusing gamecode in creative ways, etc.
18. Modernize the Java. I've been using 8 for something like four years now; it's fine, it's faster and it handles memory and garbage-collection better. I understand wanting to stay in a comfortable place and not wreck things, but that's what code forks are for, lol. I'd be stunned if it doesn't compile and run on 8 without a major hitch, though, unless you're doing <something weird> that depended on one of the few things that ever got deprecated in Java, and in that case, there's almost certainly a well-worn workaround on Stack Overflow at this late date, lol. I'd prefer to use the latest JVM that JWJGL supports well, though.
19. Past 1.0, please quit breaking the mods that touch the Economy, Skills, etc. Extensions, yes, whole new behaviors and UIs that deprecate existing functions, no. I get that making the economy work in the way that you really wanted has been hard, but at some point, it needs to be fixed with numbers-nudging rather than new functions; honestly, I hoped it was officially done in 0.95 other than balance, because it's relatively unimportant compared to the stuff higher on this wishlist, imo- the current system is a good-enough balance between accessibility and function, and it's still more complex than I think it ever really needed to be, but most players appear to be happy with it.
I've quit releasing things and I've put off installing 0.96 largely because of the huge headache porting forward anything that touched this stuff deeply became. Merely reading the code to deal with Fleet spawning in 0.95 made my head hurt a bit- it's a spawn event that calls a FleetFactory event that calls a Market, etc., etc.... sheesh, I just want to make a Faction fleet at <place> and have it <do stuff>.
It's like climbing a cliff that grows every time I get to the top, lol. I'll eventually get around to seeing how badly EZ Faction's broken, etc. and sorting through all the stuff in Rebal that will have to be redone or reworked, but after 10 years, I'm tiiiiiired of doing that, lol.
