I hope to see substantive improvements to the actual game in a coming update. The character stats, the improved campaign battles, the AI improvements : all of those make the actual combat immensely better. But right now the overall metagame is you start out, you kill stuff to gradually make you "cloud" of ships better, and you keep doing it until no one can offer a significant challenge.
I wish your attacks actually meant something. If I raid the pirates faction for 50 battles in a row, the faction itself ought to be affected somehow. The basic idea I thought of is that if you attack a faction enough times
a) The faction starts sending their ships out in convoys instead of piecemeal
b) If they become sufficiently mad, and if they have the resources, they assemble a fleet strong enough to take you out and send it after you.
c). If their own types of ships aren't working, they hire outside mercenary fleets that come in from out of system to chase the player fleet down.
d) Once a faction is actually exhausted of resources, they abandon the system
To make this a little more in depth : if you've got a fleet hunting you down, if you flee to a friendly starbase you'd have the option to "lie low" (costs credits and supplies to pay for the slip rental fees and to pay for your crew salaries) or to "reconfigure IFF" that would cause your fleet to resemble a fleet from that faction unless you get too close to ships from the faction that is trying to hunt you down.
Other options might be there besides combat, like maybe a faction would try to bribe you to stop attacking them.
If you ally with a faction and annihilate all other factions from a system, you get a victory screen. You beat Starfarer! Would you like to continue playing?
As a programmer myself, I know that scripting this kind of stuff is not at all difficult. It's a lot easier than some of the stuff the game already does.
