Survey ships should play a more important role than they do now. Since I’ve always wished for bigger and bigger galaxies anyway, I think exploration should be more important, and more fun than putting a survey ship on auto-explore and simply waiting for the galaxy to be revealed. Here are some ideas for enhancing exploration:
- Flying past a planet could not count as exploring it, and, if this were the case, it should be folly to send a colony ship to a planet with only the preliminary information a fly-by provides. It would be fun to be to able survey teams from a survey ship to a new planet to determine its quality and any other factors it might have, like special resources, bonuses, penalties, native sentient life etc. Sending these teams could trigger a lot of random events now associated with colonisation or could give an indication of choices the player would be faced with should colonisation take place, such as what to do with native sentients, to use my previous example.
- This could also be extended to asteroid fields, moons, rings and anomalies, with either a survey team or the survey ship itself taking a random, albeit short amount of time to discover the properties of whatever it is and how it can be useful to the player.
- The player would obviously need earlier access to the ‘survey module’, but would have a good reason to build several survey or research ships, giving the player another factor to balance in managing his empire, or another avenue to focus on if exploration was his particular interest.
Anomalies also have the potential for being expanded and made even more fun to hunt down. For example:
- Randomly occurring anomalies. Anomalies shouldn’t only be seeded at the beginning of the game but should occur throughout the game, giving attentive players something else to look out for as the empires rush to make new discoveries. After all, with so many things moving, blowing up and getting lost, it’s inevitable that something interesting will ‘pop up’ every once in a while.
- Expanded negative discoveries. These might range from minor annoyances to mega event triggering, and could be anything from beasties infesting derelict hulls, to dangerous anomalies (for lack of a better word), like wormholes and storms
- Choices regarding anomalies, like those given in random events, giving the opportunity to leave some things alone, or to risk a negative outcome for the chance at some sort of advantage.
- Anomalies should require more than simply identifying them to gain their benefits, they should need to be transported (when applicable) to a planet, giving the empires time to do anything, up to and including going to war, over the chance to snag a particularly juicy find. Anomalies should also be rarer and more powerful in order to be worth the effort, doing away with the current plethora of tiny bonuses the player can collect with his auto-exploring survey ship.
Yet again, some admittedly pretty ambitious ideas, but meh
