Tech Tree:

New "ultimate" weapons for each category.

Senario:
1.) The player assumes the role of the Yor, who are set at the good alignment, and must conquer evil versions of the other races.

2.) Everyone has a Terror Star, and the UP can't ban them.

3.) Terran vs. Drengin, with the Terran military being only fighters, albeit strong ones and many of them, and having high logistics, and the Drengin navy consisting of a comparitively small number of capital ships and having low logistics.

Improvements:

I have different improvements planned for certain races like the following for the Drath:

1.) Incubation Centres, which improve population growth and morale.

2.) Metamorphosis Training Colleges, which increase espionage.

Components:

If this includes starbase modules, they will include:

1.) Missionary Headquarters, which incrases your influence. Note: can only be built by the Terrans and when they have chosen Good as their alignment.

2.) Classified Research Centre, which increases research on any planet(s) owned by you in its area-of-effect.

I think I'm going to tweak the techs in such a way that it becomes worh it to have small and big ships, perhaps through much higher space requirements for more powerful weapons. Examples:
-Prism lances: not a beam weapon, but an anti-missle defense. Possibly using a laser skin (if I could somehow get the laser animation to shoot at the missiles...suggestions?), these angry flashlights are a BIG step up from PD, but big space requirements,
-Some kind of missile weapon that is extremely powerful but only can be used on small hulls (don't know how THAT's going to work...)

Also, an "orbital weapons platform'' module that makes the weapons on the ship it is attached to very powerful, but reduces its speed to 0.

A sensor jammer as well, meaning that ships within a few parsecs of the jamming ship have their sensor range reduced.

Hmm. Well, for components, I'm thinking of a line of reactor components. They'd offer a substantial boost to weaponry and defenses, but at a cost... be it less HP (volatile hardware), or simply huge monetary requirements.

I'm also thinking of extending the weapon trees significantly, as it's irritating to see phasors as early in the game as you do.

Pfffttt - if anybody can recognize me, whatever i decide to mod will certainly be inspired by four letters; X_C_O_M. That's the small input.

As of right now though, i already started working on some "indirect" stuff;

1- Autopsies (ala-real-XCom actual research pre-requisites) in the tech-tree which slooooows down the acquisition of key weaponry.
2- Animation of ship parts. Which may come a lot later after the whole ships and fleets get done.
3- Numerous APOC surface buildings in supplement of the standard UFOD/TFTD sets.
4- A number of concepts for scenario(s) which will probably endup being packaged as specific campaigns.
5- Extra tiles based on "new" Planet quality frameworks which would require two new tech; Coastal Integration (Blues) & Harshland Conditioning (Purples). And also, adapted Terrain-Schemas & patterns accordingly.
6- Plenty of renaming everywhere to make things even more complicated! Sicko'me.
7- New Minors, possibly three extra-type-of-sidekick-races (one of which - Fters, if you know the background of XCom, this simple word means a lot to you!) too.
8- A theoretical attempt at a true Economic Victory, somehow. In fact, it's kinda like MS-Gates goes to space.

The only thing missing is the TA copy to work with.
But, that will happen soon enough and in due time.

Which is why i'm presently concentrating the energy on the GCTeChnos exploration tool; i hope to synchronize an early beta release of the DA (half-ready for multiple tech-trees functions) version with GC2/TA distribution.

- Zyxpsilon.

Given that you can have starbase modules that decrease the opponent's speed while in the AOE, I'm not sure it's -that- much of a jump to have such a module on a ship, and it's definitely not a jump (or shouldn't be, anyway) to have it affect sensors.

A check may need to be added to specify that it's ship sensors and not racial sensors, which would be something that would need to be coded in, but still. It's not nearly as farfetched as you appear to think it is.

It's amazing what you can do with this game, even though sometimes you technically shouldn't be able to.

Well, I get a String Not Found when I try to have it affect my own ships' sensors, so I'm not even going to try getting it to affect enemy ships. Based solely on what the name is for the ability of -speed for enemies, I have no idea what the name for -sensors to enemies would be, if it existed.

But the capability is there, and it's probably 6 lines of code. I'm probably underexaggerating, but still. Not to devalue anything you guys at Stardock do, but it seems doable to me, and I'd love to have it-at least the capability to mod something in using it, even if nothing in the base game uses it. This goes for both +- sensors to my own ships as well as +- sensors to enemy ships.

For improvements, i would make planetary turbo canons that add a 25% planetary defense bonus, another would be a Secret Imperial Palace for my custom Galactic Empire race.

It depends on how modular the game engine is. If any existing effect that alters stats can be applied to any object -- ship, planet, or starbase with no restrictions -- then there are lots of possibilities.

We'll have fewer (but still interesting) possibilities if we have to stick to effects that are "locked in" to the current game design. If that's the case, then for example you wouldn't be able to put an influence or economy boosting module on a ship, because the game currently only supports those for starbases and planets. Since planets don't currently have a speed modifier zone (except for the Yor, and that's the whole influence zone, not a single planet), you might not be able to make that tech in the editor. We'll find out when the editor is released, unless a dev comments first (hint, hint).