I've read the recent description of the features slated to come out in the Dark Avatar expansion and as far as I'm concerned fall 2006 can't come soon enough! (Both for the release of this expansion and the return of Battlestar Galactica) One of the features I find especially promising is the need to research different technologies in order to colonize certain planets. This reminds me of one of the frist space conquest games I played, Space Empires IV. I like this idea as it extends the prospect of colonization beyond a "planet grab" phase at the beginning of the game, and also increases the possiblity of alien races inhabiting the same star systems.

As I was thinking about all of this I though of another SE4 feature that I enjoyed regarding ship design. Like GC2, SE4 allowed you to research various weapons and custom design your own ships -- one interesting aspect of adding weapons to a ship was the concept of "mounts". Weapons in that game had a base size and strength. When adding weapons to a small or tiny ship hull, this was all you got; however, when adding weapons to larger hulls you had the opportunity to choose from various "mounts" depending on the ship's size. These mounts would increase the size of the weapon by a certain percentage, but increase its strength by an even larger percentage (e.g. the mount might increase weapon size by 20% but increase strength by 40%). This gave players a strong incentive to research larger hull designs in order to have access to better weapon mounts. It also made logical sense as the weapons on a battleship should be larger than those on a small scout ship.

The downside to this idea, of course, is the fact that it adds a new layer of complexity to ship design for the A.I., which already has to work hard to keep up with player innovations. Nevertheless, if it could be effectively added it would bring a new perspective to ship research/design. I'm interested in anybody else's thoughts on this subject.