Sorry if this has already been brought up, but I haven't seen it lately. Most discussion of United Planets tends to be about how useless it is or what happens if you leave it.

My idea would be to allow more flexibility than simply being a member of UP or not. It would make it so that you could go against a UP law but not necessarily be kicked out. Now, I actually like the UP votes right now, as some of them are very interesting. I had a game recently where the UP limited starbase modules to 4, and that severely changed the way I had to play that game. However, when I would try to put a 5th module on, I was simply not allowed to do so as a member of UP. But what if you could transgress a UP law, like putting on an extra module or attacking a freighter that's protected? Your standing in the UP (not necessarily shown on a slider or anything like that) would then go down, making it more likely that people would vote against your interests next time. If you broke the laws too many times, you'd eventually be kicked out. But if you only broke laws a few times, it would just be that votes would tend to go against you. It could even be that proposals would come up which were directly against you, such as one suggesting that you'd have to pay a certain percentage of your income to all other races for a given time-frame. Or even something worse, like a vote limiting your military, taxing a certain planet heavily, or even putting one of your planets up for grabs. Perhaps your influence would affect how adversely breaking laws would affect your race, so that if you had huge influence you could get away with more for awhile.

What do you think?