As always, more suggestions for non-sex stuff:
- Ways to increase the tech level on owned planets, and a way to increase happiness other than "fitness propaganda."
- Tailor planest upgrades/edicts based on total population instead of just flat rates for everything. Low-pop colonies should be cheaper to develop than larger ones, but also pay more once developed. It's a balance.
- Option to duplicate surgery options as pharmacy options. You can do that now with body morphing, but I mean things like reward/punishment implants, fertility, etc. For example, instead of paying 25,000 for a fertility implant, also offer "fertility drugs" that just cost 25 per day. How long do you plan on keeping the slave or maintaining the treatment?
- Option to group owned colonies by solar system. Basically another folder layer, so instead of just a list of all colonies have option for "System names->click on system->shows colonies in just that system"
- A goddamn pause button - especially for the galaxy screen.
- Ship damage should not automatically be exactly 50% of the purchase price of the ship. Make it variable, anywhere from 5% to 100% (i.e. lose the ship). This would come into play even more when you implement slaves as ship captains, later.
My last idea is a bit more complicated and ties into making the factory other than a linear cash-printing machine. Factories should need resources, and their revenue should be tied to the availability of those resources. Where do we get them from? Colonies. While high-tech colonies obviously have their own factories and generate more wealth straight to you, low-tech colonies could now be made economically rewarding because they have more raw resources that can be feed into your station's factories - lumber, minerals, food, water, etc. The locals aren't using it but maybe you can?
Again, using the whole "Build Points" idea from before, there is
so much that can be done via factories if you decide to go with this. So instead of raw credits have factories produce "build points" that can be used to purchase station upgrades, rooms and furniture. You could also use it to build and repair your fleet, rather than just throwing cash at everything. Later on, once that foundation is in place, you can expand the build points and factories into specific goods and link those to specific items. Naturally this plays into the laboratory & research tree idea. So now you've got low-grade metals, high-grade metals, crystals, plastics, food, pure water, hydrogen, inert gases, etc. Different items will require different amounts of each, and different rooms might consume them as well (like an eatery consuming food & water, or your fleet needing hydrogen as fuel to move around the map).
Why go through all this effort? Because once you add a research tree you can
strip away a lot of existing items and move them into the research tree instead. In other words, players would no longer be able to just go out and write a check for a battleship or a time machine - they'd have to actually built it themselves, because shit like that should
not be for sale no matter how libertarian society has become. Super high end stuff of all kinds should only become unlocks of technological advancement, and require more exotic materials to build. And this is where, at this next step of development, high-tech worlds aren't just cash machines but rather the places that give you the more exotic materials to work with. Example: Tech 8 = low-grade metals, water, food. Tech 30 = plastics, hydrogen, medicines. Tech 70 = exotic crystals, computer parts, cybernetics.
Of course you could always sell your surplus for cash, and probably should lest it just pile up forever. (For more on resources and production I suggest playing "Distant Worlds Universe," which does it this excellently).
But let's face it, if all you needed was lots of cash to conquer the galaxy then your rivals would have already done it by now. You, the player, should only be able to succeed where they didn't because you're thinking outside the box - your using your 100 Smarts slaves as researchers for stuff that they haven't thought of, yet. Your 100 Agility slaves are flying starfighters and racking up kills with ease. You're using your factories to make new kinds of weapons that your rivals just don't have because all they've been doing is piling up credits all their lives. Your station is the best because it's more than just a glorified brothel - it's a small city, with residents, goods & services, and a thriving internal marketplace of it's own. And to borrow a phrase from Stellaris: You're not just building out, you're building tall. You're developing your colonies, improving them, and by doing so giving your little empire more power projection than it's size alone would suggest.