Combat:
- Torpedoes: If a smaller ship is going up against a cap ship, why not be able to have a chance and use some slow moving (but hard hitting) torpedoes to help strike craft be able to take out their lumbering foes.
- Cutters (CIWS): For those that don't know, CIWS is a real life weapon. To implement this into the game, I would think it would be cool to use the idea of an autonomous gatling gun to counter the above torpedoes. Maybe not automated, but definitely have a fast firing weapon that would throw a bunch of laser beams/projectiles at incoming missiles/torpedoes or smaller ships while also lighting up space!
- Weapon Grouping: This is essential if there is going to be wide range of weapons. Who wants to fire a missile at a dinky little enemy? We should have weapon grouping so we can fire only the weapons we want! Specifically, fire beam weapons seperately from consumable weapons... or switch to firing both (or any combination we desire)!
- Scopes: This one might not be as popular as an idea... but if there was long ranged weapons like railguns, why not have the option to snipe enemy ships from afar? I'm not gonna lie, I love when I can make my AI driven allies be the tanks while I sit back and pick off the enemy one-by-one. Having a zoom/scoped function to long range weapons would be really cool.
- Dynamic Power Output: The ability to overload shields at the cost of firing weapons... or overloading weapons at the cost of shields. This is pretty straight forward. Maybe put it on a slider so we could dictate "40% to shields with 60% to weapons."
- Megastructures: As stated in one of my other threads... big structures you can fly into with your entire fleet and they would have massive interiors you can explore, mine, find (and kill) pirates and aliens, and find cool alien artifacts. These can be abandoned, be massive trading hubs, or infested with baddies.
- Dead systems: This seems pretty self explanatory... systems that don't have stars/planets... but are clusters of a combination of space junk, radiation clouds, ice fields, etc. This would really vary how explorers experience... well... exploring.
- Varied sized systems: Once again, the name says it all. Small and packed systems might tend to have more starship traffic (and more chances to interact with the NPCs) while other systems are vastly bigger. In the bigger systems, I think making the feeling that you are "alone" exploring is very important... and most of the visuals that you have shown match that isolation well. In the more densely populated zones, make the player feel like he/she is one person among dozens of ships flying around... going about their business.
- Sustainability: What I mean by this is... the farther you explore, the less populated systems might potentially get. I'm sure Josh does not plan on making every planet in every system be a trading post and bar. So, it would suck if you were exploring, and then you needed resources that you can only get at vendors. Would you have to fly all the way back to populated systems? Why not have a method or the resources available by exploration? Set up shop in a system for a couple of days as transport ships and escorts fly there and back with vital resources that you need (obviously in game days). Hell, these ships could even be like the glorified pets from Torchlight... they could sell your loot and then get you more resources that you need like fuel/materials, all while continuing to explore.