1. "Fishing Boats":
Neutral civilian vessels spawned through a density-dependent function salvage all kinds of ship debris, alleviating lag problems in the later phase.
Difficulty: High
Fun: Medium
Usefulness: High
2. "Stochasticity":
Shooting stars and gamma ray bursts fired from random dummy objects beyond the map, constantly bringing unpredictable harzards to the space dwellers.
Difficulty: Extreme
Fun: High
Usefulness: Low
3. "Planetary Defense System":
All colonized planets are equipped with weapons to defend themselves, which are also upgradable according to different tech trees.
Difficulty: Beyond Extreme
Fun: Medium
Usefulness: Low
4. "Militia":
Groups of rebels summoned randomly within the map, fighting all players around.
Difficulty: Unknown (at least High)
Fun: High
Usefulness: Low
5. Advanced Alliance AI
Allied AI players will cooperate with the player by participating in the battle plan set by the player. The player will be able to designate a full spectrum of strategic requests at any given camera location, for example, "attack this point", "reinforce this stronghold", "investigate the combat zone", "assembly here", etc.
Difficulty: Extreme (the biggest problem is overwriting the existing AI behaviour)
Fun: High
Usefulness: High
6. Nuclear Radiation
A radiation cloud continues to do harm to the surrounding ships after a nuclear explosion. This can be done by spawning a dummy object that does spherical damage with a nebula appearance after a nuclear explosion. The dummy object will be despawned after a dummy subsystem's health is iteratively reduced to a threshold. As the health of the subsystem decreases, the damage multiplier also decreases. The duration and radius of the radiation remnant can be also upgraded, corresponding to a factorial of different dummy objects.
Difficulty: High (and it can be buggy)
Fun: High
Usefulness: High
DO IT, IT WILL BE AN EPIC VERSION ON SoaSE!
I love the fishing boats idea.