Better visual sense of building a greater empire.

The Critique:

Not having a good visual sense of building a greater empire. Stars feel too isolated from each other. 

Description:

In most 4x games (eg. like Endless Legend, Age of Wonders 3, Civilization) player often get this sense of building things by changing the landscape or building buildings and such. This is a great way to get the satisfaction of doing good in games. It also allows for new gameplay options to come up with. Raiding buildings, attacking trade routes, etc... all contributes to gameplay and creating visually appealing games.

Examples of other games:

In Endless Legend, you could build or raid villages, resources or other buildings. You get to see your city grow visually. All of those were creating gameplay too but more importantly, you get to see what you build in the game. Which gives this great feeling of carving the landscape and no game looks to same comparing turn 1 to 100.

Civilisation has this as well. You get to see your cities grow and the landscape is getting filled with other buildings and roads. Age of Wonders 3 visually shows this too. Town and a metropolis are very different from each other.

Examples of Endless Space 2:

The only way to visually understand your empire growing is an influence circle keeps getting big with every turn or empty dots getting filled. This makes a very lackluster result of the only difference is between turn 1 and 100 is the selection of your color is getting a bigger space. You get few new lights around your planets but they are just animations not offering gameplay options. Not to mention they got lost in the interface and you can't see in the usually used map mode.

Solutions:

Creating interstellar traffics! The way I see it, there is no way of Endless Space 2 can't grow more planets or raid resources or watchtowers. So in a game where you are dealing with an interstellar empire. Why not create more traffics and connect whose stars with each other? With visually and of course increasing gameplay features with it.

IDEA NO 1: Sending FIDS between stars

Transfering FIDS between systems could even system specialization even more. It could be tied up to system levels and with each upgrade, you can up to 100% of your desired FIDS income or ability to have multiple routes but not taking space in building queue.

If say, a player wanted a system to fully specialize in production and have no use of their 100 Science and 50 Dust income. Depending on their system level, they could order to send 75% of their Science income to one of their happy, science specialised systems. Maybe even they could get second cargo ship to transport 75% of their Dust income to another different system which specialized in making Dust. 

You can send people to other colonies which is a good strategy to fast grow but what If I wanted to grow a specific of a race to grow in a system? Theoretically, it is possible via doing switching the whole population somewhere to somewhere but It could potentially create more problems because I already created the perfect environment for the fellas living in there. So sending Food could open up to different strategies. 

Just like transporting people these could pop up in space resulting a vast transportation traffic happening in each turn. Making the space more alive. In later turns It could create lots of enjoyment to set up this greatly optimised galactic transportation system with supporting visuals we can finally see that these -used to- empty stars are now connected with life.

IDEA NO 2: Rework of the trade system

Currently its too vague how trading really works but I'm not going to fully go on that. We keep leveling up our trading fleets and trying to create long trading routes but the galaxy is still the same, empty. Say If there were trading fleets were going on their way with each turn and helping to create more traffic in interstellar, wouldn't that be more visually appealing and creating the sense of "I did this" "these were once empty now our civilization is expanded their borders" feeling?

With every upgrade and HQ we could observe we are getting bigger and bigger rather than just staring at statistics.

IDEA NO 3: Improved building&system visuals and animations.

These won't be affecting as the turns go and will be static animations. Some system defenses we build could be observable in the system. It would be more awesome to crack those defenses we see in real time. Same goes for wonders as well.

Rather than just lights going around the planets, these (lights) could represent each political thought for which one is in the majority in that planet. Which would be informative and visually appealing at the same time.

Closing comments:

In starting rounds we could get the feeling of space is endless with the colonization starts our people sending food or population but after some few turns space become not so endless. We already explored a big chunk of the map but the only difference is colors. These stars need to interact with each other in order to have this sense of growing our civilization. More raidable civilian ship traffic could improve much of this critique.