One of the mechanics that I thought was absolutely genius in a few recent Space 4x games (Distant Stars and WILL BE more apparent in SOTS II) is the addition of the private sector, ie private companies/people spending their own money to make money off of space mining, trade, tourism, and even income from their own colonies, and your empire taxing this income to your extreme benefit since they are the ones expending their money.



Now, like Distant Stars, the empire should have a large hand in this sector, but only in the sense of "subsidizing" these companies by direct funding or by the building a number of space ports to promote them to trade or transport tourists/provide tourist services.



The presence of a Private Sector should be determined by the government your civilization runs under, because if you run it under a totalitarian dictatorship, one would think there wouldn't a private sector, no?



I have one more suggestion, but this seems to me to be a much more difficult one, and I don't have high hopes of it being picked up. This suggestion is to have some technology be discovered by the private sector themselves on their own accord and expense on the belief that it will give them the edge in the market, ie competition driving innovation to a certain extent, much like it does real life.







Feedback on this suggestion is greatly appreciated, I always loved the idea of a private sector driving things in RTS/TBS games, makes things that much more realistic.

The 'civilian' construction in SotS II is actually based on player allocating budget into the 'surplus'. The more funds you channel into surplus the more chance there are that civilians will establish freighters, colonies, mining outposts etc... so in that example it's not entirely independent to the player and costing them nothing as it's costing a significant amount of budget each turn for something that may not pay out depending more on luck.



That said, it is an interesting idea though I am unsure how fitting it would be from the little I've currently played on Endless Space.



Perhaps when approval is above a certain threshold, civilians/independents could attempt to colonise other planets in systems you have a colony providing you have the technology to do so. Bypassing the production/construction cost & time that would otherwise be required and bypassing the population count requirement...



But certainly shouldn't be something that happens frequently or is easy to achieve IMO... more a bonus for really doing a good job at managing your empire.

There is some private sector in Endless Space. You can research private sector partnership in the science tree. Plus random events can happen which provide new breakthroughs.

Sounds like a pretty good idea, and like Monarch said, there is actually some private sector in Endless Space already.

The trade routes are automatically built and represent that, me think.