I won't include new races, although you can never have enough, or ground warfare and fightercraft, as they will be included in DLC no.5.



One thing I think would be good is a 'neutral colonies' feature akin to that of SOASE, where a percentage of worlds would be inhabited by neutral factions with the ships of a random faction, just to make expansion a little bit more challenging and rewarding. This would be controlled when making the map, you would choose a percentage and voila.



One idea I've had floating around for a while is espionage, in my mind this would be part of diplomacy, and would include features like: hero assassination, stalling resource production, terrorism(general lowering of approval) and starting uprisings(which would be the ultimate technology), where the world would become an aforementioned neutral colony. The missions could work on a percentage of the chance of success, if you win, woohoo, if you lose then you lose an espionage team or a hero.



More planet types and colonization options is always a good thing, but you could go for colonization of stars, harder than gas planets, and with the use of a dyson sphere, swarm or ringworld. Or metropolis worlds left by the endless, with a lack of food, but excellent dust, science and industry.



These are all my ideas, if anyone has a few they'd like to share please post them below.

Hmm... dyson spheres, swarms or ringworlds, would take longer than the game takes to build, and would take more resources than are in a single system. Ok, so it takes, say 500 years to build one, with breaking down of the cores of, say, 10 gas giants? It just isn't practical.



I suppose you could reduce things to make it in the game, but it just wouldn't seem epic enough to make it realistic.



Better would be to make, say, a ringworld a wonder, that you or the AI have, perhaps a 1 in 50 chance of getting. Trouble is, if it was implemented realistically, it'd be an "I win" button, both for you, and the AI.

I suppose, maybe if there were no anomalies in a system, you could have one of them take up each anomaly slot, they could be the ultimate system improvement, but there is the trouble with resources, a lot of industry, maybe monopolies on resources would be required, say endless artifacts, if you had 4 pre-schism, 4 virtual and 4 concrete, then it would make it something very hard to get, but could maybe count as a wonder, winning the game to make it rewarding.