The Space Pirates though remind me a lot of the Antarans in Master of Orion 2. I'd love to see the pirates have more random events in the game in building forces in random star systems, acts of sabotage, blowing up buildings, ships, and stealing technology where moral is low. This would be the perfect atmosphere to adding espionage items to the tech tree.



Rather than churning out spies in a production queue, their attacks would be relegated to Heroes only. The Spy's role would work mainly from Wit and Offense.



The diplomacy screen could have a new tab set up where you could assign a hero to another race as a saboteur with abilities that were selected during upgrades or researched in the Tech Tree under the Diplomacy section. Once the spy is sent on the "diplomatic" mission there would be a chance he/she doesn't come back if their dice role fails by too much. Apart from Wit, Offense, and calculated bonuses, the average moral of the empire plays a big part of the equation as to whether the sabotage is successful.



The coolest thing about the update is that if any of the developers run out of ideas for the update, they can just pick up a copy of the daily paper or read FP on-line.

Don't add espionage, please. Almost no 4x get it right:

MoO: functional but

Galciv2: broken

Civ4: too weak

Civ5: okay



Space pirates/Antarans are okay but more likely annoying.



I think it's much more important to revise da military and make it interesting. Fighter and bombers are weak and you cannot really specialize in those. Planetary defense is messed up (why do antiair defense work against troop invasions? By raw numbers they are far too good!) and totally without personality.