So I thought Disharmony was a great addition to ES, but having played since Beta I still the think ES Gold or ES Complete is still a bit of a ways off. I've heard that there may be a renewed focus on ES after EL and DotE are released, and I hope that's still the case. While the current state of the game is great, there are still a couple of improvements I'd really like to see. I'll divide them up a little for clarity, but that's mostly just for organization.



General stuff / content patch things:



I'd like to see the Vaulters get the automaton treatment and have new ship designs. All the humans look kinda samey right now; even the Pilgrims as "most different" still have the same stylistic elements. The Vaulters seem like space vikings. That's a visually rich idea to explore.



Intra-empire trade routes should show up in trade caps, or at least be a thing. Maybe even have little freighter looking icons slide along the star lanes between trading partners? They could be toggle-able to have less performance impact, use existing scaled-down models, and add a lot of life to the map.



Economic victory should be changed. As it stands, it's a race to a set dust finish line which gets harder to stop as the player reaches closer to the goal. I think it should either be changed to a dust / turn total, or an unspent dust amount. I like this second one better: it rewards the players who spend a lot of time building up very powerful economies, but also makes victory interruptible if the player is dragged into a war requiring a lot of resources. It also seems like a more organic victory condition than simply which empire has had the most dust over the course of the game.



Larger map settings / more empires. I'm sure a lot of people would like to see new races added to the game, for variety at the very least, and the maximum number of empires on a given map should be tied to the number of races there are total.



Controlling fleet spam. Last time I played a game, I was just slogging through fleet after fleet of enemy ships. Sometimes dozens of them on planet. While that may be more practical, it's not great gameplay. Battles don't feel like they have much strategic importance if enemy fleets have to be killed off one-by-one. Victories don't feel heroic. While I'm uncomfortable proposing a fleet cap, that may be a solution to the problem. If it were technologically feasible, I'd suggest dramatic increases in fleet size in addition to a fleet cap, but I realize that might not work because of the way battles play out, not to mention the toll it would have on my computer to have loads of ships shooting off all those lasers. If I want to smash my enemy's fleet of 500 warships and turn the tides of war in a single fateful encounter, I should be able to do that. Taking them on 12 ships at a time feels wrong, unless of course their own grand imperial fleet was stuck the same size. I don't have any great ideas on the subject really, just that it doesn't feel right the way it is.



Remove ind->science and ind-> dust. While I really do like having these from a quality of life perspective, they make the game too homogenized. Industry is super powerful, especially when you get the late techs that give huge industry boosts. Devoting planets to industrial production should come at the cost of not getting nearly as much science or dust. Specializing systems more would make them more valuable individually as opposed to having a couple of huge pop systems that are only marginally better at producing science, industry, or dust. You should have forge worlds distinct from research worlds and economic / cultural worlds. Part of the problem here is with building improvements at the system level rather than the planetary level, but while I think the game would be better if improvements were per planet, I also think that's too core of a gameplay piece to change.



Expansion 1: Diplomacy revisited



I'd group this as the culture & espionage expansion. We should be able to allocate resources (dust) to espionage programs in other empires or within our own. Effects of this could be seeing more information about the enemy, lowering their public order, sabotaging buildings, or stealing technologies. Defensively your espionage programs could manufacture public order and protect against enemy spies. This would be a good use for dust and a reason not to always lower taxes to the absolute minimum until the very end of the game.



On the second part, I'd like to be able to culture flip planets of the enemy's that are within my influence. Influence as it stands doesn't seem like a very useful mechanic, but the means of improving it all denote force projection and communication ability. More cultural reach should also improve planetary growth rates and maybe even trade incomes, making the small but culturally powerful empires more appealing.



Thirdly, there should be an improvement to diplomatic victory, at least in single player. While it might be unfeasible for multiplayer, I've always liked the galactic presidency model of diplomatic victory: if any one empire receives a 2/3 majority in the galactic voting sessions (at whatever interval they're placed), then they head the galactic government and win the game. I think it might be possible, with an overhauled culture system, to take this out of the hands of the players and make voting automatic from the people. This way, empires with very high culture would get more votes from enemy systems, allowing a winner without a huge population advantage.



In terms of new races, there's plenty to go with in the existing ES world:



I'd love to see the Dust Collective expanded as a pirate-esque faction with big bonuses to living in asteroids and maybe a dust-producing-but-not-culture-flipping influence area.



As for the other small races, I'd like to see the Deuyivan race expanded as well. They could have a mechanic by which they do really well in gas giants but very poorly on terrestrial worlds. They'd be a really cool, really alien race to play around with.



Expansion 2: Ground combat and immersion



I don't think ES actually needs any fancy ground combat; in fact, I think just playing around with the current model and adding some trailer style moving images to invasions would be fantastic. The artwork in ES and the trailer videos released so far for EL are fantastic, and I think interspersing those as events (specifically ground combat) in ES would be an enormous boost to immersion. They could even be toggleable if people don't want them. Now as it stands, ground combat isn't that great: bombs don't do too much damage, and it takes a lot of time to capture things with early level ships. Invasion should be a more powerful mechanic, and empires should have to actively defend their planets (or build static defenses, which have upkeep costs). Maybe adding in mechs or tanks as more powerful ground combat units would spice things up a little.



What ES could use is some weapon variety for ships. As it stands now, it's pretty much laser 1 - laser 2 - laser 3, which is boring. Throwing in some more interesting weapon varieties could expand the possibilities in ship building. This is where I think Disharmony over-pruned. It's fun filling out a ship with a variety of weapons. I'm thinking of maybe nukes that damage multiple ships, beams or kinetics that fire at only one target per round but do catastrophic damage, maybe some crazy high level stuff like gravity well beams or phased (super fast moving) torpedos or relativistic kinetics. There's all kinds of stuff that could be thrown in to make space combat more exciting without really changing any of the existing combat mechanics.



Yet more races? (because every expansion needs new races): integrating some of the new EL races would be awesome! The necrophages look kinda like the ES "virus" minor race, and that would be a great addition to the roster. I'm really just digging all the minors, because I think the saurian-looking plocnyos would also be a great new add, maybe as a scientific or cultural powerhouse race with very strong ground combat abilities?