Having played the game for a while now, I've got a couple of ideas on how to make it better



1. Make the combat truly turn based. At the moment, because of the fact that the battles are in real time but divided into three stages, you sometimes don't have enough time to analyze the situation and adapt your strategy. What I'd like to see is an option to automatically pause the game at the end of every stage and allow the player to change which cards they are using, giving them plenty of time to analyze the current situation. Speaking of which...



2. More information during the battle. In the current battle screen, there is very little information displayed, other than total remaining HP and the number of ships on each side. More information, such as HP of individual ships, would be very helpful when deciding your tactics.



3. Fighters/smaller ships. At the moment, even the most basic of starships seems to be rather large. I'd like to see fighters and such to be introduced, comparable in size to real life fighter planes, perhaps somewhat larger. They should take very little command points to put in a fleet, so instead of using a single destroyer you could, for instance, use 10 fighters. They should, in my opinion, be a high risk-high reward option, where as a squadron of fighters can inflict a similar amount of damage to equally costly larger ships, but the damage output goes down significantly as individual fighters are shot down. While they'd be hard to hit, a solid few hits would be the end of them.



4. More variance in weapons. At the moment, all ships come equipped with pretty much same 3 weapons, with varying levels of power. I think different sub-types would add depth to the game and make the ship designs more important. For instance, instead of having normal missiles, you could have swarm missiles, which are less powerful than normal missiles, but have a much higher chance of at least some of them passing through the enemy's chaff and hitting the ship. Or you could launch a single, slow moving missile with a high powered warhead, which is not likely to hit your target, but if it does, it deals massive damage.

I'd really prefer instead of more variance in weapons we have a more in-depth battle system when it comes to the cards. Here is my thread on the subject: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11640-5th-tech-tree-military-doctrine