My wishlist, in no particular order:
- Moving planets and phase lanes are awesome. Realistic orbits are probably not ideal for gameplay, which is totally fine. Gameplay comes first. But please give us an OPTION (through settings or map design) to play with realistic solar systems.
- option to invade a planet rather than bombing it. Maybe it takes longer and is more expensive, but you keep some of the planet infrastructure if you succeed
- expanded planet specialization options, both in upgrades we buy and natural characteristics
- more varieties of defense structures. Synergies between different types, counters, etc etc.
- customizable autocast. I like autocast as a tool to reduce micromanagement in the first game, but there are a lot of abilities where it is just dumb. A ship ends up using ALL it's antimatter for no benefit, just because it can. It would be a cool strategic layer if we could set up our own rules for when autocast could activate each ability. For example, I might decide that I only want my Skirantra to autocast repair cloud if it has greater than 50% antimatter and more than 10 damaged targets in range.
- make it possible to actually harm an opponent's economy with small raids, if left unchecked. In the original, there is little that a small fleet can do even if it gets behind enemy lines and is ignored. Blow up a mining asteroid? Takes significant time, cheap to replace, barely noticeable effect. Pick off trade ships? Almost unnoticeable. Bombing a planet will hurt, but siege is expensive, slow and easy to kill. Need a full fleet to protect it, so it's not really a raid anymore.
