The first is something I’m sure has been talked about an awful lot, but I feel like moving to one month “turns” after a certain point in the mid game would help speed things up a lot. Past a certain point getting dragged back to Earth or the Stations to manage my agents can become a little dull whilst you’re waiting for habs to upgrade, warships to be built and fleets to arrive at their destinations.
Related to that dullness I think two mission types might benefit from some changes, namely “Defend Interests”, and “Assault Alien Asset”. The simple answer would be to have some way to set your Councillors assigned to automatically renew Defend Interests on nations your hold points on based on some set of priorities, with something similar for your more action orientated councillors so that they can automatically bounce around bathing the xeno-growth in purifying flames.
However, I’d like to suggest an alternative, when you get to the point in the game that you’re holding several large nations together within your faction I think it would be cool to designate your councillors as “Agency Heads”, for lack of a better title. Basically, have that Councillor assigned to permanently run a department within your faction and assign them a budget to utilize to achieve their goals.
So, for Direct Action that would mean they automatically have a chance to burn down every xeno-flora in your territory every turn based on how much Ops they’ve been allocated, the size of your territory and the number of xeno outbreaks you’re dealing with. Thus, if you own North America, and you have three outbreaks and have given a large budget you have a fifty percent chance to degrade each outbreak each turn. If you have the Pan Asian Combine and the rest of the pacific islands, over a dozen outbreaks and a small budget it might be as low as 1-5%. (Note that the numbers are drawn straight from thin air and would obviously need some balancing to get right.) Likewise for head of Political Intervention they would provide a permanent “defence” to your control points, with a scaling influence cost based on the number of control points you hold, and the level of defence given based on their other relevant stats.
The downside to this would be that your two councillors would be taken out of the normal rotation of actions, so couldn’t purge opposing factions control points if head of Political Intervention, or influence nations or the other tasks they might be suitable for. Likewise directing all your forces to burn back Xenos incursions would leave your head of Direct Action unable to lead a suicide mission against the newly landed alien ground troops, or assault Alien Installations or stabilize restless nations. At least not without some cooldown period after being removed from the position. Effectively allowing you to automate some of the functions that can get a bit repetitive for an upkeep of influence and Ops and the loss of flexibility in how you utilise your Councillors.
The other thing is purely about immersion. The early and mid-game feel just right, and cool, being the secret group behind the scenes trying to wrangle disparate nations and ideologies towards a common goal as the sky quite literally falls upon everyone’s heads. But one of the dissonant things I’ve noticed in my playthroughs has been that after a certain point, once you have a few mega-nations under your control and a dozen large ring stations and colonies scattered across the belt and inner system that it feels odd that you’re still just pulling strings. I think it would be a nice, even if purely from a story perspective, if once you hit a certain amount of development off-world that your faction announces its formation as a peer organization to the nations it controls. Effectively becoming an independent nation, and lead partner in an alliance with its Earth based nations, towards achieving their faction’s goal. That way you don’t have to wonder why the US would allow a shadow government to be building dozens of intra-solar warships capable of orbital bombardment without wanting them under the command of the US Navy, as the lore explanation would simply be that some of those ships are doubtless US, some EU, one dinky tin can even has a Peruvian flag on its side but they’re all first and foremost resistance/humanity first/etc. vessels and pursue the players goals. The ability to transform from the Resistance to, for example, the Sol Defence League would be a cool way to build immersion as the fight for the system becomes less about Earth and more about the system at large.
Beyond that my groggy heart would love to see more granular detail, perhaps having food and certain other goods be required for upkeep of stations and colonies with the game automatically designing and using freighters to ships those goods about the system, with options to automatically provide convoy escorts for them from your local ships, or else risk them being attacked and your colonies starve or degrade as they run out of parts they can’t manufacture themselves. My thinking mostly being that the slingshots make sense for raw materials to get from a to b, but more delicate stuff like complex machinery or foodstuffs would probably still need to be manually taken where it needs to go rather than being shoved in a fed-ex box and yeeted across the system in the general direction of my newly established colony on Ceres. At the very least I wonder how well freeze-dried spinach would react to solar radiation over it’s months long journey across the system. However, I doubt it’s practicable in this early access and I fully admit that my groggy tendencies are not for everyone!
Anyway, those are my suggestions/thoughts. Overall I love the game and whatever happens I’m really looking forward to seeing the updates you bring out!
(Sidebar, if you can pass on to Mr Lumpkin that his Human Reach book series was excellent, and I’m still patiently waiting for the next novel. Understand why it might have been delayed, but once Terra Invicta is done if someone could lock him in a room with something to write with I’d be really grateful!
)