>>14396585
Make a working in-game economical model.
Add trade, trade routes, civilian industry, resource scarcity.
Add culture, religion/ideology mechanics.
Add espionage, subversion as mechanics.
Make rebellions actually a threat and a possibility.
Add meaningful planetary invasion mechanics.
Add internal political management and internal power struggles that tie into the espionage/subversion mechanics.
Add population control mechanics, appeasement, repressions, bread and circus.
Add population growth mechanics. Currently each race breeds at a set rate still. If you have a mono-racial empire, populating planets quickly is a massive pain in the ass, even if you have robots.
Make population density a mechanic, allowing the player to cram more pops on a planet until it's turned into a planetopolis. Add benefits and drawbacks obviously.
Allow us to colonize any rock floating in space. The current planet type system is complete ass. For example, why can't a continental race colonize a tropical planet? It's total bullshit.
Fix warscore that does it's damnest to artificially limit violent expansion and instead implement organic measures that punish such behavior such as the empire's culture disintegrating and fragmenting it, slave rebellions, populace being genocided rebelling, nearby civs attacking you, nearby civs creating containment coalitions against you, nearby civs economically isolating you. The refugee system is actually interesting despite it being made because paracucks are a bunch of virtue signalling cucks. It's however too simplistic and needs expanding.
Fix combat so it's not frigate wars or blob wars or whatever the fuck is the meta right now. Implement a RPS hard counter mechanic for the different ship types. Buff defenses to make them a real pain in the ass to break through and an actually viable option, but make them expensive as fuck to maintain so they are only placed in spots of strategic importance. instead of spammed all over the fucking place. Allow fleets to flee instead of getting obliterated 100% in one deciding battle, but increase repair times significantly as well as make them much more expensive. Add an organization mechanic that punishes blobbing your entire force into one chunk by making each individual ship preform increasingly worse the bigger the fleet is. This is mitigated by the commander, but only slightly.
Add meaningful planetary invasion mechanics. Ground combat as it is right now is fucking pathetic and might as well not be in the game at all.
Remove mana mechanics on recruiting commanders/scientists, etc. Instead allow me to have as many as I fucking need and can afford. I'd rather have them all be paid a hefty salary, but having as many as I need instead of being limited by some arbitrary bullshit.
Write this shit down and take it to your boss, tell him he's a massive cuck that sucks nigger dicks.