Ideas for options to add to the game:
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Combat dice. Come up with a system that makes it very LIKELY the fleet in a combat with the most weapons and numbers will win, but not always guaranteed. An “Any given Sunday” element if you will. Have the system generate a random amplification for each side. Possibly make varying levels of the importance of the die rolls in the options. In real life, the underdogs sometimes manage to pull it out. It happens in sports, war, and business. Life would be very boring if the outcome was always completely obvious.
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Random events. Just like in #1, in war things go wrong. Armies get bogged down in snow. Crucial units land in the wrong place. Disease ravages a force. A general makes a huge mistake in logistics of supplies. It would be interesting to add an option for similar, applicable events. Perhaps a star encounters a plague. Or a black hole slows down or swallows a fleet. Maybe some space mercenaries join your side and swell your numbers. Maybe your treasurer runs off with some of your funds, or our spies manage to steal some money from another player. Maybe thre more planets you have the more chance things happen to you. Good and Bad. In a real empire, especially one at war, the chances of real disasters and triumphs really do increase.
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Boosters. Give players a certain number of boosts at the beginning of the game to use up as they go. Things like sudden but temporary swells in industry or science. Shields that temporarily protect a planet by reducing the combat power of enemy ships for a few hours. Stuff like that. Maybe all your ships have better weapons for a short time. Maybe you have a certain number of free warp gates to use. All these would be limited in number.
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Penalties to accounts for going AFK too often. It’s a plague. A lot of games get absolutely wrecked by high numbers of AFK players. Especially right in the beginning.
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AFK planets don’t count. In other words an option where you can take AFK planets, but they don’t count towards victory. Maybe the victory total reduces. Perhaps the planets have fewer natural resources.
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More subtlety to formal alliances. Allow for options of WHAT your alliance includes. Allow players to enter into scanning only alliances. Or the opposite - alliances with no sharing of scanning, only the inability to attack each others planets. Allow the players to define the expiration period for their particular alliance - maybe they want to agree that when their alliance dissolves, the waiting period is only 6 hours, not 24.
I think with #1-3 in play the outcome would never be as inevitable as it often is now. Players would be less inclined to Quit or go AFK if they knew that with a little luck they just might pull off a miracle.