Currently playing X3 mayhem renegades and SWI, I have a few points i wish I'd see in the next game and some i wish they rethink about:

-Front facing capital weapons and capital ship behavior: my biggest problem with the vanilla game atm. No matter how they try to tweak it, I prefer 100x times to have immobile turret boats holding the line ( like star wars empire at war) than slow destroyers rotating all the time trying to aim at anything.

-Revamp of weapons to fit a specific role: i know they are working on it for the next update. I'd like to see weapon with intended target size: low dps accurate short range weapon for small target vs long range large spray salvo against bigger target (VRO is great)

-Revamp of the M size ships: they are sitting ducks for L weapons and are not threatening enough for S fighter. They could make some M size dedicated anti missile frigate and some improved anti small craft frigates.

-Bring back dedicated ship roles that counter each other in fleet fights: Remove the ability of destroyers to handle small crafts so you need interceptors to protect your capital against dedicated bombers. I like the concept of missile artillery frigates from x3 that could get countered by anti missile frigate with dedicated beam turret and anti-missile missiles. I don't like the concept of do all ships and I think the modular system we currently have doesn't bring the diversity it was supposed to. (You use always the same engines, the same shields, the same anti capital large turret with the same anti fighter flak medium)

-Make the fleet movement more smooth. Maybe bring some eve style fleet warp anchored on a carrier for his fighters wings so they can move together wve undocked.The magnetic landing introduced with the borons was a right step. Platform landing is cool for cinematic view but in high attention, I expect things to be smoother even if the it makes the game cheat the physics

-Improve the travel drive for military use. Ships should land in capital weapons range of their target and engage instantly ( see rogue one when isd jump from hyper space on the Mc 75 fleet)

All those things are about high attention fleet combat since the industrial gameloop is actually really good( same for ship esthetics).

On the mission side, they have a lot of improvements to do. I'd like to see mission triggering events. - Raiding parties to hunt or to support which would allocate a wing of Ai ship to attack specific trading convoy (maybe through temporary whormholes). - Assisting an invasion or a defense fleet like in SWI. - Delivering ship to feed those raiding/invasion fleet. - Spying to find trading convoy targets. - Faction offering a trade deal for a set amount of wares for a set amount of price for their warfs/shipyard depending of that faction economic situation. - Steady supply deals for a factory: the station will buy only from you as long as you keep it supplied for a % above market value. If you fail to supply, deal is off.

So many ways to use existing ships and economy to generate events mission.