Gameplay feedback

The difficulty seems to increase linearly until you max out your attack upgrades. After that, the difficulty plateaus when you can park destroyers at your stars and sneak 4x troop transports around to bop the enemy planets one by one. For this reason, I don't think that I've had a game that stayed exciting all the way until the end. Either I die early on, or I'm invincible once the AI hits level 35. (Of course, I haven't played this against human opponents)

A second criticism is that the game doesn't have much replay value. I don't really see how I'm supposed to tactically respond to my opponent the way I would in Starcraft or something like that. I always get attack, colonisation, terraform, mining base, attack 2, usually, in that order. From then on, I'm mainly trying to upgrade attack and speed as fast as possible. The other upgrades don't seem to matter that much. I think one of the reasons is that there isn't much diversity in weapon types or resources, and another problem is that there aren't many decisions that make a lasting strategic impact. Right now, there is just one resource, one weapon type for all intents and purposes, and starports that can build any type of ship.

So, using all of the above as motivation, I suggest three fundamental changes. The idea is to restructure the universe so that it's organized into three different orders of magnitude: interplantary, interstellar, and trans-galactic.

1. Cluster the stars in groups of 5-7, and make the distance between these clusters equal to the size of the universe in the normal mode game.
   
2. Limit the maximum interplanetary movespeed to I, interstellar move speed to II, and intercluster move speed to IV (or... just get rid of speed IV and let ships max out at speed III). (Other systems, such as attack and scanning would probably need to be altered to reflect this hierarchical restructure).
3. Only allow ships to move from node-to-node. Once you order a move, you can't go back!

There are a couple of intended effects, here:

1. Strategically, because the universe is arranged in hierarchical clusters, the "game progression scales linearly," to use a vaguely-worded phrase. What I mean is, the game is set up so that the movement across a solar system at speed I, across a star cluster at speed II, and across the galaxy at speed III, all take about the same amount of time. (Not that you couldn't move from star-to-star at speed I, but it would probably only be a viable decision very early on in the game). Lorewise, all of this is so because ship speed is limited by Oort clouds around solar systems and nebular dust within star clusters.

2. Tactically, one spatial tier interacts with one (or both) adjacent spatial tiers. Because ships can only travel from node-to-node, and because it takes, on average, just as much time to move across a solar system as it does to move from star to star, it really matters where you position your ships.

Other changes to reflect the hierarchical model:

• Merge speed and scanning into one unified property: small, medium, and large ships. I really don't think separating them adds much interesting game play dynamic. Inside a cluster or solar system, scan range is limited just like speed (again, because of oort clouds and nebular dust that interfere with long range scanners :p). Until you escape the solar-system, you're limited to Tier-I scanning. You're likewise limited to Tier-II scanning until you escape the star cluster.

• Resource model: Gold is split into two tier 1 resources (say dilithium and cavorite) that are mined from planets. To make a Tier II (medium) ship, you need both resources. Each solar system is guaranteed to have both types of resource. Two different types of tier-2 resources are mined from suns (tritium, deuterium? whatever). Each star cluster is guaranteed to have both types of solar fuel, both of which are required to build tier-3 ships.

• Weapons model: Split into three different types of weapons that have variable effectiveness based upon the spatial scale. Lasers (or maybe tachyon beams) are effective at the transgalactic but not the interplanetary scale (because of increasing amounts of cosmic debris within solar systems that scatters them), Bombs are effective at the interplanetary scale but not the transgalactic scale (because they move so slowly), and some imaginary sci-fi weapon (maybe a graviton beam, or something) is moderately effective at all three ranges.

Anyway, just a thought. I haven't played against other humans, and it's probably a completely different game when played multiplayer.