I love the complexity of this game and several others. The main reason is the complexity with building your own ships the way you want them. This got me thinking, why not bring it the next step further. I know this would mean more micromanagement (for those that want it) but, then have an option to do automatic research as well. This is what I propose...
- Research basic components of engines, such as cooling system, thrust, plasma coils ect...
- Take those components and build your own engines, which depending on what materials you use it may be more or less the size/power that the default engines previously did. By taking time to research and build the basic components you may get an advantage but then again you may not.
- To prevent from someone who has spent months playing the game from having a huge advantage, have a universe twist, where different components act differently depending on the universe design which would be randomly generated behind the scenes unknown by the physical display only affecting how things function.
Below is an example how this could work...
- Laser composed of a power crystal, gas pump, resonator, and output coupler. By using different types of power crystals, gas's in the gas pump resonators and so on you may have a laser that has a size of 10 with a power of 2.
- default laser may be a size of 9 with a power of 1. By adjusting this further you may get it to be a size of 12 with a power of 3.
- By following the normal tech tree maybe you get one by default size of 7 and power of 2 in that same time frame, then again maybe your self built laser has a size of 20 and a power of 3 so you're better off with the default
- By doing this different components can work with each other differently giving either unexpected results or better than expected results, building different designs with different materials as you see fit (more or less researching your own devices from the basic components.
Just a suggestion I think it would bring even more complexity to this amazing game.