Here are some suggestions for Rebellion that I'd love to see make it into the game. I'll start with the simplest ideas first, and then head into the more offbeat ones.
1) Force limits for stations:
-Stations would have a hard limit (tech expandable) so as to reduce the overwhelming might of defensive installations. Constructors would take up a slot in the station force limit rather than the ship one
2) Local defenders repop if a gravity well is cleared but no colony/extractor/station is established
-Makes space travel a little more dangerous for trade ships, keeps things interesting
-Local defenders could become more potent over time by tracking changes in the pirate faction, making them more and more of a hindrance to movement and expansion if not checked and eliminated early
3) Soft force limits for colonies
-Colonies have a fixed soft force limit based on map size; exceeding it causes the player to incur administrative costs that increase exponentially with each additional planet (from a low base)
-Expanded via administrative hub upgrade to station rather than tech increases
-Makes REX less effective, ensures that empty wilderness regions can exist
4) Pirates moved from a single fixed installation to spawning in unoccupied grav wells
-No more pirates being irrelevant if they're in an unoccupied system
-Able to spawn closer to prey, making surprises more likely
-Less likely to end up fighting against a single well protected bottleneck
-Still able to be eliminated if players occupy every grav well
5) New gravwell types with additional abilities
-Ancient Graveyard, can be extracted from to reduce tech costs
-Gas Giant, can be extracted from to increase force limits for ships and envoys
6) Ability for incursions to occur
-Strange and powerful ships from unknown area appear in grav wells, causing havoc
-Also inflicts a random environmental effect on grav well
-Eliminating an incursion gives the player a random reward
7) Espionage system based around envoy ships, with improvements mutually exclusive with diplomatic improvements
-New separate and tech expanded force limit for envoy ships; no more than 1 spy ring for each envoy ship
-Ability to set up spy rings or CI rings on allied, neutral, enemy and owned planets.
-Spy actions and costs are fixed and appear as buttons on infiltrated planet or orbiting facilities
-Spies last for a fixed duration
-Spies grant LOS in grav well
-No more than one spy action can be in effect in a grav well at a time, and no new action can be taken until the old one expires. Actions can be cancelled by paying half of the original cost of the action
-Research lowers costs and raises duration of ring and actions
-CI rings have no abilities; they double costs of spy actions, and halve the duration and effect. Whenever an action is taken when a CI ring is there, it has a chance of cancelling the action and removing the ring. Must be placed by envoy ship, no more than one CI ring per envoy ship
-Factions would share a number of espionage abilities, with each one also having an ability specific to their faction (eg Advent special reduces resistance of culture to pushback)
-Generic abilities would include the following
::Reduce allegiance
:: Disable orbital facility
::Sabotage constructors (no construction for duration in grav well)
::Sabotage extractors (no output for duration in grav well)
::Terror Campaign (reduce pop)
::Incite Uprising (can only be enacted when allegiance <40%, causes the planet to spawn a pirate group and bombard the planet, making it go neutral and spawn defenders if successful)
