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Just brainstorming some ideas for things to make exploration and system claiming more important/viable:
One thing I love about the Civilization games is resource management. The thrill of finding the PERFECT place to found a city in is awesome. It can be the difference in a small science/gold producing city, and a capital filled with Wonders. In Starmade... not so much. Long as you've got some asteroid rings and a couple of planets, you're good. About the only things you might actually go out of your way to look for is a system with your favorite colored star or a sector with a pretty nebula. Beyond that, doesn't really matter what is in a system you claim for your home base, as it won't be overly long before you mine it clean of asteroids and destroy all of it's planets for resources (unless you're like me and keep a pet planet around just for kicks).
There's already talk of gas giants and using them for renewable resource gathering, and I think that would be a good start. Entire wars would be fought over systems with Rammet baring gas giants. Lets look at those as being similar to the various resource panel enhancements in Civilization. Instead of a panel with Wheat on it, you have a system with a Parseen gas giant. Instead of an iron deposit, you've got a Rammet planet.
So, what else could we do to encourage exploration and growth? How about if we take the idea from Civ for luxuries and apply them to planets? Right now the only uses for a planet are for a temporary starter base until you can afford a station, and eating them for their resources. Instead, what if each type of planet also produced luxuries of some type, and that you got some form of bonus for controlling the planet? To go back to our roots with Minecraft, what if a terran planet produced say, chocolate? Mining the planet would damage it's luxury production, so you'd have to decide if you wanted the planet intact as a luxury, or eat it for the immediate resource boost.
What could we do with luxuries? Well, the short sighted answer would be "sell them to shops for money" or "add them to crafting requirements for different blocks", but why not look back to Civ again for a more long game answer? Instead of just building bases and ships for ourselves, what if we actually were setting up empires? Start treating systems the way we treat cities in Civ, as things we control and build in, but have a certain level of autonomous stuff going on behind the scenes. You build a station or a building on a planet, and have it start attracting NPC settlers. If you build them things like sleeping quarters, recreational areas, etc, you make them happy. Happy settlers provide you with some form of income, and attract more settlers, which require more areas be built for them.
You could build for them to make yourself a huge income base at the expense of all the resources you place into it, or you could ignore them by keeping it small or simply not building whatever might be required for them to move in (like say you had to "feed" your people with hydroponics or agriculture, and each person requires X blocks of food producers, if you don't want any people, you don't build any food areas).
Could then even start setting up trade routes by giving the NPCs cargo ships and setting up destinations. NPCs could then go about loading luxuries onto a cargo ship, flying it to another system, and trading for luxuries there. Then both systems would have access to those luxuries, and the happiness of both systems increases.
Heck, depending on the size of your empire/happiness level of your people, they could start spawning in their own structures and ships and going about their own lives in the background, making the universe look more active and alive.
Maybe go so far as to borrow from Civ again and have "influence" systems. You still claim a system as you do now, but if there are enough happy NPCs living in the system, you start making virtual claims on surrounding systems as well. Influence systems wouldn't have NPCs popping up in them, but would give say reduced mining bonuses. Or maybe the ability to harvest luxuries from those systems by setting up a trade route into them without actually claiming them.
Hmmm... or perhaps tie happy populations into things like the gas giants. Your NPCs are the ones that actually harvest from the gas giants, not you. The more NPCs you have in a system with a gas giant, the more resources they can extract from it in a given amount of time. Meaning not only will you have to explore to FIND a gas giant, once you do you'll have to set up an outpost there and start building it up to attract workers for it.
Would make war more interesting as well, as you'd have more to target than simply the other guy's ships. Start taking out his supply lines, his outposts, kill his NPCs, etc to reduce his capabilities. Which of course means he'd have to build defenses for his NPCs...
Faction alliances would mean more if being allied with someone let you open up trade routes with them. Hmmm... perhaps an active trade route with an allied faction with access to a gas giant would let you share a percentage of their gas giant production. If they're producing a thousand parseen an hour and you're making a thousand macet, say you could automatically send them 10% of your macet in exchange for 10% of their parseen. Or perhaps we could work player shops into it. Separate out the buy/sell sides a bit more and have one side being "this is what I have to sell", and one side with "I want to buy these", and a trade route could have NPC cargo runs between allied factions move those goods around for you. You have thrusters, that guy wants thrusters. You want power capacitors, that guy has them. Ally with him, and your NPCs start automatically trading back and forth for you.
Get your empire big enough, and get enough trading buddies, and actually mining things yourself by hand could become something you only do when you actually need a lot of something specific in a short period of time.
One thing I love about the Civilization games is resource management. The thrill of finding the PERFECT place to found a city in is awesome. It can be the difference in a small science/gold producing city, and a capital filled with Wonders. In Starmade... not so much. Long as you've got some asteroid rings and a couple of planets, you're good. About the only things you might actually go out of your way to look for is a system with your favorite colored star or a sector with a pretty nebula. Beyond that, doesn't really matter what is in a system you claim for your home base, as it won't be overly long before you mine it clean of asteroids and destroy all of it's planets for resources (unless you're like me and keep a pet planet around just for kicks).
There's already talk of gas giants and using them for renewable resource gathering, and I think that would be a good start. Entire wars would be fought over systems with Rammet baring gas giants. Lets look at those as being similar to the various resource panel enhancements in Civilization. Instead of a panel with Wheat on it, you have a system with a Parseen gas giant. Instead of an iron deposit, you've got a Rammet planet.
So, what else could we do to encourage exploration and growth? How about if we take the idea from Civ for luxuries and apply them to planets? Right now the only uses for a planet are for a temporary starter base until you can afford a station, and eating them for their resources. Instead, what if each type of planet also produced luxuries of some type, and that you got some form of bonus for controlling the planet? To go back to our roots with Minecraft, what if a terran planet produced say, chocolate? Mining the planet would damage it's luxury production, so you'd have to decide if you wanted the planet intact as a luxury, or eat it for the immediate resource boost.
What could we do with luxuries? Well, the short sighted answer would be "sell them to shops for money" or "add them to crafting requirements for different blocks", but why not look back to Civ again for a more long game answer? Instead of just building bases and ships for ourselves, what if we actually were setting up empires? Start treating systems the way we treat cities in Civ, as things we control and build in, but have a certain level of autonomous stuff going on behind the scenes. You build a station or a building on a planet, and have it start attracting NPC settlers. If you build them things like sleeping quarters, recreational areas, etc, you make them happy. Happy settlers provide you with some form of income, and attract more settlers, which require more areas be built for them.
You could build for them to make yourself a huge income base at the expense of all the resources you place into it, or you could ignore them by keeping it small or simply not building whatever might be required for them to move in (like say you had to "feed" your people with hydroponics or agriculture, and each person requires X blocks of food producers, if you don't want any people, you don't build any food areas).
Could then even start setting up trade routes by giving the NPCs cargo ships and setting up destinations. NPCs could then go about loading luxuries onto a cargo ship, flying it to another system, and trading for luxuries there. Then both systems would have access to those luxuries, and the happiness of both systems increases.
Heck, depending on the size of your empire/happiness level of your people, they could start spawning in their own structures and ships and going about their own lives in the background, making the universe look more active and alive.
Maybe go so far as to borrow from Civ again and have "influence" systems. You still claim a system as you do now, but if there are enough happy NPCs living in the system, you start making virtual claims on surrounding systems as well. Influence systems wouldn't have NPCs popping up in them, but would give say reduced mining bonuses. Or maybe the ability to harvest luxuries from those systems by setting up a trade route into them without actually claiming them.
Hmmm... or perhaps tie happy populations into things like the gas giants. Your NPCs are the ones that actually harvest from the gas giants, not you. The more NPCs you have in a system with a gas giant, the more resources they can extract from it in a given amount of time. Meaning not only will you have to explore to FIND a gas giant, once you do you'll have to set up an outpost there and start building it up to attract workers for it.
Would make war more interesting as well, as you'd have more to target than simply the other guy's ships. Start taking out his supply lines, his outposts, kill his NPCs, etc to reduce his capabilities. Which of course means he'd have to build defenses for his NPCs...
Faction alliances would mean more if being allied with someone let you open up trade routes with them. Hmmm... perhaps an active trade route with an allied faction with access to a gas giant would let you share a percentage of their gas giant production. If they're producing a thousand parseen an hour and you're making a thousand macet, say you could automatically send them 10% of your macet in exchange for 10% of their parseen. Or perhaps we could work player shops into it. Separate out the buy/sell sides a bit more and have one side being "this is what I have to sell", and one side with "I want to buy these", and a trade route could have NPC cargo runs between allied factions move those goods around for you. You have thrusters, that guy wants thrusters. You want power capacitors, that guy has them. Ally with him, and your NPCs start automatically trading back and forth for you.
Get your empire big enough, and get enough trading buddies, and actually mining things yourself by hand could become something you only do when you actually need a lot of something specific in a short period of time.
