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No secret here, I want to see planets play a much larger role in the game in the future. Here is an outline of how I'd currently like to see them handled, namely make them colony sites.
The TL;DR up front summary: Planets use Happiness to generate NPCs, which are then housed, fed, and then shipped off to man your ships/stations.
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Happiness
First step is the addition of a new tracked entity statistic, Happiness (or Comfort, or whatever else, but we'll just call it Happiness for now). Would apply only/mostly to stations and planets, the Happiness Score (HS from here out) represents... well how happy that location makes people. The higher the HS, the more attractive that location becomes.
Planets would come with a base HS, they intrinsically appeal to people. Lets say the base HS for a generic planet is 10. You would then modify that with things like planet type (earthlike forest planets get a boosted base HS, desert and ice planets get a reduced score, etc), and we could have random Luxury blocks on planets that can boost their HS (like delicious fruit, or precious metals).
The planet's overall Happiness score could represent how quickly new NPCs become available. The higher the score, the less time is required for a new NPC to generate.
---
Feeding and Housing
Once an NPC has been attracted to the site, they will need a place to "live". Bedrooms, barracks, whatever it is that gets decided upon. We'll go ahead and assume that a new block will be made called "Bed", and that every NPC requires a bed. Total number of beds = maximum number of NPCs that can be "stored" in that colony at any one time.
Feeding the NPCs would be a constant upkeep cost. Lets call an as-yet-undetermined unit of time a "Day". A day could be an hour real time, it could be 24 hours real time, whatever, doesn't really matter at this point. Its just an arbitrary amount of time.
Each NPC would need to "eat" once per day. Now, the simplest way to do this would be to say that you spend credits to feed your crew. Each day that they get something to eat, you spend X amount of credits to feed them. This could be offset by growing your own food and stockpiling it, in which case each NPC would consume one unit of food per day instead of costing you money.
Planets could have their own indigenous sources of food available, like alien mushrooms or some such, that provide a natural base amount of food at all times without the need to cultivate any more (like every day it just automatically adds 5 units of alien mushrooms to your storage).
If you don't have the food or the credits to feed your crew, they leave.
---
Happiness Boosters
We can then add in specific types of structures to boost overall happiness. If multiple types of fauna are available, perhaps having X number of different types on board would create a "Zoo", which would increase happiness. We could have entertainment centers of some kind, or even use some of the decorative blocks we currently have.
We could have multiple types of food available providing a HS bonus. Means if we had fauna like... I dunno, lets call them Space Cows for lack of a better term to produce meat, Space Wheat to produce bread, etc, you could create a varied diet that makes the NPCs happier.
---
Crew Uses / Happiness Reducers
Since its unlikely that we will have the need for excessive amounts of crew to make our ships/stations function, we'd really need something for all these generated NPCs to do. If the new planets came with innate resources instead of just blocks, we could then build passive mining buildings that would extract raw materials without actually destroying the landscape.
Or they could be assigned jobs like "farmer" in that they would go out and bring in food blocks (either what you grow yourself, or go outside and forage), meaning you could "automate" food production.
Building these structures could require NPCs to operate them, and operating them would decrease the overall HS of the planet, where the amount of reduction is tied to the amount being produced (aka, the more you drive your population to mine, the less happy they are and the less likely new people will be to want to move there).
---
Stations
All of these structures would be available to build on space stations, but in order to keep planets the defacto colony site of choice, the base HS of a station would be 0. It would have no natural food production, so you would have to build greenhouses/hydroponics/etc to grow food. You would need to build large amounts of recreation space to generate enough happiness to attract NPCs. Etc.
Make it so a station CAN support your crew needs... if you spend enough time and effort building it up. Or you could simply fly over to a planet and set up a colony that can produce the same results with far less investment from you.
Could also have Happiness ratings for ships, though they wouldn't be able to attract any new NPCs. Instead, NPCs working on your ship or station to increase it's performance would be the same as NPCs on planets mining, they are less happy when you make them work all day. Means you'd need to spend a certain amount of effort making ships "nice" enough via internal spaces and decorations to keep your crew productive.
---
Managing NPCs
NPC management might be as simple as they are "stored" in whatever area they spawn to due to Happiness. Once the maximum number have spawned (as determined by number of beds), no additional crew will spawn. To get more, you'd have to visit that planet and recruit them. Once recruited, they will come with you on your ship and serve as crew. That leaves less than maximum NPCs in your colony, which would start the countdown to generate a new one.
Since we already have trade networks and physical ship deliveries in place, we could even treat NPCs as resources by being able to buy/sell them. If one player has a luxury planet that cranks out NPCs by the droves, they could set themselves up as a Mercenary Dealer, others come to them to buy crew who then set off on a delivery ship to be dropped off at the designated station. Player could use the same interface to pay a small fee and have the NPCs shipped to wherever they need to go instead of having to fly over and pick them up manually (basically, you pay their passage for convenience instead of playing taxi yourself).
---
Other - Training Specialists
Could also build "Schools" where you can assign an NPC a specific job. How much happiness is affected by working could vary based on if the NPC doing the job is trained in it or not. Lets say an untrained NPC lowers Happiness by 2 for having to do a job. If they are trained to do it specifically (like a miner working in a mine), the Happiness cost goes down by 1 (still makes the planet unhappy, but not as much). If you've got a miner out working the fields to produce food, the Happiness cost would increase to 3 (guess those miners just really hate picking tomatoes).
The TL;DR up front summary: Planets use Happiness to generate NPCs, which are then housed, fed, and then shipped off to man your ships/stations.
---
Happiness
First step is the addition of a new tracked entity statistic, Happiness (or Comfort, or whatever else, but we'll just call it Happiness for now). Would apply only/mostly to stations and planets, the Happiness Score (HS from here out) represents... well how happy that location makes people. The higher the HS, the more attractive that location becomes.
Planets would come with a base HS, they intrinsically appeal to people. Lets say the base HS for a generic planet is 10. You would then modify that with things like planet type (earthlike forest planets get a boosted base HS, desert and ice planets get a reduced score, etc), and we could have random Luxury blocks on planets that can boost their HS (like delicious fruit, or precious metals).
The planet's overall Happiness score could represent how quickly new NPCs become available. The higher the score, the less time is required for a new NPC to generate.
---
Feeding and Housing
Once an NPC has been attracted to the site, they will need a place to "live". Bedrooms, barracks, whatever it is that gets decided upon. We'll go ahead and assume that a new block will be made called "Bed", and that every NPC requires a bed. Total number of beds = maximum number of NPCs that can be "stored" in that colony at any one time.
Feeding the NPCs would be a constant upkeep cost. Lets call an as-yet-undetermined unit of time a "Day". A day could be an hour real time, it could be 24 hours real time, whatever, doesn't really matter at this point. Its just an arbitrary amount of time.
Each NPC would need to "eat" once per day. Now, the simplest way to do this would be to say that you spend credits to feed your crew. Each day that they get something to eat, you spend X amount of credits to feed them. This could be offset by growing your own food and stockpiling it, in which case each NPC would consume one unit of food per day instead of costing you money.
Planets could have their own indigenous sources of food available, like alien mushrooms or some such, that provide a natural base amount of food at all times without the need to cultivate any more (like every day it just automatically adds 5 units of alien mushrooms to your storage).
If you don't have the food or the credits to feed your crew, they leave.
---
Happiness Boosters
We can then add in specific types of structures to boost overall happiness. If multiple types of fauna are available, perhaps having X number of different types on board would create a "Zoo", which would increase happiness. We could have entertainment centers of some kind, or even use some of the decorative blocks we currently have.
We could have multiple types of food available providing a HS bonus. Means if we had fauna like... I dunno, lets call them Space Cows for lack of a better term to produce meat, Space Wheat to produce bread, etc, you could create a varied diet that makes the NPCs happier.
---
Crew Uses / Happiness Reducers
Since its unlikely that we will have the need for excessive amounts of crew to make our ships/stations function, we'd really need something for all these generated NPCs to do. If the new planets came with innate resources instead of just blocks, we could then build passive mining buildings that would extract raw materials without actually destroying the landscape.
Or they could be assigned jobs like "farmer" in that they would go out and bring in food blocks (either what you grow yourself, or go outside and forage), meaning you could "automate" food production.
Building these structures could require NPCs to operate them, and operating them would decrease the overall HS of the planet, where the amount of reduction is tied to the amount being produced (aka, the more you drive your population to mine, the less happy they are and the less likely new people will be to want to move there).
---
Stations
All of these structures would be available to build on space stations, but in order to keep planets the defacto colony site of choice, the base HS of a station would be 0. It would have no natural food production, so you would have to build greenhouses/hydroponics/etc to grow food. You would need to build large amounts of recreation space to generate enough happiness to attract NPCs. Etc.
Make it so a station CAN support your crew needs... if you spend enough time and effort building it up. Or you could simply fly over to a planet and set up a colony that can produce the same results with far less investment from you.
Could also have Happiness ratings for ships, though they wouldn't be able to attract any new NPCs. Instead, NPCs working on your ship or station to increase it's performance would be the same as NPCs on planets mining, they are less happy when you make them work all day. Means you'd need to spend a certain amount of effort making ships "nice" enough via internal spaces and decorations to keep your crew productive.
---
Managing NPCs
NPC management might be as simple as they are "stored" in whatever area they spawn to due to Happiness. Once the maximum number have spawned (as determined by number of beds), no additional crew will spawn. To get more, you'd have to visit that planet and recruit them. Once recruited, they will come with you on your ship and serve as crew. That leaves less than maximum NPCs in your colony, which would start the countdown to generate a new one.
Since we already have trade networks and physical ship deliveries in place, we could even treat NPCs as resources by being able to buy/sell them. If one player has a luxury planet that cranks out NPCs by the droves, they could set themselves up as a Mercenary Dealer, others come to them to buy crew who then set off on a delivery ship to be dropped off at the designated station. Player could use the same interface to pay a small fee and have the NPCs shipped to wherever they need to go instead of having to fly over and pick them up manually (basically, you pay their passage for convenience instead of playing taxi yourself).
---
Other - Training Specialists
Could also build "Schools" where you can assign an NPC a specific job. How much happiness is affected by working could vary based on if the NPC doing the job is trained in it or not. Lets say an untrained NPC lowers Happiness by 2 for having to do a job. If they are trained to do it specifically (like a miner working in a mine), the Happiness cost goes down by 1 (still makes the planet unhappy, but not as much). If you've got a miner out working the fields to produce food, the Happiness cost would increase to 3 (guess those miners just really hate picking tomatoes).
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