Personally, I love games that can successfully combine more than one genre's mechanics and playstyles, and that is one of the things I love about starmade. You have the ability to build whatever you want (well, in terms of spacecraft, anyway), you can have dogfights, massive fleet battles, explore an endless universe. Resource gathering and economy and territorial control are a thing (and will improve, i have no doubt); you don't just play in someone elses' pre-designed universe with preset toys, you get to make your own and shape whole star systems.
But I also love questing in open-world adventure games, RTS games because I like being able to see battle and economic plans come to fruition on a large scale, FPS games like Halo, things like Star Wars Battlefront I/II where you can start up a battle between factions and participate as an individual among many AI, and the Battletech games, like Mechwarrior and Mech Assault. Because mecha is awesome, duh.
Starmade already has some inkling of the mechanics of these games coming into play, but I want to see it go further. We can have AI-controlled fleets and individuals, eventually. Then we could have some semblance of an RTS game, where we can control our fleets in real time, send harvesters and combat groups out to achieve goals, conquer territory, give orders on the fly during fleet combat, manage manufacturing and infrastructure, etc. It'll have to be limited somewhere, or one good strategy player will be lording over the entire galaxy, but having to do everything by hand in a world with need of many hands and a severe lack thereof is no fun either.
We could even play as individuals working within another player's mo fleet, or an AI faction controlled fleet, in due time. There's already some sort of quest system for the traders' guild in the works (you can ask for a mission and be told off, at least), and I would love to see that fleshed out. "Join up with our fleet in sector 19, -5, 7 for a fleet engagement. Hostiles expected are members of the Crendi Nation Navy, capital ships present. Further briefing form Admiral McMerchant on your arrival."
But then when you get down to the FPS games and ground combat, it's trickier to merge together. We probably couldn't have mecha or serious ground battles on a planet in starmade, due to lag, the fact that planets are really damn tiny (an enemy that is 100m away is probably over the horizon), getting ground vehicles like mecha and tanks to play nice with the blocky terrain, etc. But we could have boarding action and infantry combat aboard ships and stations, I have no doubt, if effort is put into it. I wouldn't mind another full-on redesign of solar systems and planetary geology, but that's a thread for another day. :P
