Personally I find the relatively bare-bones style of FF refreshing as I tend to overcomplicate when thinking of mod ideas.
I feel Jon would be better utilized
in debugging and improving the AI of the bare-bone vanilla mod, without a proper AI a SP game has very limited playability.
While private-modders have the energy to imagine strange new ideas and also have the freedom to use IP without major risk of lawsuits against Firaxis.
Things I'd like to change:
-change all references to city to system or star.
-change floodplains/space description of grav-field space to stellar/space or grav-well/space.
(simply copy/paste the correct xml-txt entry from the blackhole-gravfield)
-make stars visible on the map, from the start.
Just for reality's sake, light from stars should be visible from all across the galaxy. Exploration would still be required to discover the planets and find resources.
IIRC there are tags in the terrain-descriptions for visibility range (at least for mountains).
(only for terrain, not for features, which is what a solarsystem is. Setting ocean/coast iVisibleFrom to 20 does nothing)
-more events and some "hidden fun stuff".
-pirate systems. I don't recall ever finding one.
Someone mentioned antimatter as a produced and expendable resource in another thread. That is an intriguing idea.
Another intriguing idea is having some resources located on planets...which might be possible with random events....as soon as a planet-plot is accessable a event might be triggered modified by multiple factors.
-harvesting of asteroid fields/deployment of minefields? Dubious about these ideas.
-moving features? Nice for event-candidate, but maybe unrealistic at civ-timescale.
-destroyed ships sometimes creating wreckage-fields same as asteroids. maybe by event, python cumulative chance of event happening if multiple ships are destroyed in same tile during one turn.
see. already I'm complexifying the hell out of it.