What kind of cool stuff would you like to see in a 4x game?

[malicious bloke]

For me it would be time travel. Once you get almost to the end of the tech tree you get techs that allow you to send ships back in time...the map temporarily reverts to a much earlier state, when everyone was much more primitive.

Just think, you could do anything! Use later terraforming methods on planets close to your homeworld, exchange advanced technologies with yourself, splatter difficult enemies back when they were a bunch of knuckledraggers, leave a nice little orion-style cache of technology in a guarded star system close to yourself or well out of the way of everyone...then you switch the map back and the game extrapolates the changes.

 

[malicious bloke]

And I would also like a game that combines bits of sim city/civilization/age of empires...so you start with a couple of tiny settlers...build a village, grow/expand/advance and build a nation; then lead your nation to world conquest/unification; then expand out into the galaxy at large...like you can leave the growth of your planet and nations in the hand of the AI, or step in and add stuff...then the same deal again, advance and expand throughout the galaxy, eventually developing technology for intergalactic travel and then the whole thing scales up again.

Ye'd have to randomise certain things, like having technologies that are dependant on certain types of particles/energies that you might not discover until you explore certain places, and having a random roll at the beginning of the game to decide when each race starts, so you could either be totally ancient or the relative equivalent of plankton compared to the other races...

would make things infinitely replayable no?