I always feel like games like this die in the late-game. Once you've had fun with the exploring and are collecting resource units for the nth millionth time, the game kind of runs its course.<p>It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.<p>Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.<p>Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.