gistfile1.txt

My suggestions to making emperor mode more fun (or rather said turning it into a more traditional 4X game):

The current way of playing emperor mode has the issue that the player is instantly confronted with the full set of features galimulator has to offer: Wars, Diplomacy, fancy Graphs, Lineages, Ships, Wealth, Science and a lot more. Without a tutorial it is simply impossible for a player to figure everything out without getting frustrated. However, the idea is not to have a text-based tutorial but rather exposing the player to the individual gameplay elements one by one (and hiding them from the menus until they get relevant). For this the core gameplay loop needs to get altered to make the first few minutes more friendly:

**Fog of war**:
  At the start, players don't see much more than a handful of stars. As they expand they see more. Furthermore, as interactions with other empires don't exist until they are discovered, the relevant UI elements can be hidden from the menu until they are relevant.

**"Control pylons"**:
The apparently uncontrolled nature of expansion of empires within galimulator can be confusing to newcomers. To make natural expansion make sense, I introduce the concept of "control pylons", which can be placed in space. Within a radius of that pylon the empire can expand. Every once in a while (frequency and cap is dictated by empire specials) a pylon can be placed pretty much like actors

In a seperate lession, enemy territory can't be taken until these control pylons are destroyed.

Furthermore, the factions system can be overhauled to make use of control pylons: When a faction starts, a group of insurgents take over your control pylon and the goal of the player is to take the pylon back. This can be done in four ways: The two diplomatic routes in which the player either does concessions (which may result in temporary or even permament penalties in terms of actor & pylon capacity or even science) or talks the insurgents down. The alternate two routes are the aggressive ones. Either the player stages a counter-insurgency or the player destorys or takes over the pylon by having enough ships near it. 

The effects of the emperor's skill need to be dictated in a transparent way. For the first three it can be explained in text form. More concretely it would look like follows:

 "Chance of neogiations succeeding: 35%"

 - Government type: 60%
 - Emperor's diplomacy skill: +10%
 - Diplomatic special: +5%
 - Currently rioting: -40%

For the last one clicking on the pylon would reveal a table like:

 "Insurgency establishes government in ca. 2.4 millenia"
 "Progress towards pylon capture: 15%"
 - Increasing by 12% per millenia due to:
  - 2 Dropships present: +30%
  - 1 Battleship present: +10%
  - Empire size (280 stars): -28% 

Hovering above the percentages (i.e. +30% and +10%) would reveal how they are composed like in my negotiations example above.
The empire size effect can be lessed by the emperors admin skill as well as the admin skill of local leaders.

An issue with control pylons are that implementing them in the AI feels like a complicated task but I believe it to be ultimately possible (placement strategy could perhaps be dictated by empire specials and a difficulty of sorts). The other issues are moving galaxies (gotta love how my jokes from a few years ago come biting me in the back) - the only solution there would be to reduce the angular velocity variance to an acceptable level. But I guess the extra challenge might be something more hardcore players might like.