Small Immersion Improvements

[Yurk Embassy]

NPC Starships / Civilian Activity

This is another area the game could be livened up a bunch, if not where the most impact could be had. Often your spanning galactic empire feels a bit unalive, unless you have players working with you. There is already ship landing code and often unused space ports in your city, so why not have NPCs flying around ships between your planets? Would be very satisfying and rewarding once you get to that point in the game. A few default built-in ships could be used for this, but having the player also be able to design a ship for use for this task (with some restrictions of course) would add another layer of customization. Similarly but perhaps more difficult would be having NPCs walk, drive, and commute around the planet. Planes flying between airports, ships between seaports. Performance is probably an issue here, but if the performance impact of these simple commuting NPCs or NPC starships could be mitigated it could maybe be a worthwhile addition.

To be fair, I feel like that might do a disservice to the "everything that is there has a purpose" vibe SoH has, in addition to causing more lagging (optimisation is vital for such a thing to be even envisioned, in my opinion). There could be a way to bring a bit more liveliness into our spaceports, though. Empires used to rely on trading ships, commanded by Officers who had a pre-defined, automated mission that they would execute again and again; they would simply buy specific goods on planets where the quality was decent, and bring them over to designated shipyard colonies, or directly over to the homeworld. It was vital, as resources used to travel through the planets of a same system only.

I'd suggest a simpler change: bringing back that restriction of resources not travelling between star systems could bring back genuine use to cargo haulers, and force empires to rely on traders once more. It would make officers useful for something other than warfare; trading lanes would be brought back to life, and you'd hear the occasional, satisfying rumbling of that one huge cargo ship that lands and takes off on and from your city, now and then. Although, the issue of automated ships being stuck in occasional limbos, would have to be addressed. I'm unsure as for how reliable officers are at the moment. But I feel like this necessity for a logistics network made the game feel very much alive. You could tell resourceful colonies and shipyards were nevralgic points to your empire, just by staying a good 30 minutes in one of these cities.

Helicopters flying between cities of a same world, or small transporters travelling between your space station and cities, would be a great sight to see, though; after all, if NPCs are able to man helms, why not small vehicles (which is why I'd also tend to agree with your point about fighters)? But there again, civilian trafic for the sake of aesthetics may cause unnecessary lagging if not backed up with the proper level of optimisation.