Introduce tax income. That way tiny/very tiny planets can be used. Currently, sparse and tiny planets are leftovers. Perhaps make it able to tax the population? Smaller planet and lousier mineral/artifact/research points should yield more tax. Also more pop yield more tax. Less resources but more population on planet will make things "expensive" there, thus higher taxes. Also perhaps make taxed planet unable to produce other resources?
It should be balanced so that sparse stats and small planets don't jump too much in value.
Final roundup: tax income depends on planet size, stats, pop, and rank level. Also number of taxed planets should be limited and needs to be "harvested" like the other resource points.
HQ (some ideas credit to Mox posts )Perhaps there should be possible to make a planet a HQ? Now the games seems to be like your ship is where civilization lives.
Suggested buildings ->
1) Shield recharger (speeds up shield recharge rate)
2) Hull repairs (only repairs non-disabled ship)
3) Modules repairs (only repairs non-broken and unequipped modules - say costs 90-75% of normal repairs?)
4) *Defense structures that defends ship when under attack (bonus negated during missions and kills, bonus only for defending) (adds planet shield/def/att/scan/cloak)* Planet shield shows shield amount on planet, taking damage first before a docked ship
5) Storage structures (artifacts, minerals) Stored items cannot be used, need to dock and transfer to cargo bay (uses energy)
6) Population -> provides workforce, reduces energy requirement for transferring minerals/artifacts (each building here should have population workforce requirements) Pop don't act as a planet HP as they are hiding in structures now
Higher tier buildings speeds up repairs and reduces repair costs. Research of following buildings should be mostly integrated into planetary structures research tree.
Attack damage should spread between structures and docked ship should planet shield be reduced to 0. Storage buildings can be raided. buildings should not be destroyable, just disabled.
No production, cannot be invaded, does not count towards planet limit, HQ planet size limited by rank, very difficult to scan/hack
Converting planet to HQ - planet must not be found by anyone else (flux if needed), does not contain non-HQ buildings
To use HQ structures, ship needs to dock. While docked using recharger/repairs will cost credits but cheaper and slower than the repairing hull in [SHIP]
When docked, action window will show buttons like start repair hull/shield modules (OR perhaps a HQ tab
)
Docked ships cannot do missions that deal damage, kill players, colonise/invade planets
*These ideas are going to be hard to balance