1. Graphics! Let us
see some of the battles for once instead of looking at a page of numbers! Some kind of interactive battle report where you can watch the attackers and defenders shooting at each other!
2. A much larger amount of random variables in the game. Surely there can't be many users out there who like the predictability of the current battle system - for goodness sake there can be absolutely no chance of drawing new players into the game if every single attack can be calculated by an alliance to within 1% of the ships that will be lost, the values of the resourcess and whether an attack is worth it or not. Make the game almost totally unsuitable for all current ancillary tools, battle calcs, parsers and the like.
3. A much more customisable tech system, allow for resource spending on ship upgrades (number of guns weapon types and so on), resource spending to improve the effectiveness of constructions (on a basic level this could be something like a resource cost for the types of scans that distorters can block but this could be advanced much further). Development scans also to show the types of ship upgrades applied and so on
4. Less mathematics / formulae published in the manual - telling the palyers exactly how the stats work for every single angle of the game before ticks start is nonsense!
5. Some kind of salvage ship / cargo haluer / structure stealer as an accompaniment.
I realise that some of the suggestions made are quite vague, but who knows. With new owners maybe we can see something of a new direction for PA