I think it would be nice for your crew to provide purchasable upgrades for the ship. Bring your engineer 100 copper wire, 50 gold bars, and 25 tungsten to upgrade the ship's scanner range. Or 50 Titanium, 30 durasteel, and a chicken sandwich to the mechanic to boost the ship's speed. I like the idea of passive benefits, but actively upgrading the ship gives you something to focus on. Plus I really want to upgrade the ships sensors haha! It'd be nice if I didn't need to "explore" a planet to view the resources of a planet, or later on to explore a system to see the planets in it. Diminishing returns could prevent anything from becoming too unbalanced. So here's a list of some thing I think could be upgraded. Personnel armaments Medical training medkit capacity off ship medkit type off ship regen rate on ship Ship speed (again passive benefits are boring, although quite welcome I should add!) Fuel efficiency Scanner range Ship weapons? ( can we have space battles? ) I'm sure somebody can think of one or two more. It would be a sort of end game resource sink, something to do on top of these fancy new space stations. In any case wouldn't you like to actively improve your ships, and simply be done once you've finished grinding out 12 crew members?
